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if the market allows it. That's the point, the market works fine to incentivise me in choosing fruit loops over other cereals - but if the market is captured, monopolised, or poorly regulated, market forces don't apply properly.

I don't hold off renting because it's a luxury I can do without, I rent because it's an inelastic need for shelter, and I don't have anywhere near enough capital to pursue ownership. The issue is that landlords are not just an enterprising part of that dynamic, they knowingly and maliciously gouge prices far in excess of any actual tangible value of their shitbox studio, because they know that if it's difficult to move and everybody else is doing it, they can bleed their working single-mother tenant dry. At the end of that transaction, the mother has invested in the owner's 4th mortgage and gets evicted when she falls a week behind, with less wealth than she had to start with. That's why there was this article about capping RAISES to rent in an LA county.

Here in Australia (we're not all american), it's becoming a really significant problem - housing has been nearly entirely commodified since the millennium, while social housing and support services have effectively crumbled. My rent in Sydney is now 80% of my income alone - and that's for a below average rent and an above average income - I've been fortunate, and I'm still at the point of having to sell assets to keep dry in the rain. The days of a single income blue collar family owning a home outright in less than a decade are long gone, and I know of 190k household couples now priced out of crappy suburbs.

It isn’t going to change until God changes it.

There is no god, so he won't be changing it - but well written legislation might. The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging there is one, and to that effect calling a spade a spade - of course it's human nature for those who can to maximise their wealth, but I've also got the right to treat them like the parasites they are when they claim to be 'providing' anything after they hoard it all, then earn a living by exploiting multiple people's need for shelter who, without multi-property scabs like landlords, would be buying and selling less affected by speculative values. Landlords don't provide a service, they're a cartel keeping house prices high.

I'm not the one downvoting you, but I think this is where you might lose me - I agree that people will buy housing and rent it out if they can make a profit, and we've had landlords doing that basically forever. But if the government gets involved and owners sell, I don't see how home ownership can be more unaffordable. Basically we have a hugely constrained supply of housing. If, say, there were 50 skyscrapers full of apartments that went up overnight in San Francisco that charged $1000/month, rents would have to go down everywhere else because there would be the introduction of so much supply that nobody would pay more than that cost (because that's the alternative to where they're living now). Obviously that's a fantasy scenario, but the various governments (city, state, and fed) all are not doing anything to move towards that goal, which would create supply equal to demand. If current landlords sell, then that would drive prices further down, not up - you're literally increasing the supply again, and also because they will be competing against each other to sell, it should drive down prices for those homes as well.