> It has value due to its location, something that the owner has no control over and did not spend a single penny to make more attractive To be fair, the owner

> It has value due to its location, something that the owner has no control over and did not spend a single penny to make more attractive To be fair, the owner is paying property taxes - which do go towards improving the location. > The apartment has value not because of anything inside the apartment or the building. I think you'll find, in basically any city, that the quality of a building does correlate to it's rent price or value. You'll also find that owners do invest in increasing the quality of their buildings, which does improve the value or "niceness" of the location. If this wasn't true, gentrification couldn't exist. > Why should someone profit from the attractiveness of a location they haven't actually built? If you're claiming that since no real identifiable person or group "built" the attractiveness of a location, and that therefore no one should get to profit from it, you'd be seriously tampering with the signal that the natural markets supply/demand provides in the form of rental prices. That's going to lead to some significant "economic inefficiencies" for the area in the medium to long term.