The thesis behind this editorial is in direct contradiction to your idea. The reason that people become apathetic is only tangentially related to ownership...it

The thesis behind this editorial is in direct contradiction to your idea. The reason that people become apathetic is only tangentially related to ownership...it is actually about incidence: who benefits from improvements in public services? In a world where landowners successfully push for land scarcity, all benefits of public services go to landowners, regardless of whether or not they are residents, pushing non-landowner residents to apathy towards public service improvement. If you don't restrict land uses, allowing everybody to live in the city without being sucked dry by landowners' economic rents, then both renters and resident-owners will be pushing for public service improvements, while the institutional or non-resident owners will be the ones apathetic towards improvements. Renters don't make the city worse, concentrated economic benefits going solely to landowners does that.