How long will looser regulations help until we're back to the same problem?
Perhaps we should dig deeper.
Why have we organized our society in a way that encourages and almost enforces high population density?
The fact is that our current way of living is unsustainable. The housing situation is just one symptom of that.
Answering your question with another question. Why stop there? What you are ultimately arguing for is population-growth control. Turns out very few people are interested in the government deciding how many children they can have.
What do you mean here, and how does it relate to total population levels?
Unless your proposed plan is like living off grid or something, making it easy for people to move to cities seems logical.
Once you account for maintenance items owning becomes decently more expensive than a simple “mortgage + utilities + insurance + taxes” calculation shows. A $10k furnace every 25 years adds something like $40 a month and that’s only one of the many wear items there are.
There are other non-tangible benefits to ownership, of course.
Right, but remember that if you are a renter, the landlord is passing those $40 to you bundled in the rent (along with all other future maintenance projections). There's no free ride, the renter is paying for all of it plus profit margin to the landlord.
You can sometimes get lucky as a renter by finding a small-time incompetent landlord who doesn't price these future maintanence costs into the rent, but that's not the norm.
If an investment house was a business, it often takes a decade to see substantial returns, sometimes after many years of hard slog and even losses. Would you accept that from the businesses that hacker news dreams of?
I think the fundamental issue is that the whole renting market is buying long and selling short (buy a dwelling for a long period, rent it for short periods) and that causes issues on one or another direction (either you rent for what appears "too much" because you need to build reserves, or you rent for what appears "fair" and the first major expense kills the landlord).