Value is absolutely added by both, and suggesting otherwise is pretty naive.
Landlords take on the responsibility for long-term ownership and maintenance of a property and give people access to it on a shorter term basis that is much easier to get out of.
Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service.
If you "eliminated landlords and private sale of land", you would pretty quickly end up with a system consisting of landlords and private sale of land, maybe under a new names.
In mainland China, before the communist revolution landlords used to be called "dizhu" (literally "land lord"). The name took on bad connotations (the communist revolutionaries didn't take kindly to landlords), and nowadays they're called "fangdong" instead. Apart from the fact that the land is technically on a 99 year lease from the government not owned, a "fangdong" is still pretty much the same as a landlord anywhere else.
> Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service.
By using money that they don't have either. I think that part is important to remember. The difference between a bank and a private person is not that the bank has money to lend. It's that they are allowed to lend money they don't have. If you do that it's called fraud.
You most certainly can lend money you don't have. Of course, you're going to have to come up with it somehow (so will the bank), likely by borrowing it. Which is fundamentally no different than what a bank does, albeit their balance sheets are larger and counterparties different. It's "borrowing" all the way down,and how the financial system works.
>banks can lend money that didn't exist until they lend it to you and that stops existing the moment you pay it back
Of course. How else should the money supply increase but to create it out of thin air? All of it is. Imagine not being able to buy a house until Fred paid mortgage his off? This is a reason why getting off the gold standard was a good idea. What's the point of having a dollar be equivalent to the price of an ounce of gold (which itself is an arbitrary peg), along with all the mechanisms required to maintain that peg? If you want something equal to the value of an ounce of gold, buy an ounce of gold.
This is what Bitcoin proponents get wrong about its use as a currency; a static supply is a problem. Why would you want to limit people's ability to perform transactions in the unit of account? If you can't increase the supply as needed, then you have to find ways to further divide what's out there (which is just the other side of the same coin).
Fractional reserve is what makes possible for banks to lend (part of) the money that clients deposit. In a full reserve system every single dollar in client deposits would be kept in the vaults and the banks could lend only their own capital.
"Singapore is indeed a country where rich people run pretty much everything and where the finance sector holds primacy. It's also an autocracy run by a dynastic series of strongmen who have expropriated 90% of the land on behalf of the state, which owns nearly all the nation's housing, and whose sovereign wealth fund has a serious stake in most of the country's significant businesses.
"Singapore is a template for what China hopes to become: a state that uses surveillance, selective law enforcement, and claustrophobic control over individual behavior, in tandem with market systems, to create wealth and (above all else) stability -- perpetual rule for the people on top."
Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs? Alternatively, we could make the government responsible for ones that individuals can't afford.
Sure, they could self-finance repairs. But how do you get from here to there, and is there the promised land you think it is?
You can't just take the houses away from landlords and rip up all the mortgages - not without destroying the economy. For example, there's a lot of peoples' pensions that are invested in mortgage-backed securities. Sure, it would be nice not to have a mortgage - but maybe not at the price of also not having a pension.
So, how do we get to this place of no landlords and no mortgages without blowing up large chunks of the economy? By the government buying all the mortgages and all the landlord-owned property. That's... rather a large amount of money. Where's the government going to get it? Either from taxes, or from just creating it. That would be quite a bit in taxes, which is kind of zero-sum (and if you think that they're just going to take the taxes from other people, it very rarely works that way). And creating the money would be inflationary, which causes its own kind of damage.
And, would this be the promised land? It would be a land where nobody built new houses ever again, or else a land where the government kept spending money to buy new houses. In one case you'd see the supply of houses age and deteriorate over time. In the other case, you'd see the decision of how many new houses to make being made politically, rather than by the market. That usually works out sub-optimally.
So be careful what you wish for. Not having to pay rent sounds nice. But your solution may be worse than the current problem.
> Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs?
I paid cash for my house, and yes, that does mean that my present income is more fully available for repairs.
Rent and mortgages don't go solely toward upkeep of the property. The property itself has a value.
On the extreme short end of space ownership, you have hotel rooms that you rent day to day.
Zooming out a bit more, you have apartments and rental houses that you can rent month to month or year to year from the land lord.
Zooming out even more, you have mortgages, which are basically you in a rent-to-own agreement with a bank over the course of the mortgage.
I don't think most people have issues paying night-to-night for hotels. If you don't mind paying for a night in a hotel, why would longer term space rentals be an issue?
Further, mortgage rates are more or less at all time lows. So the bank isn't even taking that big of a cut of your money.
Landlords don't make that great of a return on their money either. Housing prices effect them just as much as someone buying a primary residence. Often the rent is too damn high because the housing cost itself is too damn high.
As to why housing markets in some major metros are so messed up, that seems to be largely down to artificial restrictions on supply vs demand.
Landlords take on the responsibility for long-term ownership and maintenance of a property and give people access to it on a shorter term basis that is much easier to get out of.
Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service.
If you "eliminated landlords and private sale of land", you would pretty quickly end up with a system consisting of landlords and private sale of land, maybe under a new names.