The analogy is just that, an analogy. It will not be 100% accurate, because it is an analogy. But your response is patently absurd, unless you’re a bad parent. Being a parent of an infant or a toddler requires a huge effort. Been there, done that. Being the parent of a 24 year old living on his own? I talk to him often and see him frequently, but the effort is orders of magnitude less than for an infant or toddler.
The process IS analogous with rental property for small landlords, especially if you build it yourself (as I did one). Researching and finding a place. Checking laws. Checking financing. Checking contracts. Multiple times starting over because something isn’t OK — for example walking away from a deal because the contract sucks. Then organizing firms for building. Finding contractors that are good doesn’t happen on its own. You’ve got to check progress. Redo things. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have to redo things. Have contractors that go bankrupt or defraud you and you go to court. The process takes years. You’re on a financial hook for decades.
Only when ALL that is done can you even start to look for renters and start to get payback for the hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds to thousands of hours you’ve already invested. But you have to pay your mortgage whether you have renters or not. The bank doesn’t fucking care if there was a problem with the builder outside of your control and building the flat took 3 years longer than planned.
The bank also doesn’t care if your renter trashes the place and skips town without paying the last two months rent and the deposit doesn’t cover the damages, let alone the missing rent. That mortgage is due.
The bank also doesn’t care if you can’t find a renter. Not the bank’s problem.
BTW: Like with parenting, the second flat is a lot easier than the first.
You mentioned “America” once in your first sentence. Then talked about landlords in general terms except for specifically mentioning European feudalism for the rest of your article.
Landlords provide a service. Even if the government provided flats for everyone who needed one, landlords would still exist. Like with Medicare for All. In countries with M4A, private hospitals and doctors still exist, unless it is a dictatorship/authoritaria gov’t where officially they can’t exist (but they still do).
A farmer trades his excess grain for money. A worker trades his excess time for money. A landlord rents his excess property for money. Each has risk.
If I create an app and put in on Google play for sale I’ll get passive income just like with a rental flat. But that passive income doesn’t just magically appear. And it doesn’t continue without additional effort and investment.
That the US system is horribly skewed to the super wealthy with unfair rules favoring those same super wealthy does not make being a landlord “inherently unethical and exploitive” anymore than an app creator or a farmer. It is the US system that is unethical and exploitive, not owning excess property.
