What cities in the US have the capital to do this at a large scale? Risk management is certainly a part of it but every discussion here in SF and broadly in the CLT movement is about how to get capital access.

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.