Not really, because the rental market does not behave like commodities do. Generally, you have to live within a reasonable distance of employment. For this and other reasons, renters are much more vulnerable and tend to get exploited far beyond the cost of the service.
Basically, if tenants had any more money to exploit, they would already take it. Rents are maximally high wherever possible to extract maximum money from people who need a place to live.
Consider the common joke that I pay this much in rent every month but the bank says I can’t afford a house where the mortgage would be substantially less.
Agreed, and this would be solved by sufficiently high land value tax - if wasn’t profitable to be a landlord nobody would do it and the price of land would decline sharply. Henry George saw all of this coming a long time ago.
First time I’ve heard of the idea of a separate land value tax… Frankly it seems like an awesome idea, especially for cities.
I imagine it would make dense housing more profitable than McMansions, and punish the NIMBYs who keep standing in the way of affordable housing. Maybe we could make the tax increase significantly with the number of properties an individual owns and start it at the highest rate for things like shell corps and LLCs.
