$2400 a month for a 1br apt built in the 60s covers a lot of wear and tear, especially when you have maintenance staff making $10/hr doing all the work. If I add up all of my maintenance costs over the past 5 years, I'd be very surprised if it totaled over $1k (paint that they charged me for, a small window, a small drywall patch, carpet that they charged me for) .

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.

I have friends in some of the rental neighborhoods in my locale. How do tenants destroy the outside of houses, make roofs leak, or fail to turn on the heat?

That's one good thing about large-scale home-ownership: people tend to take better care of things they own, so overall costs to society for housing may be lower that way. It also makes people more invested in their communities, in theory.

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.