These are good points—I think you're right to flag rent in itself isn't the issue per se, and this points to the fact that the main crux of housing affordability is a mismatch between supply/demand and prices.
I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting.
The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning.
I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.
I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting.
The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning.
I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.