but property ownership still comes with a level of long-term required investment that many people simply do not want and cannot afford.
That’s largely due to the lack of supply of housing. And that’s why I think the government should be absolutely spamming housing units. Even if we kept landlords, they’d have no leverage to keep rents sky high.
People like me need to rent, and thus we need to rent from somebody.
And I think that your choice for that somebody should be better than some rich fuck who owns half the city’s housing (mildly exaggerating).
you’ve got the existence of an intermediate owner that performs maintenance and searches for tenants, with the bonus and curse that that intermediate has no profit motive to actually perform that work.
The person who does that work doesn’t need to be the owner though.