It’s hard to grasp this when your mentality is coming from a lifetime of capitalist propaganda, but yes, you’re stealing from someone.

Imagine a perfect world, where spacious modem homes are constructed in a responsible manner, and where anyone can live anywhere that’s available. No rent, no mortgage, no housing payments at all; housing as a right, funded by the public, and you live in a unit that suits your family in an area close to your workplace.

Now, we don’t live in this perfect world, but to complete the vision just to rule out common talking points: In this perfect world, the housing units are modern and spacious, since they aren’t produced by corporations for profit, there is no pressure to cut corners and no incentive to deliberately keep housing scarce. Construction is planned around need instead of return on investment: durable materials, good insulation, safe wiring, accessible design, decent sunlight, green space, and maintenance that’s done because people live there, not because a spreadsheet says it’s “worth it.” Neighborhoods aren’t carved up by speculation, and empty units aren’t treated like “assets” to hoard; if something sits vacant, it’s because it’s being repaired or repurposed, not because someone is waiting for the market to rise.

And here’s the part that matters for your question: in that world, you moving to a bigger home doesn’t create a private opportunity to extract money from someone else. It just means a smaller unit becomes available to someone who needs it, at no cost, because shelter isn’t a commodity.

But in this world, housing is artificially turned into a revenue stream. When you move up and keep the smaller place as a rental, you’re not “providing housing” the way a builder or a maintenance crew provides housing, you’re controlling access to something people must have to survive and charging them for permission to exist there.

The “fair price” argument only works if the market itself is fair. It isn’t. It’s shaped by scarcity, wage stagnation, barriers to ownership, and the simple fact that people can’t “opt out” of needing a home.

So yes: the theft isn’t that you’re charging above some moral ceiling, like you’d be fine if you just found the perfect number. The theft is the extraction itself, taking a cut from someone’s paycheck not because you produced their home, but because you happen to hold the deed while they have no real alternative. They pay, not out of freely chosen exchange, but because the alternative is displacement, overcrowding, or homelessness. That’s coercion dressed up as consent.

If you want a concrete way to think about it: imagine any other necessity, e.g., water, insulin, oxygen. If you had extra and someone needed it, charging them monthly for access because “that’s what the going rate is” would still feel like exploitation, even if you charged less than your neighbor. Housing is just as necessary; we’ve just been trained to treat the tollbooth as normal.

And to be clear, I’m not saying you’re uniquely evil, or that you invented the system. I’m saying the system makes it easy to feel innocent while benefiting from harm. The moral question isn’t “am I kinder than other landlords?” It’s “am I participating in a structure that turns someone’s need into my income?” If the answer is yes, then whatever the price, you’re taking something that should never have been up for sale in the first place.

The solution doesn’t come from small guys like you giving up their rental properties, because we know the corporations won’t give up theirs. The solution would be a move to that more perfect world, which forces both corporations and small landlords like yourself to give it all up at once.

I don’t blame you for trying to find a way out of the wave slavery situation we all face, but you’re trying to get out of it by becoming part of the problem. The problem is capitalism.