Nothing you've said has anything to do with rent. It'd be equally possible to build and incentivize building housing and then to enable people to own homes or at least own units within multi family homes.
Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.
Right, and it’s a good thing that the people producing housing, legislating housing production, and in control of housing supply aren’t the same.
Why is owning a home important? I do not think that home ownership is what most people want. We have attempted to make this desirable at through state intervention by pitching housing as an investment instead of a durable good.
saying one of the many reasons rent is good “is not about rent” doesn’t mean there’s no clash in the argument.
All moving to an entirely ownership model would do is reduce elasticity of the housing market, which would be disastrous.
These are good points—I think you're right to flag rent in itself isn't the issue per se, and this points to the fact that the main crux of housing affordability is a mismatch between supply/demand and prices.
I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting.
The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning.
I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.
> I do not think that home ownership is what most people want.
I think this is a ridiculous statement. I don't know your background, but I grew up in extreme poverty (by Canadian standards). In the welfare complexes I lived in growing up, living in a home you owned seemed like an unattainable dream. The ability to choose between owning a home and renting a home is representative of a degree of economic freedom that is becoming unattainable for many, many people.
There is absolutely merit to the idea that choosing to rent is a good choice for many people, but in most cases the people who would make that choice are inclined to do so because they either desire or require mobility in terms of relocation, and frequently the reason people desire that is the opportunity to pursue better economic opportunities (jobs, investments, etc).
I get what you're saying, I also grew up below the poverty line for all of my childhood. My point was pretty unclear. I don't think that people want to "own a home" in that it's not home ownership that they're after but an asset.
The amount of people I grew up with who viewed having a house as a way to become wealthy was large. Which is silly. (Real housing prices : median income) cannot continue to climb in a society that has decreasing population without some sort of external intervention. Poor people spending the entirety of their money on a house will be the ones left holding the bag, which is part of why it irks me so much.
Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.