Canada

@girlfreddy

You do realize that every rental needs to be owned by someone right?

Whether it's your neighbor directly, or your neighbor's stake in a REIT, it really doesn't matter to the outcome for people who want to live in that area.

Rentals have always been commercialized, the whole point of renting out a unit is to make money.

You're right that housing is a fundamental need, but Canada (since it's inception) has always had private ownership of the housing market. We can fix this with a private market, the government just needs to regulate it better. Restricting ownership to two properties won't fix it though, it just changes the winners from large corporations (owned by rich people) to individual rich people who have enough to own a second home that they rent out.

The only way to make affordable housing is to drop the price of all housing, which is politically suicidal at the moment. You will never convince the 65% of the population that are owners to vote to devalue their property by 75% in order to make things affordable for everyone. The problem needs to get far worse, until ownership drops dramatically before any sort of effective policy can be passed. It's going to be a few decades at least.