I’m not a landlord, but I rented 6 different places for a total of about 13 years after college plus my time during college. I’m glad those places were available at prices I could afford.
Property values rise in locations that are highly desirable regardless of government or market intervention. It has more do to with the surface area of the earth than any particular policy.
A government system will result in similar issues - Look at the retirees and trust funder tenants living in mostly-empty 4 bedroom rent controlled apartments in NYC.
You have to allocate the limited space somehow. You cannot fit more people into one square meter of land without building higher or denser, and building higher is not always a simple option.
-cease preventing density by legal fiat
-support density with infrastructure
-cease encouraging home cost inflation via the tax code, socialized lending institutions, and bank capital regulation
-put in place a property tax systems that encourages the most valuable use of land
-eliminate parking mandates and free parking
-broaden the commutable footprint by building excellent mass transit systems
That’s not perfect but if it’s far from nothing.
After the prerequisite step is taken, then the tax code should be changed to fix that rent seeking, in houses yes, but generally too. Seeking rent is not an overall economic good, but a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich.
* the average person/family is trying to live a little beyond their means
* “work needed to do” is like a gas, it expands to fit the hours worked
* rent seeking elements expand to keep #1 true
The takeaway is that there is a lot of “work” being done in the economy that doesn’t need to be done because prices will always rise a little past what people can pay comfortably so… people work too much and think that they need to.
If you cut the lifetime hours worked by half, the standard of living probably wouldn’t change much.
The solution to this is radical modification of the markets which leech away extra income.
One such method would be to control real estate prices by enacting huge taxes on rental property and profits simultaneously making it extremely difficult or impossible to acquire large loans for real estate (owned or rented out). Making owning s home that isn’t your primary residence a huge financial liability and removing the ability to sell it for high prices would crash the market and remove the rent paid to landlords or “rent” paid to banks for mortgages. Both betting industries that take far more value than they give back.