"An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap."
This isn't true. You will have put money into the property to keep its value up, also writing off all of those expenses, so that you can still rent it out.
>You will have put money into the property to keep its value up
You're ignoring what was written: if the building has value 0, then it is not maintained to keep the value up. Of you kept the value up, then it would not have an effective price of 0.
Of course most people put money into properties exactly to keep value up.
>also writing off all of those expenses
Writing off expenses does not make them free - you are still paying for them - out of otherwise profit. It just means you get taxed on net profit instead of taxed on property gross income. But you are still losing money.
Writing off expenses is not some free money giveaway.
The point was to illustrate that OP ignored costs involved for landlords in the thought experiment.
oh it's certainly not free money (queue the seinfeld episode of kramer telling jerry to "write it off") but the discussion is about taxes or lacktherof. In no other investment that I know of are you allowed this double write-off: you can write off both the investment as it depreciates and the costs to make sure it doesn't depreciate.
This isn't true. You will have put money into the property to keep its value up, also writing off all of those expenses, so that you can still rent it out.