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.