But that doesn’t mean that rent is “predatory” except in the cases of long time owners hiking rates when their costs have stayed the same. The reality is that rent is closely related to the current cost of buying at any given time.
Not all landlords are predatory maybe, but at least in this city the overwhelming majority of them are. They’re also like a half dozen corporations that hold most of the apartment buildings. They raise their rates dramatically like clockwork even though I’m in California and we have Prop 13 which holds their tax raises to very low percentage increases yearly.
I would say that for the most part, yes, it has a relationship to what it would cost to buy the same property…but it’s location dependent. You can’t (for the most part) buy an apartment here. It’s almost certainly the case (I’m only not 100% sure because a lot of the apartment complex holding companies are private) that they have low rate mortgages or no mortgages at all on the buildings, and they charge more and more as time goes forward despite their costs not really increasing.
We’re entering a neo-feudalistic economy and while yes, again, there’s some relation to the cost…a lot of it is just straight up greed.