Linking ownership and maintenance to justify rent is a fallacy for two reasons:
1. You said it yourself: a homeowner who simply owns and does no maintenance is a blight. This includes people who charge rent, and then use a portion of that rent to pay someone else to do the maintenance. In this case, the landlord is contributing nothing: they're just using the artificial scarcity of the property they own to insert themselves as parasitic middle men between the resident and the maintainer.
2. Maintenance is valued far less than ownership. Even in cases where landlords do maintain the property themselves, they are paid far more than we would pay a super or a handyman. Think about it: if you owned your own home and didn't want to handle the maintenance yourself, would you pay someone $1343/month[1] for the few hours they have to work on maintenance? Obviously not. And landlords agree: supers are paid only a small fraction of what the landlord makes in an apartment building. Let's not pretend what you're paying for when you pay rent is maintenance.
How much profit do you think it is typical to make on rent of $1343 per month? Here's my attempt at estimating for the whole industry:
$1343 rent
x 12 = 16116 [1]
x 7.11 p/s = 114,584 [2]
x 3.5% = 4010 [3]
/ 12 months = $334
Which is to say, from the renter's perspective, they're paying about 25% of their rent towards the landlord's profits, but from the landlord's perspective, they're making about 3.5% on their capital.
So I'm curious if you find this believable, whether it's an outrageous level of profit, or what? Do you see any logical problem with my calculation? Does it seem like a good explanation of why, even if you think you're being ripped off as a renter, owning property isn't an automatic way to get rich?
While your landlord may not be a big fund that is professionally managed, and might be making more or less, it seems reasonable to me to assume that the people who are the best at extracting profits work in such places and their performance represents the competitive climate for everyone.
You can invest in real estate and reap the profits with literally any amount of money, if you live in the US or have access the financial system there[4] But I think 3.5% isn't exciting to most people.
[1] Yearly total of rent payments
[2] 7.11 is the average price to sales ratio for Residential real estate investment funds.
I'm equating sales to total rents and price to property value or amount invested.
As a cross check, $114K seems like a reasonable value for an apartment; in fact I happen to know that my former apartment's building was assessed at about $90K per apartment, and the rent was noticeably higher than $1343.
[3] 3.5% is about what a residential real estate fund, called REZ paid to investors in the past year.
(0.46+0.50+0.63+0.51)/60 = 3.5%. As a cross check, this is in the ballpark of what corporate bond funds pay, and you'd expect them to be similar when investors who want steady income can choose either (but the real estate funds don't get taxed at the corporate level).
The fundamental issue isn't whether or not people "automatically get rich", it's whether we want to incentivize behaviors that harm everyone at all.
The lowest earners are disproportionately harmed by this[1]. People who rent their homes aren't the only ones harmed. People buying a home are also harmed, because they're competing with people who are buying houses to rent out, which drives up the price. And the game is rigged: if you are buying/renting a home to live in, you're operating under the various constraints of your life: you can't wait for more favorable prices without going homeless, you can't buy in arbitrary locations because you need to be where you can work, where kids can go to school, etc.; a buyer buying to be a landlord is not operating under these constraints.
A landlord literally doesn't have to provide any value: they just own the home and get paid to do nothing. When someone pretends they can't work because of disability to leech off society we put them in jail for fraud, but a landlord doesn't even have to pretend they can't work.
I'm trying to figure out what your point is and if you disagree with me about anything. Originally I thought you were saying all the rent money you pay is free money for your landlord.
The point of my comment was, no it's not. The amount you should expect to make on owning an apartment for doing nothing is very close to zero. If 3.5% sounds like a large amount, (I'm not clear if you think so or if you think that's a wrong figure or what) that's before taxes, before inflation, and subject to property value going up or down.
I kind of take for granted that the social purpose of financial markets is to reduce economic profits towards zero to the greatest possible extent. There is no question that it's generally a bad thing for people to be paid for doing nothing. With interest rates as they are, it seems like we have the closest approach to zero profits in the entire history of the universe, at least in the developed world. How much more can you ask for?
1. You said it yourself: a homeowner who simply owns and does no maintenance is a blight. This includes people who charge rent, and then use a portion of that rent to pay someone else to do the maintenance. In this case, the landlord is contributing nothing: they're just using the artificial scarcity of the property they own to insert themselves as parasitic middle men between the resident and the maintainer.
2. Maintenance is valued far less than ownership. Even in cases where landlords do maintain the property themselves, they are paid far more than we would pay a super or a handyman. Think about it: if you owned your own home and didn't want to handle the maintenance yourself, would you pay someone $1343/month[1] for the few hours they have to work on maintenance? Obviously not. And landlords agree: supers are paid only a small fraction of what the landlord makes in an apartment building. Let's not pretend what you're paying for when you pay rent is maintenance.
[1] https://www.abodo.com/blog/2019-annual-rent-report/