When railroad and heavy industry did this exact thing in the 19th century we called them robber barons and broke up their obscenely powerful and corrupt monopolies via antitrust legislation.

With government public housing you can lose it if you break the law (hope you never smoke weed) or if the populace elects a racist government and you’re a minority.

Commodifying housing helped black people in the South because they could actually buy prefab houses from Sears.