> so they can make money off doing nothing from someone else's need for shelter.
They already did something - they put up their money to buy this property. Now, if you want to use it for shelter, you need to give them something in return.
> They're willing to fight for the law to make shelter situations worse or nonexistence so they can charge more money.
In fact, it's just the opposite - by investing their money (which they could put into stock market, or spent on champagne, caviar and sexually attractive persons of their preferred gender) into the shelter market and then putting that property out to be rented, they are improving the shelter situation. If they didn't exist, then the shelter would not have been built, or you had to buy it outright to use it. Since many people can not afford to do that, and - for example, for young person just starting their careers - it makes no sense for them to do it, the existence of rental properties improves the situation on the market.
> If everyone had a home, there wouldn't be a housing market,
Where those homes would come from? Who would pay the costs for them being built? That's like saying "if everyone would be a bllionaire there would be no need to work for money" - but actually, if that were the case, we'd find ourselves in economic collapse, ask Zimbabwe, they had a lot of billionaires. Homes are a scarce resource that needs to be built using other scarce resources, so the situation you describe is not possible.
> naturally anyone involved in that ecosystem prefers there to be a shortage
A shortage is certainly preferable to any realistic scenarios where there's suddenly an abundance of homes for everybody (e.g. 90% of earth population dying out, or the civilization degrading so much that any random cave or hole in the ground is an adequate home now).
> They're the only market actor that expects no loses and fights for zero risk.
How it's zero risk? You put up an immense sum of money (frequently, that persons whole life savings) for a prospect of uncertain returns in the future (and certain expenses in form of taxes and maintenance). That's the very definition of risky investment.
> That's not business, that's authoritarianism.
I don't think you understand what "authoritarianism" means. Buying or creating a resource with the prospect of later giving other people temporary access to that resource when they need it, in exchange for compensation, is one of the most common business models in existence, you take advantage of it probably a dozen times a day, unless you live in extremely rural and isolated area - even then, how do you access the internet for example? Probably paying for access to somebody who invested in building the infrastructure for you doing so. This is literally one of the most commonest businesses ever.