Having known someone who owned and personally maintained a small apartment complex, you are wrong. My FIL is the hardest working person I know.
A landlord's wealth derives from being a middleman between the tenants and the property, not from the landlord's own labor. That wealth is quite literally the whole point of being a landlord in the first place; if the income from rent didn't significantly exceed the value of the labor your FIL performs as "maintenance", then why would he bother with dealing with all the headaches of property ownership if he could instead just be an employee of the tenants themselves (said tenants forming e.g. a housing cooperative)?
That is: there's nothing a landlord does that the tenants couldn't do themselves (whether directly or by hiring someone to do it on their behalf). It is therefore not labor alone that defines the relationship between a landlord and one's tenants. Your FIL may be "the hardest working person [you] know", but he's still a middleman in the ownership class.
Transitioning from land prices to land rental values - i.e. gradually moving toward a 100% land value tax - would address both high prices and scarcity by taxing land consumption - and, accordingly, encouraging urban density in order to amortize that tax, thus alleviating scarcity and reducing residential expenses. Same market at play (a land value tax definitionally taxes the market value of land); vastly improved outcome.
People act like renting is some sort of evil forced upon people, but don't realize there is a big market for renting. People don't always want to own their own housing.
A housing cooperative is about as economically efficient as it gets; you and your tenants would only need to pay the bare minimum to keep up with loan payments (and possibly, as I've proposed elsewhere in this thread and others, a land value tax) and maintenance, with no middlemen taking any cut out of your rent.
If I'm some early 20's person just starting out, no money to my name, I need a cheap place to rent. I don't want to own or in fact, I probably can't own.
And it's not just early 20's people. I moved to a new city for 1 year with the intent of returning. I don't want to buy anything, I want to rent.
Landlord's are providing me a service in that case - housing.
Which is exactly why it's handy to be able to pool resources with other people looking to do the same thing, thus spreading the debt (if there is any) - and the risks thereof - across multiple parties. Think of it less like a real estate purchase and more like a startup, because that's what it is.
> I moved to a new city for 1 year with the intent of returning.
In which case a housing cooperative would've served your needs just fine. Again, less like owning a home outright, and more like owning a share in a company (because, well, you would own a share in a company). And when you're done with it you can sell that share.
I've heard stories about cooperatives in NYC and the bureaucracy can be a negative. It sounds like an HOA or condo board.