Why should a company own a residential property for the purposes of renting it out and spinning a profit? I'm saying we must remove that if we want housing to be affordable.
> I'd prefer if step 1 was something like "remove government subsidies to people who buy or own real estate".
This is such a classic misunderstanding of the problem. Government subsidies are not the core problem here, and they have extremely minimal impact on the cost of housing, or the availability of housing for sale.
> And step 2: Build publicly owned apartments.
As we know projects like this take forever and go through literally decades of red tape and bureaucracy. There is a much simpler and faster way that will address the crisis NOW. Let humans who need a house to live in buy the houses that already exist but are being horded by companies and other people whose sole purpose to own the house in the first place is to spin a profit.
We absolutely should not let companies like Nestlé buy all the available drinking water on the planet so they can sell it for high profits, so why the hell are we letting companies (and people) buy all the available housing for the purpose of renting it at a profit?