[solar-ice]

If we come at this from a perspective of "people deserve to have a home where they are safe", rather than from an economic perspective, the moral question is why on earth we decided to allow and protect private landlords who have an interest in exactly the opposite.

[ltbarcly3]

I completely agree with you that allowing private landlords is against our collective interests as a society. I think there would be details to work out but I would be very interested to see a city or state ban the renting of housing as an experiment.

As for thinking from an economic perspective, I think anything else is doomed to fail. Unless we think about how people will behave to maximize their own outcomes in some system we risk making things much worse (even if we do think it through we still risk making things much worse, but at least we will have more confidence that we are doing the right thing). Socialist states are a great example of this, they plow ahead on the moral high ground (at least in their moral system) and manage to make their citizens poorer.