My god, your comments are written with such a lack of empathy and your opinion is so underdeveloped that that is why you earned my downvote.

Rent is increasing everywhere because inflation is increasing everywhere, including outside of major cities.

More importantly, the solution to "housing is increasingly controlled by those who own a lot of housing and they are using that control to extract more wealth from those who own less than them. " is not simply “move somewhere less densely populated, the housing there is cheaper”. Why? Because of course it’s fucking not.

Housing is cheaper there because less people live there. What does that mean? Less people want to live there, for a myriad of reasons. Maybe I have multiple family members within a city? Hell, I have friends certainly and they’re not moving with me - decade long friendships that won’t go away but I’ll certainly see far far less.

Maybe I have kids and I don’t want to move them to a new school? Maybe the schools in my neighboring small towns aren’t properly funded or have a conservative board so their education is skewed.

Maybe I like going to IMAX theaters as a treat and my neighboring towns don’t have one. Or ice skating or to an arcade or to top golf or to a Thai boxing club or to a pottery class. Cities have these experiences in spades, and maybe my neighboring towns dont.

Maybe I hate driving and commuting would not only cost more of my most valuable resource but it would cause things I’m opposed to like increased pollution while costing me more money and increasing my risk of accidental harm. Maybe the city I would have to commute in our through has such a reliance on car infrastructure that everywhere is clogged up with traffic most hours of the day making any sort of timely transit impossible.

Maybe I just like good food, smaller towns have less variety, less options, and fewer hours. Maybe I like well sourced meats like fish, which my small towns struggle to source.

Maybe my neighboring towns don’t speak my language as well as cities, they can’t accommodate me while I learn the native language. Maybe I like a racially diverse populace with high education and who have a multitude of life experiences. Maybe I’m LGBTQ and my neighboring towns are too conservative to treat me well. Maybe violent crime is higher in the suburbs and neighboring towns and that worries me.

I mean, you’ve clearly thought about all of this and found it inconsequential when compared to hundreds of dollars in rent. But I’d be willing to pay more money to stay in a public transit heavy city, with my friends, so I can get good sushi and Turkish food when I want, and see movies on the big screen.

That doesnt mean I want to pay some guy’s 4th mortgage at a rate that costs me my ability to ever own an apartment. Housing is a right, we have the capacity to make it affordable everywhere, we should be doing things that improve everyone’s lives not pretending that it’s acceptable to tell everyone to uproot their entire life in exchange for €X00 a month back.

Not everyone can drive. Many households only have one car between multiple adults. Some can’t afford childcare and rely on nearby relatives to help out, and would have to start paying for childcare if they moved. Some people don’t have the education or job training that would allow them to get a job worth commuting to. Some people are reliant on social services or medical care that is not available otherwise. Many of the suburbs around American cities are just as expensive as the cities themselves but without walkable areas, nearby shops, or any public transportation.

This is just a handful of examples and it barely scratches the surface of the more complicated issues at hand here