The other flipside is that individual landlords aren’t necessarily going to be any better than larger corporate landlords–for every individual landlord that rents their Nan’s home at cost and keeps rent lower than inflation, there’s probably at least one other landlord that jacks rent up year over year, drags their feet on maintenance, and tries to screw you out of your deposit when you move out. (The ones who do this usually tend to leverage their income into more property and turn into a slum lord, though, so the rule of thumb of ‘don’t make it your only job’ still largely applies.)
The real core of the issue is that we haven’t built any new public housing for well on 2 decades by now, and the market has decided that the only new housing we should build are million dollar McMansions that squeeze into lots that would previously hold a much smaller house with a decent yard.
What should be done is a massive investment in public housing at all levels of government to fill in the missing demand for low-cost housing, but we’ve been so collectively conditioned by four decades of Reagan-era “Government is not the solution, it is the problem” neoliberal thinking that the odds of this ever happening is roughly on par with McConnell agreeing to expand the supreme court and eliminate the electoral college.