It can be exploitative, but it's not automatically so. Both parties benefit from the agreement in different ways.

I dunno man. When we moved into our apartment we got a new water heater, new washer/dryer, new kitchen sink, and HVAC repaired within the first couple weeks. We've gotten multiple smaller things fixed as well including exterior tuck pointing to fix a leak.

Sometimes I lament not owning, but that would have all been out of pocket if we had bought a property as is with those issues. Didn't cost us a dime.

Should hotels be illegal too? That’s basically renting out a room by the day. What if you cannot afford to buy a house, or only want to live somewhere temporarily? If you cannot rent any place to live, what would you do?

As with most things, it is a matter of degree.

The key thing that the landlord handles is risk. If the roof is very expensive to fix, that is not the contractor's problem. If the property does not generate revenue, that is not the bank's problem. If the property is not worth the cost to build, that is not the builder's problem. If the property is unsafe to live in, that is not the renter's problem.

The landlord's financial risk in the property (should) provide an incentive to maintain and make use of that property.

I'm not saying there aren't other system of distribution people to homes, and I'm not saying that the capitalist system in the US is the best system to do it. I'm just pointing out that a core principle of capitalism is risk, and that is what the landlord provides, a single point buffer of risk for the other parties involved.

There are a few fundamental things a landlord provides:

• Avoiding cost of transitioning a property. Government, insurers, and lawyers make transitioning ownership of a house expensive. That by itself erases about a year of typical 'equity' gains. If you have to mortgage, then net loss is likely over the first couple of years. If you know you will leave in say 4 years or less, this has value.
• Ease of leaving. If you own, you can't just immediately cash in and move out with the proceeds. If you have to move, you get stuck having to pay for two residences until you can manage to offload.
• Potentially access to rent a home when no one will loan you money. On top of being only there for college, when I started renting I had no history, so no bank would have loaned me money anyway, certainly not at a reasonable rate. Sometimes landlords will have as strict a credit requirement as banks, but it's at least more likely to find a willing landlord than a bank willing to risk the loan.

This comes together for renting making a whole lot of sense for people on a remote work assignment, college students, and seasonal occupants who need a residence for a few months or a couple of years. Also for people who have just moved out on their own and need a residence while they get some credit history under their belt, hopefully being in a situation like university where the need is short term as well.

You're intentionally leaving out that the landlord maintains the property and appliances. That's no small thing.

There are absolutely bad landlords who will do as little as their tenants will allow them to, for sure. Landlords aren't like cops though, the continuing existence of bad landlords is not enabled by good ones like how "good cops" do.

By that logic owning anything is theft.

You might want to get your eyes checked. I don't ever intend on owning rental property, but I'm not naive enough to think the renter gets nothing from the deal.