The supposed cure for renting is owning your own home. But rent is a trap. When tenants try to buy a house, we find that landlords already have the advantage. Tax work-arounds, special interest rates, and all-cash offers make housing effectively cheaper the more money you have, crowding us out of options.23 Our landlords can buy more buildings just by pulling out equity from their mortgages or borrowing against the buildings they already have.24 They can use their assets, which we pay for, to surf from debt to debt. Meanwhile, as homes get more expensive and further out of reach, tenants are compelled to keep renting for a longer period of time. The longer we rent, the further we are from saving enough to compete. Paying rent is keeping us from reaching the first rung of that imagined “property ladder.” And our lost ground is our landlords’ gain.25 Our rents don’t just vanish when we send in our checks. They pay off our landlords’ mortgages, so they can claim their second (or fourth, or hundredth) house.26 When people say paying rent is like “throwing money in the trash,” they’re only half right; it’s our trash can, but our landlord’s bank account.