"Saying landlords don't "provide" homes because they outsource things like maintenance is like saying parents don't raise their children because they send them to school." That analogy is patently absurd and incredibly insulting to parents. Being a parent requires infinitely more time, money, patience, and generosity than being a landlord. A parent who puts in the same effort as a typical landlord would be the type who is absent for the entire child's life and then expects the child to pay their expenses while barely providing anything in return even though they're supposed to be the "provider." So yeah, I guess I could agree that being a landlord could be analogous to being an abusive absent parent, but it's still a weird analogy. I mean, parents literally create children, whereas landlords don't create homes...

To address your other points which make more sense, I make it pretty explicit from the beginning of the article that I'm referring to the system in the US in particular. In the first sentence, I say "millions of Americans have been ruthlessly evicted." I agree that the system is much more humane in places like Europe. A lot of American landlords would probably hate how it works in Europe. I've read that in France it's illegal to evict tenants during the winter. If a reasonable rent ceiling and humane laws like that were implemented in the US, that would go a long way toward addressing the problems with the current system. But I think there's still a lot of value in critiquing the landlord-tenant system as an institution, because as long as it exists, there will probably be homeless people. Germany is great, but there are still plenty of homeless and impoverished people there. It's easy for you to say my arguments are "naive" when you're fortunate enough to not be homeless. Sorry, but they're not homeless because they're irresponsible. It's because of the structural violence of institutions that are invisible to people who are not suffering within them.