But the right to own land is an essential part of a functioning society. The idea that no one should be able to own land is ridiculous and does not work. There are plenty of examples of this all across the globe.
Even trees do that. Eucalyptus literally poisons land near it to kill competition.
What do you call the territorial animals then? A tiger will chase other tigers from the area it considers its own. Same as wolves and many other species. It's not exactly property in the sense that it cannot be traded but it is indeed the ownership. Without property rights humans would have had the same: the strong chase the weak off their land or force them to pay for being on the land.
That's precisely what property rights are: "the strong [...] forc[ing the weak ...] to pay for being on the land". That's what property taxes are. To "have rights" is to be paid up with a protection racket. Yet as depressing as that is, it beats the alternative! In many places it's not a bad deal!
There is admittedly also an element of magic here: People generally view property rights as legitimate, and the police who enforce them as legitimate, and so on. But when that belief system fails, it's ultimately the State's ability to deploy force that reestablishes the faith.
Indeed, the law is ultimately based on force but it still does allow physically weak to have rights, unlike a natural law.
In practice, with housing, such leases are effectively ownership. The terms on these are often 100 years or more, and when they come to term, since there are often significant improvements built in the land, the terms can't be renegotiated since the lessor can't force the sale or relocation of the improvements.
Since governments are in the business of governing, not real estate, they'll almost definitely outsource that work (or big parts of it) to private contractors like they do for defense.
The end result is that your landlord is now an even bigger private entity (that might be a conglomerate of smaller entities, which might or might not look like the institutional landlords that exist today) with the near-infinite financial backing of the government and the insanely slow processes that come with that (such as having to go through an intermediate to get that Tesla Powerwall you want to install approved, only to be told that Tesla isn't an approved supplier and that you should use this battery from $VENDOR_THAT_WE_DONT_HAVE_RELATIONSHIPS_WITH_WE_PROMISE).
so for most of recorded human history society did not function?
the only reason we're allowed to buy land is because it was commodified during the industrial revolution as the process of capital extraction from labor had moved from the land to the factories.
But land ownership as in subletting and sub-subletting and sub-sub who knows how many levels up, that is not a necessary consequence of the concept of land ownership. What if only personal use was allowed? Sure, you would definitely see hoarding and countermeasures would not be without their own problems, but there is definitely room between unbounded capitalism and "property does not exist" level socialism.