Even with the recent run up in real estate prices, housing is generally a terrible investment compared to stocks or actual productive investment vehicles. Even if there weren't massive transaction costs in buying and selling housing, which your proposal would force people to incur every time they move, it would force everyone to lock up their money in an objectively worse investment because you fetishize home ownership.
Taking your principle at face value, the same would be true of cars. Car rental agencies "add nothing of value to society" by simply renting out something they own that could otherwise be owned by the person using it. Should we force people to buy cars every time they travel somewhere and need one to get around?
Maybe a better analogy given this is HN is renting computing power. Why should companies like AWS be able to profit from "adding nothing of value to society," i.e. simply renting out server space/computing power?
Respectfully, this proposal shows a serious lack of economic understanding that seems important to have before making extreme policy proposals.
I agree with your point that outlawing rental properties completely is silly, but not your analogy to cars or compute, which are not real property nor nessecary for one to, you know, stay alive.
Most services landlords provide are compulsory if you can not afford to purchase a home, something made more difficult when others drive up the prices of homes by purchasing them and then renting them out for a profit.
Who would buy and develop rental units if landlords didn’t exist?
Landlords seem to fulfill a very valuable part of the supply and demand driven marketplace.
Are you suggesting we eliminate renting altogether and force people to buy?
No I’m not suggesting we eliminate renting altogether. I do think there is an opportunity to limit how many rentals can exist in an area or the form of those rentals (multi family or single) in order to drive down housing prices in areas where landlords own a substantial amount of land. Alternatively I would suggest not privatizing ownership of rental housing and socializing the housing.
If you limit the amount of rentals then that will increase prices, not drive down. That’s because if there are fewer homes to rent and the same number of renters, prices will increase to the level that the renters will accept before they move somewhere else.
What should be fixed is to provide sufficient supply of both private and rental homes. Thus driving prices of both down. And this should be entirely possible if certain tradeoffs like not everyone getting that single-family home next to downtown near lake and sea is possible...
Not to mention forcing even those who do somehow have massive amounts of cash or go into major debt to lock up all of that in an asset that historically underperforms productive investments (stocks), and putting their entire net worth in a single asset with no diversification whatsoever.