I'm genuinely glad you're trying, and helping your tenants when you can; but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid.
From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
The idea that landlords don’t provide a valuable service is a kind of willful denial of reality.
In someplaces like Kansas where people actually mixed their labor with the land (homesteading) to claim it and then improved it and the title transferred in capitalistic exchange, landlords are basically 100% providing a service. But in New York very little of the "value" provided has anything to do with services and labor mixed with the land as someone like Adam Smith envisioned as value generation. It's largely just some proprietor being handed land in the 1600s with the wand of a King, taking the shit by violence, then making regulations out the ass with violence (to make their shithole house pretend to provide a more valuable 'service') and then exempting themselves via grandfathering and then people exchanging title for same. Their service is a legacy of beating the shit out of Indians with weapons and then the populace with government and then allocating the value to themselves.
You had an option if it was for sale.
I live in a managed building that is completely soulless. I needed to extend my lease by one month before moving out. They wanted me to sign a new 12 month lease at a higher rate, break it, and pay a two month penalty for terminating early. This took over a month to get to something remotely human.
There is absolutely a difference between someone treating people like people and bad landlords.
Also, they aren’t throwing their money into a void. They’re literally getting housing.
Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.
I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.
Not true for everyone. I was quite happy to pay my previous small time landlord. We had a very productive business relationship, at least from my perspective.
He fixed the large things and I didn't have to worry about it. In return I did basic maintenance and bothered him maybe once a year on average when something larger needed fixing.
I felt I got plenty of value from that relationship and my money certainly did not o into a void. My current mortgage though? Most of that goes off into the void of the market and I miss my previous living situation quite a bit most days.
Also, the money doesn't go into a void: Tenants receive housing in return.
“Money into a void” is the phrasing _they_ used!
That (rather judge-y) part negates the "nice" part your started out with. I don't think OP "drank too much of his own kool-aid", he simply listed all the nice things he does for his tenants, which are great and well beyond what you could expect from an unrelated party in a contract for a service.