In this scenario, who owns the property? And if you are advocating that everyone should own their home, what is the point of a property manager? What about the people who do not actually want to own their home?
Instead of:
Investor owns the land
Investor pays for construction, finance, maintenance
Investor receivers rent
Government owns the land
Investor pays to lease the land for 30 years or whatever
Investor pays for construction, finance, maintenance
Investor receives rent
Of course it is not a solution to current situation when real estate are very expensive, but in theoretical discussion where real estates are affordable you can buy it and sell when you move.
Real estate transactions are extremely expensive. Even if you sell the property for the same price you paid for it, you lose a huge amount of money in the process.
This is not a replacement for renting.
Nobody would be allowed to rent out a space they owned because it would turn them into a landlord. All of the rooms people rent out to others would go away. You wouldn’t be able to rent a private house from someone, you’d have no choice but to live in government owned housing developments.
This would be incredibly unpopular if implemented because it wouldn’t resemble the utopian fantasy it’s supposed to represent. It’s a vacuous idealism in the same category as “billionaires shouldn’t exist” that serves as a placeholder for an unspecified utopian government-run economy. The details are never specified, you’re just supposed to imagine it works and nothing is lost as a tradeoff.
The problem is always financing. If you're going to own a place you need a lot of upfront capital. If you own a place and plan to maximize rent increases it's easy to leverage your new asset to buy more properties. But if you just want to keep it near cost then you need a new infusion of capital for each new property. So, by their nature such endeavors don't grow as fast as rent maximizing landlord can grow.
It's more about risk management. Do you want your university to be disbanded or your local government bankrupt if there is a war or natural disaster, or even a standard city block fire.
I assure you wars and natural disasters are not that uncommon in the grand scheme of things. That's why we have people or corporations with a higher appetite for risk assume the risk. These entities, unfortunately, don't always have your best interests in mind.
A university endowment or a city's tax revenue is legally and structurally earmarked. They can't just liquidate those assets to buy for local real estate. For the non-profits and community land trusts actually doing this work, securing patient, low-cost capital is absolutely the primary bottleneck.
The high leverage of private landlords actually makes them more vulnerable to systemic shocks. Meanwhile, non-market housing models (like land trusts) don't over-leverage their properties, which is exactly why they historically have much lower default rates during crises.
Given the option of landlords making bank for their risk and then getting a government bailout when there's an economic shock or having more housing decommoddified I'd take the latter. There's very little housing in the US that is under these alternative structures so at the very least I'd encourage more experimentation with them.
Or you can have the government own the land but do long-term (99 year) leases, like they do in Singapore.
LVT has the same vulnerability as property tax: owners can worm their way into the policy details and redirect the surplus back into their own pockets. Leases bypass this problem through the competitive bidding process.