Landlords aren’t profiting off of scarcity. They’re profiting off of having the means to do something that renters won’t: Buy a house with a 30yr mortgage, and leverage that money for something useful.
You too can buy a house. But everyone who shits on landlords, always spits out excuses why buying a house isn’t “feasible” or would “lock them down too much”, etc etc.
If you can buy 30k worth of tractor equipment, you can run it and make the money back you spent on it. That’s all landlords are doing - they’re buying when you won’t (not can’t…won’t) and then selling it back to you in trade for your “economic freedom” to move every 1-2 years and bitch about it.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.