The problem with leasing property is that once you've bought the property to lease, you the landlord (good god the feudal nature of the word itself should be setting off alarm bells) are now in possession of a basic need of humans (shelter) that you can dole out as you please. This property is also fairly easy to manage without it going down in flames so the next step is maximizing your own comfort at the top of your middle-class existence at the cost of some poor other unfortunate. This poor other unfortunate must clamber up to the top of the shit-pile racing against time as you bleed them dry so they too can afford a property to squeeze out the next unfortunate.
It's a pyramid scheme of the worst kind. But its practice is widespread and common enough that we don't bat an eye. And you don't have to look far to see abuses everywhere veiled in legal frameworks. My wife, for example, was recently thrown out of a Scandinavian country because we didn't have a strong enough case for residency. Her landlords were a man and a wife both very well-off living downstairs. We thought it was an amicable living arrangement until, on moving out, they politely informed her she'd be paying two months of rent after her departure to "give them enough time to find a replacement". This was in a city swarming with desperate people willing to kill their pet if it meant they could be move in the same day. My own experiences with landlords in the US have been of the same awful caliber.
We, as human beings, have allowed these abuses because there are no sufficient checks and balances to our own greed. It's all Self-first and damn the others. I feel a kind of hollowness eating me out from the inside every day I get a little older wondering where the Hell we all went wrong.
