The landlord doesn't provide the place to live, it is already there, and the cost of upkeep is lower than the rent otherwise the landlord wouldn't be able to make a profit.
This is different from, for example, a retailer, who provides the service of gathering things into one convenient place, and does so more efficiently than everyone gathering the things for themselves. A retailer's profits are payment for providing that social utility.
Landlords' profits are mostly a consequence of their holding rights, rather than the provision of any comparable social utility (there are some small efficiencies to be had, but they are not the primary driver of profits).
Property developers (and the people who actually physically construct housing) provide places for people to live. Landlords simply buy/own those places.
Those are almost always different groups in practice though I’m sure you could contrive a counterexample.
A landlord provides about as much value to a consumer as a stockholder does to a public company. Economically the landlord-tenant interaction is primarily a speculative/investment/arbitrage relationship rather than a service
Thus landlords are the one to actually finance those buildings.
> A landlord provides about as much value to a consumer as a stockholder does to a public company.
Which is a significant value, for a company (even if I would like more companies to be privately owned). In this model a landlord is how people can get access to housing without huge initial capital and/or long term commitment.
A rent-based housing economy causes huge problems for those that want to buy an house (somilarly to how Airbnb/short stays cause problems for rent seekers) but this is not about one sector being parasites, it is about an imbalance in the market.
the situation would not be better if landlords did not exist.
Landlords take housing out of supply and extract rents from it. They produce nothing- the house was "provided" already, they just inserted themselves into the process.
That is because the buying process is an artificially inflated burden that reinforces the current system.
Removing landlords would also remove the need for them to exist.
