> There's nothing morally wrong with charging market value.

How do you define market value?

Because for some landlords it seems to be the highest value that someone will pay to live there.

Taken as a collective action - that results in rents continually going up beyond wages.

I don't know all the circumstances behind the OP's rent increase - but an ~8x increase seems pretty astounding. Were rental prices left untouched for decades? Was there some major increase in the cost of maintaining the property or land? Has the landlord made significant investments in the facilities or amenities?

> My investment finally paid off and you want me to run a charity.

So, can you see any room between asking landlords not to be assholes about squeezing tenants for every last cent, and running a charity?

That's what I'm asking for - I understand you've put in some risk, you've worked hard to earn money. But your tenants are working hard too.

In many cities there's a huge (and growing) demand for properties that are within some reasonable distance to places of employment.

Landlords collectively driving up prices beyond wages and other costs results in a huge flow of wealth from the working class to the wealthy. This means someone on what would elsewhere be a fantastic wage, is at best mediocre. Those on lower wages may find they're having to share rooms and eat ramen two hours away from work well into their adult lives just to survive.

If you own a rental in San Francisco, you have an effectively zero-risk investment.

Is it a zero-labor investment? Fuck no. But, due to the city's completely batshit insane zoning laws and the militant NIMBY contingent you (as a landlord) are guaranteed an income that increases far more quickly than the cost of maintaining it.

It is for this reason that most landlords in absurdly high-demand areas get no love or sympathy whatsoever.

I was too harsh, and for that I apologize. I more care about the level of the increases: a landlord can certainly pull in more profit with a modest rent increase that doesn't break the tenant's bank (and that's likely even a higher increase than current rent control laws allow). The OP's rent is about to become over 4x what it once was. I certainly won't deny that the cost of owning a property will tend to go up, but it sounds to me like most of that rent increase will end up being pure profit.

I want to be rich someday, too. But I don't want to be rich knowing that I directly made the lives of other people harder in doing so. I don't think wealth and capitalism has to be a zero-sum game; I don't believe that for me to become richer, someone else must become poorer.

All this is precisely why we don't have absolute property ownership rights. We as a society have collectively agreed that land is a limited, public asset, and we're willing to allow people to own it, and receive some benefits from the state, but also have to follow some rules that serve the public's interest... like not kicking people to the curb out of greed. If you own land, then you should know this already: it's not "yours" in the absolute sense. It's an investment, to be sure, but your return on that investment can be limited by law in some cases. This is just one way in how that shakes out.

I'm sorry that doesn't jive with your political/world outlook, but that doesn't make me a bad person. There are pros and cons to any economic system, but apparently capitalism is not for you.

I'm not going to try to define "good person" or "bad person", but I will say that the idea of evicting someone from their home (and sometimes city) because their landlord sees dollar signs in their eyes is just reprehensible to me. That doesn't put me at odds with capitalism; I think that just makes me human.