I guess you're being sarcastic, but what value is being provided to society by having landlords rent houses out to people who would rather buy them?
Rent gives you greater location flexibility and less commitment to a specific place and building. You don't have to maintain it yourself, and you are freed from the mental load of having to do long-term planning around it at all. Not that it's necessarily good for the surrounding community, but to some degree, renting gives you the luxury of "driving it like you stole it" and that's a real value for some people.
I own my house. When plumbers dumped water in the basement and destroyed a floor, that was my problem. Renters pay for that kind of stuff to be someone else's problem.
On the other hand, I'm not sure why the service of removing risk from home ownership is good (or why it couldn't be separated into ownership and property management.) In the paradigm you're proposing, the renter wants to be insulated from the risk of property damage or adverse effects on the home they purchased. And the price they're willing to pay for this is... 100% of the equity of the place they live in?
People often dread working for others, but still do it because the risk and difficulties of running a business themselves aren't worth the ability to easily change jobs/roles/location that working for someone else allows.
If you own a house or business, if something goes wrong, you have to fix it, or sell the asset so it's not your problem anymore. If you rent/work for someone else you simply move/work somewhere else.
It is often the case that renting is quite a bit cheaper and always the case that it's more flexible to do so, which is why a lot of people choose to rent instead of buying. Society benefits when people who wish to rent housing have housing available for lease.
The leasor turns their large investment into a stream of payments, and the leasee turns their stream of payments into use of a large investment without having to make such an investment and without needing to have the capability to make that investment.
Avoiding making a large investment in property makes it easier for the leasee to move if needed, since there aren't significant costs to unwind a lease like there are to unwinding property ownership.
(On a much more minor note, there are not more housing units (about 140M) than people (about 335M) in the US and probably not in the world; though that's literally what you claimed, it's probably not what you really meant to claim. Taking the most charitable re-interpretation of your claim: there are slightly more housing units than households (about 140M vs about 130M) in the US. See above about the prediction that many of these housing units likely not existing [or continuing to be offered/maintained] if rent were outlawed.)
Preferring a better option doesn't mean much unfortunately. To go with a variant on a crass old joke "I would rather be paid billions to sleep with an endless line of beautiful women than work retail but they aren't hiring for that position unfortunately."