Near as I can tell, this would drive up the price of rentals quite significantly. Any landlord would need to factor the risk of getting caught being a landlord

Near as I can tell, this would drive up the price of rentals quite significantly. Any landlord would need to factor the risk of getting caught being a landlord into your rent. Fail on my part. I meant to apply this to ownership without renting, with the intention of kicking out the damn speculators. By the way, a more realistic way to lower rent prices would be to end rent control. The original rent control regime (where rents couldn't increase with inflation) turned out to be a huge disaster. It left a bunch of well-connected non-productive rich white people with an arrangement better than ownership, at the rest of our expense. The concept of rent control I don't have an issue with, but the original implementation was awful. I don't mind government interfering with the rental market if all tenants benefit. In a city like New York, government meddling is necessary because the free market fails catastrophically, as we see in these four-digit rents, but I do think the 60+ year-old sweetheart deal that some people have, just because they've been here forever, needs to be ended.