I understand your metaphor, but it is a disturbing idea to have Verizon in the position of my landlord.

Verizon owns the router and the configuration, presumably, even though you're allowed to change it. This seems perfectly legitimate to me, particularly given how tech-incompetent most of their customers are. Only real concern is security, but it's a minimal one. (Remember back in the day when you could figure out the default passwords for Verizon routers by SSID alone?)

If this concerns you, roll your own access point (you probably have anyway if you're reading this).

> They have no interest in using your wifi key to intrude on your network.

Verizon might not, but what are the motives of the hackers who might stumble upon a cache of SSIDs and keys? Remember the furor about Google Street View capturing SSIDs (/sans/ keys)? Presumably all they were doing with the data was improving their geolocation capabilities. To me what Verizon's doing here is much more intrusive and would require me to trust them to a much greater degree.