It’s a cycle. Tenants need more rights => the economics for landlords are less attractive => the supply of rental housing dwindles => tenants need more rights.
Rearranging the deck chairs can only get us so far in the face of scarcity. The experiment in a distributed and suburban country is over. The population is urbanizing, as it has throughout human history. Whether it wants to or not, that's where jobs are going. That presssure will always show up in some form or another unless the housing supply grows to meet it.
Whether it’s the market or the government, someone needed to be building on a massive scale, yesterday. That’s not incompatible with protecting long term renters, but when we make it less lucrative to build we must also give more of a push to build anyway.
Rearranging the deck chairs can only get us so far in the face of scarcity. The experiment in a distributed and suburban country is over. The population is urbanizing, as it has throughout human history. Whether it wants to or not, that's where jobs are going. That presssure will always show up in some form or another unless the housing supply grows to meet it.
Whether it’s the market or the government, someone needed to be building on a massive scale, yesterday. That’s not incompatible with protecting long term renters, but when we make it less lucrative to build we must also give more of a push to build anyway.