Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs? Alternatively, we could make the government responsible for ones that individuals can't afford.
Sure, they could self-finance repairs. But how do you get from here to there, and is there the promised land you think it is?
You can't just take the houses away from landlords and rip up all the mortgages - not without destroying the economy. For example, there's a lot of peoples' pensions that are invested in mortgage-backed securities. Sure, it would be nice not to have a mortgage - but maybe not at the price of also not having a pension.
So, how do we get to this place of no landlords and no mortgages without blowing up large chunks of the economy? By the government buying all the mortgages and all the landlord-owned property. That's... rather a large amount of money. Where's the government going to get it? Either from taxes, or from just creating it. That would be quite a bit in taxes, which is kind of zero-sum (and if you think that they're just going to take the taxes from other people, it very rarely works that way). And creating the money would be inflationary, which causes its own kind of damage.
And, would this be the promised land? It would be a land where nobody built new houses ever again, or else a land where the government kept spending money to buy new houses. In one case you'd see the supply of houses age and deteriorate over time. In the other case, you'd see the decision of how many new houses to make being made politically, rather than by the market. That usually works out sub-optimally.
So be careful what you wish for. Not having to pay rent sounds nice. But your solution may be worse than the current problem.
> Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs?
I paid cash for my house, and yes, that does mean that my present income is more fully available for repairs.
Rent and mortgages don't go solely toward upkeep of the property. The property itself has a value.
On the extreme short end of space ownership, you have hotel rooms that you rent day to day.
Zooming out a bit more, you have apartments and rental houses that you can rent month to month or year to year from the land lord.
Zooming out even more, you have mortgages, which are basically you in a rent-to-own agreement with a bank over the course of the mortgage.
I don't think most people have issues paying night-to-night for hotels. If you don't mind paying for a night in a hotel, why would longer term space rentals be an issue?
Further, mortgage rates are more or less at all time lows. So the bank isn't even taking that big of a cut of your money.
Landlords don't make that great of a return on their money either. Housing prices effect them just as much as someone buying a primary residence. Often the rent is too damn high because the housing cost itself is too damn high.
As to why housing markets in some major metros are so messed up, that seems to be largely down to artificial restrictions on supply vs demand.
