Everyone has to resort to the courts to see money they're owed, sadly. Wage theft is practically routine; so are do-nothing landlords.

Landlords assume the financial responsibility of mortgage payments, property taxes, and maintenance. These are non-trivial costs which the tenant is often not able to pay themselves. It's also far more convenient for transient people to rent a home than to buy.

It's easy to shit on a landlord for collecting rent every month. I've never enjoyed writing that check. But the fact is that many people, likely including yourself, would never be able to acquire housing if you weren't able to rent it from somebody else.

> the fact is that many people, likely including yourself, would never be able to acquire housing if you weren't able to rent it from somebody else.

Mostly because they've made it illegal to build the kind of houses they're renting out.

Landlords, especially small-scale private landlords, enjoy many unearned tax breaks while often routinely flouting the law, on top of fundamentally gaining most of their wealth from laws that unfairly privilege those who were fortunate enough to be born earlier. I don't begrudge anyone an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, but landlords aren't that.