The location is hardly value created by the landlord, though. (The improvements to the land, like buildings, may well be.) Unlike people who earn income by producing something, people who extract ground rent are not adding value. What you're paying for then, is essentially bad luck: due to some complex set of historical reasons, this particular person owns that land and you don't, so you have to pay them a fee to use it. Why do they own it and you don't, when both of you did just as much work to create that land (i.e., none)? Usually you don't want to see how that particular sausage was made; the history of land distribution and acquisition in the U.S. is quite "dirty".