We have learned from histories, and we know exactly how to prevent populist land reform. It simply requires convincing half the lower class to fight the other half.
People have plenty of places to live. This is more about the fact that people want to have the same financial opportunity to own a house. It sucks that the older generation had an opportunity to buy a house that has risen in value, with an area that got gentrified with more stuff around them, and were able to refinance during Covid at like 2-3%, while the younger generation is SOL. This is a very valid reason to address, but has nothing to do with homelessness.
Actually, there is a 6.5 million home shortage in the places that people actually live (https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/homes/housing-shortage/index....).
That shortage has nothing to do with landlords, though, and everything to do with shitty zoning and with constructing new homes being incredibly slow and burdensome in most big US cities.
It does say when you include multifamily, the gap drops to 2.3 million.
> The United States is not building enough homes to account for the number of people setting up their own households.
This refers to houses.
You mean the economic principle of supply and demand?
Then how do you explain the massive number of evictions and hockey-stick rise in rent prices from 2010-2020 without blaming greedy landlords?
"Oopsie doopsie rents fell up?"
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Their excuse is that they, as landlords, will charge as much for rent as they get away with, regardless of what their expenses may or may not be. Two identical apartments, owned by two different landlords, one of which costs its owner ~$1000/month, and the other ~$1,500/month will both be rented out for essentially the same price.
There's no need to spill ink on moralizing and justifying why rent's going up. It's going up because you (or someone else) has the money to pay for it to go up, and because you have limited alternatives.
People get displaced, move outside of the area, and find places to live. In some cases, they buy houses in rural areas for a lower cost, and then 5-6 years later the gentrification radius grows and their house goes up in value. Look at Northern Virginia for example of this.
The main that is missing is good public transport system (or government level investment in autonomous driving). In Europe, its natural to commute about an hour or so to work, often from a different town to a bigger city. In US this happens as well, the difference though is that you have to sit in traffic in a car.