If you add more lanes to the interstate, people move further out, and the rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.

The only countervailing forces are:

* landlords not wanting as much money (unlikely, although it happens at small scales)

* rent control-type policies

* competition

And as far as I know competition is the only thing that works at scale. Although, people tend to emphasize intralocal competition as where this gets fixed. But I tend to think that the even larger issue is that so many places suck to live in (due to schools, jobs, culture, lack of prosocial governance...) that everyone with options congregates in the good ones.

There's an effect every larger than all of those, though, which is wealth disparity. If incomes differ by fewer orders of magnitude then prices can't vary as much across markets. At the end of the day when rich people can and do buy 2-5 homes and everyone else can barely buy one of course you're going to have problems.

We had two types of competition in the past that are much less common now:

- competition from new builds

- competition from different locations

The first was killed by restrictive zoning. The second still exists but is no longer useful. You can move to West Virginia for cheap rent, but you'll have to move to a location without jobs.

The combination of far less people moving across states and of jobs concentrating in expensive places to live is what killed that second type of competition.

I’d be interested in a study of moves; it feels to me like everyone used to move much further and more often for work, now it seems things are quieter. But that could all just be feels.

You don't need a study, it's part of the census data and widely available. It's down about half since mid century.

> Health insurance is heavily regulated to ensure that there are profit caps (think 80/20 rule) this means that the company is legally compelled to actually spend a certain amount on customers of said product.

This notoriously does not work at all.

Look up pay-vider structure and the type of manipulation of medical loss ratio it enables.

How does this help young people who want to move to a new city, but can't because all apartments are already rented because rents are far below market rate? This is reality in cities like Berlin and Stockholm.

You need more housing. Rents in Austin have collapsed because the city made it legal to build a lot more housing.

You should look at Vienna public housing then, rents there are typically less than 20% of the median monthly salary. Socialized housing works for the people that want to live and make a community with the limited time on this Earth they have.

It doesn't work for landlords that just want to extract wealth from others.

Relying on private developers that only want to build luxury housing is kinda how we're in this current mess. Expecting them to solve the problem we know, build more housing, is just silly. They didn't do it when money was the cheapest it ever was the last 15 years, they aren't going to start building it now.

This is why the government needs to step in and build more/better public housing.

It works for Vienna, this young chap even speaks about it at great length:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVuCZMLeWko

I sure hope he goes into politics, we need people with this type of imagination to better our society and give us hope for a better future which we can create now, not later.

Which led to insurers to purchase PBMs, hospitals, and doctor groups. The law of unintended consequences.

Landlords will get around this by raising other fees but not calling them rent, like pest control, garbage pickup, coffee room supplies, pets...landlords could do this all day long.