It's also hard to feel bad for home owners renting half of the property they live in to cover their mortgage while their property values increase 10% a year. Apartment residents meanwhile are building zero equity and eroding their chances of ever owning property.
Real estate is a hugely profitable business due to the perpetual license granted by the government to extract infinite rent from the property.
I have friends who just pay professional management companies to do billing, maintenance, and lease management for their properties. All they do is write a check to the management company and they get to keep all the profits. No, I don't think what they're doing is a real job, they just happened to have enough money to afford a few down payments on houses, and now they're getting something for nothing.
Bad tenants are probably over represented in the rental pool since they're looking for a new place all the time.
I was a landlord for a while during the realty boom. It really did suck. However, it varied wildly by tenant: some tenants took good care of the place, others didn't. So when a tenant left and I had to get a house ready to re-rent, some were a relative cakewalk, while others required a ton of work (like one idiot who drilled a bunch of giant holes in the walls for cables for their A/V equipment).
The worst part about it was being on the hook for major repairs, and having them happen at unpredictable times.
Try telling that to a landlord. Being one is a job in itself - or you have to pay someone else a good chunk of money to do the work for you.
If you want to create value, you should make sure that housing prices (both renting and buying) stay low. This way not only wealth can go to other investments, but more people can take the risk to start a business if they don't have the risk to be unable to pay their rent or mortgage.