Goes right past my comment. I don't want apartments owned by people for any other than their personal use to begin with because the profit motive incentivizes bad behavior and is inflexible in handling situations like Covid.
So you believe that buying a house should be legal, selling a house should be legal, but renting a house should be illegal? Or you believe all land+buildings should be government owned?
And you believe the government should have a monopoly on buying/renting houses?
And how would government renting houses be different than landlords? If the government wanted to give rent flexibility they can do it other ways besides owning the houses.
I don't have all the answers, but the current system cannot continue and needs to find a way to treat housing more as a public or heavily regulated utility with no profit motive.
I'm also fine with incremental change. We can start by moving ownership of unused decrepit housing to a public body that transfers based on real occupancy. Essentially expanding adverse possession.