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No. A tenant never gains anything once the terms of the lease expire. The property owner is the only one that gains, as long as the price of rent is a positive number.
I feel like this is the main point of contention. No, you're left with no new physical assets after spending that $1. But why is that a problem? Not everything is about physical possessions. If you purchase a meal and eat it, you're left with nothing at the end of the meal. If you pay someone to move an old couch out of your home, then you're left with nothing after they're done. If you pay a taxi to drive you home, you've again gained nothing physical at the end of the transaction. But in all these cases, you've gained something, or else you wouldn't spend your money there.
When you pay a landlord for shelter, you've exchanged some sum of money so that you're protected from the elements and live to see the next day. Similar to buying a meal and eating it.
Because whatever a renter pays in rent disproportionately enriches the landlord. Sure they get temporary shelter, but the landlord owns the shelter, plus they get extra money on top of that. The renter ends the relationship in the red, the landlord ends in the black. That's definitionally parasitic.
It sort of is though. In the case of renting, the renter pays money but ends up with zero physical possessions, but the landlord ends up with more money and physical possessions (in the form of increased equity in a property). That can never be an equal exchange. That's the difference between renting and buying a meal (or the difference between renting and ownership in general) - when you buy something, the buyer loses money but gains a physical possession, and the seller gains money but loses a physical possession. That can be an equal exchange.
Sorry, I'm having a hard time making sense of your must-transfer-physical-object stance. How do you have a functioning society without services?
Services can be an equal exchange too. A laborer receives your money, you receive a service which requires that laborer's active time and expertise.
Renting is not a service in the same way. You pay indefinitely, but you aren't being provided a laborer's time and expertise equivalent to the money being paid. Owning a thing isn't something that requires a landlord's active time or expertise, it's something that happens passively.
Right, so that makes sense then. We don't need an exchange of physical goods to make a fair exchange because labour and expertise has value. And ownership is not a service that merits payment. We agree on both of these points.
Renting out a home doesn't have to involve any work on the part of the owner, but it can. Think of all the work you need to do as a home owner and that you wouldn't need to do when renting. These are the services you get.
Then a landlord can invoice me if/when that work is done. Work like that isn't done every month though.
The fact that many of these expenses don't occur monthly is precisely why most people prefer having them split up and paid over time instead of being billed at the time of the work. It makes for much more predictable expenses, and we like predictability.
Imagine being the tenant that moves in just as the roof needs replacing and getting hit with a bill in the tens of thousands for a roof that you're only going to be using for a year or two.
Then landlords should send me an itemized invoice that details each of the expenses incurred while I've been a tenant, a breakdown detailing how any rent payments cover the cost of those expenses, and a payment plan that we can negotiate to ensure both parties are getting fair deals.
Or they should give me equity in the property based on how much I pay in rent.
But they shouldn't simply charge an amount based on nothing other than "the market". That number never equates to the amount of work they put in, and makes them parasitic.
We already agreed that market rate is too high. What I'm trying to convince you of is that there exists a non-zero positive value that is reasonable to charge someone as rent. It sounds like you understand now how that number comes about and why it isn't zero, right? How to ensure that the deal is fair is a whole other matter. The point is that such a deal exists.
And I've already told you I don't agree. Paying a non-zero amount of rent is always parasitic.
I wouldn't be trying to convince you of it if you agreed, would I?
What's this business about itemized bills to make them fair if the bills are zero?
Landlords don't do that. Until they do, they're parasites.
Also, I can't tell if you've realized by now, but everything I've been describing as ways to make landlording "fair" is just a roundabout description of ownership.
We're not talking about what they currently do though. The question is what they should do in order to be fair and non-parasitic. Where the threshold lies between parasitic and non-parasitic.
So far, I understand that you're convinced ownership is necessary if any payment is involved. What I don't understand is why*. We agreed that people should be paid for their labour. What makes home rentals special in that regard?
* Mainly to understand how a system with such a rule can make sense.
Sell their properties to their tenants, or grant tenants equity in the property based on how much they pay in rent (ie, co-ownership).
For an exchange to not be parasitic, both parties must gain something equal to what they lose. This, by definition, means that a renter must be able to pay zero dollars for rent in months where the landlord doesn't have to make a mortgage payment and doesn't need to do any maintenance on the property.
As I've already said, landlords don't provide a service equivalent to the payment provided, and the indefinite nature of a lease makes it impossible for a landlord to ever provide value equal to what a renter pays. As long as a tenant lives in a rented space, they have to pay a fee for the privilege, even if they've paid enough to pay for the mortgage many times over. You can't convince me that a landlord can provide potentially multiple properties worth of value over the span of a lease.