[House] renting is only "good" for the people making a profit off it. For the actual renters it's patently absurd.
"Rent-seeking" is a term with negative connotations for a reason.
"Rent" in an economic context refers to "any payment to an owner or factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent) as opposed to profits or wages: without a profit nobody would invest in anything and without wages nobody would work so these are both necessary costs. In a well-functioning market the monthly payment to your landlord is primarily a compensation for the cost of capital (profit) as well as administration and maintenance (wage), though of course if there's a bubble in the housing market, landlords will be happy to take advantage of that too (rent).
- the hotel model is a poor one for general, large-scale provision of shelter, and - the arrangement is heavily biased in favour of the hotel owner.
I always ask people who rent to take some time - whether now, or in the next ten or twenty years - to calculate how much they have spent on rent so far and how much they are still projected to spend for the rest of their lives. And then consider that they get no tangible asset for the often mind-boggling amounts the total comes to; that, in fact, they may have actually paid for other people's houses several times over with nothing to show for it. The situation is somewhat tenable when the landlords actually own their properties outright, but in the modern real estate world they are more often just middlemen that shuffle money between the renter and the bank.
I wish more people would question why the provision of shelter has become such a runaway profit-making machine, but I'm not holding my breath.
We recently bought the house we used to rent. If we would have continued to rent for 25 years, then, adjusting for inflation, that would cost us maybe 300K. That's a lot of money and you have nada at the end, you're absolutely right. But our loan plus interest plus insurance plus the leaky roof that is now up to us to fix plus 1% of your house's value for maintenance every year plus property taxes... napkin math puts it at 600K after 25 years. At that point it's ours, but meanwhile it will be harder for us to move if we have to, our monthly payment is twice what our rent was, and all of our savings are in the house so we have no money to invest in stock, less to save for retirement (tax-free) and less money if we decide we want to do something crazy like start a business. Psychologically it's a mixed bag as well: it's really nice to know something is yours, but you also start noticing a lot of things you don't like that previously you just didn't care about, and we're on the hook whenever something breaks down. We're happy with our choice, but surely you see that it's not a slam dunk in favor of one option or the other?
Running an economy on feelings is a sure way to ruin an economy. People who buy multiple dwellings would be more than happy to rent them. Renting is good. It provides a liquid market to access housing. If the market is efficient, rent or buy should be a preference rather than a financial decision: The financial impact should be the same.
If people refuse to rent, or sell their property then you have something wrong with your economy (too much regulations, people are afraid of devaluation, etc...). You don't fix a structural problem of an economy by implementing a per-person limit to buy houses.