Mucking about with Capital and Capitalism

I am writing this as of Mar 31st in 2020, just as the coronavirus crisis is about to peak in NYC. Surreal how this virus has brought this great city to it's knees. I am picking up on one particular outcome of this pandemic - the rental market - and wondering why the market is structured so. So the context is that one of the short term impacts of the coronavirus lockdown has been on the ability of tenants to pay rent. See here for instance: 40% of N.Y. Tenants May Not Pay Rent This Month. What Happens Then?

The news along these lines got me wondering: when practically every business and individual in the country is affected and is going to see revenue / cash flow hits, how is it that landlords are completely protected? They sit pretty behind such ironclad contracts that tenants have to pay the rents, irrespective of how well they (the tenant) or their business is doing. And I don't mean contracts in the legal sense (where it's theoretically possible that renters could have added force majeure clauses if they had had the foresight or the negotiating power). Rather, I mean contracts in the social/cultural sense, wherein our entire model and belief system towards renting rests on the assumption that the landlord never gets any risk exposure to the tenant. Sure, if the tenant goes completely insolvent, then the rent stops and the landlord has to evict and take a hit and move on. But in all other scenarios, whether the tenant's business is roaring, or down 60%, the rent is the rent is the rent. Fixed. Why?

Please note, I don't mean to be a 'commie' or a socialist. By which I mean my question isn't a political question. It's an economics question. After all property is a form of capital, and the landlord-tenant agreement is a form of capital-labor agreement. But is our current model an optimal one, where holders of a certain type of capital take no risk and therefore creates a higher barrier on the true engines of economic growth (individuals / businesses) as they look to create value? By optimal above, I mean optimizing for hard metrics like growth and GDP, I am not even talking about 'fluffy' things like equality or distribution of wealth. Put another way, would we have been creating more jobs or companies had capital-driven fixed costs like rent been revenue-linked?

For a typical business, rent cost might 3-4% of total costs, if that. So maybe moving to a revenue-linked rent model may not move the needle. But for retail businesses (restaurants, stores, etc), could revenue-linked-rents drive a fundamental shift in those industries towards more efficiency? I do worry that there are broader mores / expectations / incentive structures at play which may make it quite difficult for a fundamental rethink of how to secure value from property capital. To put it another way, if landlords today are used to securing returns on their assets with zero volatility (beyond the credit risk on the tenant), would they be okay introducing volatility into their cash flows? Even if such a model proves to be better from a systemic / macro-economic growth perspective (big if), what's the incentive at the micro level for the market to move in that direction? Perhaps marginally higher occupancy rates?

Just to clarify, this is a topic that I am not at all qualified to talk about, so this is more idle musing than clearly laid out or justifiable argument. I guess it's finally time for me to finally read Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the twenty first century'!