I fully get the issues with landlords in terms of coasting off of other people's labor and in general being parasitic. My question is, the resistance I get when I say that someone shouldn't profit off of another person's need for housing is that they bring up grocery stores/ restaurants profiting off of a person's need for food. And I don't really know how to address or answer that. Just wondering if someone can close the loop for me!
Grocery stores do profit off of a need for food. They destroy massive quantities of food in order to keep prices up.
The 'job' of a landlord is to gate-keep housing by absorbing risk for banks. It is inherently immoral because rent-seeking is immoral.
Essentially the capitalist system pushes people into a cycle of poverty by pricing them out of ownership. The price of a house is no longer tied to the price of land, building materials, and labor. The price of a house is tied to the literal maximum amount of rent which could be extracted from someone.
Essentially they act as highly inefficient middlemen in order to keep people from building wealth. Over the course of my life so far we have bought at least one house for our landlords by renting from them for decades.
I think the best simple explanation is, if renters can pay enough per month so that the landlord can pay their mortgage AND take profit, why can't they afford to buy a house?
Anecdotally you're right, but do you have anything to back this up.
Ask the renter why they don't buy a comparable house.
Because the banks won't approve it. Having enough money to buy a house isn't enough, you have to have enough money to buy almost two houses to be approved to buy one.
You have to have enough to pay that and then some. It costs more to rent as a result.
https://medium.com/surviving-tomorrow/were-not-in-a-real-estate-bubble-38c09ddc74f9