I think the most charitable way to respond is to empathize with the person who has spent >=$X monthly for the last N years and did not had contribute that amount to a mortgage instead as an available option. It's easy to respond to your opponent by assuming that all the unbound variables are on your side. What if they aren't?

Don't get me wrong - I can empathise with how hard it can be to get your own house or flat these days.

But I do not think OP's comment was fair to the landlords. It is not their fault that building materials are getting ridiculously expensive, that more and more people need to live in/near the cities to get a decent job and other factors that make owning your property less and less accessible.

The comment was about paying rent, not landlords.

<https://xyproblem.info/>

Not OP, but some possible explanations:

- it's against OP's values and principles - OP doesn't believe it's risk-free or easy (I don't believe they said that) - OP doesn't act solely based on financial incentives

He did not say it explicitly, but I think that it is implied in this part of his comment:

> being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive

I would argue, that doing something that is not easy and taking risks is the opposite of lazily sitting around and doing nothing productive.

The only real risk is temporary expense and inconvenience if a tenant turns out to be bad.

Even if it's not possible to eliminate that risk, there are various not particularly challenging ways to minimise it.

On a return-for-hours-worked-actively metric, being a landlord can be extremely easy.

And you can trade off money for more time by handing over more or less all of it to agencies and/or informal support.