Got it! Sorry for misunderstanding earlier. Now that I understand, it's clear that your position is both nuanced and subjective (I had previously thought you held a different view which would have been falsifiable).

I also think that the way you've framed this with the concept of two opposed purposes -- the purpose of deriving economic utility from a house as an asset, and the purpose of people having a place to live -- is actually a usefully simplistic way of considering the tension in the housing market. It helps to make it clear that there could be instances where a landlord's incentives are misaligned with society's incentives.

If you grant me for a second that society is better served by having no homelessness and that homelessness can often be the trigger which leads to other awful events, I think the question becomes one of how policymakers should intercede on behalf of tenants, not if.

Germany and the UK are two very interesting comparisons. You rightly point out that Germany is not just tenant-centric in its "worst case" scenarios (evictions and other life-deranging events), but also in the day-to-day of altering the interior of a property, rent caps (but not control!), longer leases, etc.

The UK's approach has been somewhat different (and very muddled). Before the 1980s in the UK mom & pop landlords didn't really exist, and then buy-to-let mortgages began popping up as products, sparking a wave of amateur landlords which culminated in the late eighties with the creation of ASTs to recognise the need for a more sophisticated set of arrangements between increasingly amateur landlords and tenants.

But in my view beyond creating a legal framework for the private sector which ensures tenants are not preyed upon somehow (e.g. a landlord being able to set a substantially below-market rent and then create their own unfair punitive measures for noise or something, resulting in tenants being locked into a cycle of debt), the obligation of the state is to ensure that there are alternatives to this market because, as I think we agree, it's something approaching a human right.

So if I look at the UK's approach in the aggregate (rather than just the meddling I see happening in the private sector), I like some of what I see! The state provides housing if you're unable to access it either through renting in the private sector or ownership. The state I believe is increasingly moving towards building its own stock of new dwellings rather than trying to incentivise the private sector to do something it isn't equipped to. And the legal framework to protect tenants is fairly robust: Section 8 and Section 21 are pretty tenant-centric IMO, and if you fall out of the private rental sector there is immediate and ~adequate help.

I think the area in which we differ is that I believe that instead of augmenting and limiting and fannying about with a free market, the state is best served by creating a compelling alternative. In many ways I equate the state's obligations to intervene in curbing out-and-out capitalism for pursuit of the greater good to its own kind of monopolistic power. (E.g. bank bailouts served society more than the invisible hand turning into an invisible fist.) I believe the state should be buying land and building housing in sufficient quantities at a neutral or negative margin, and providing a genuine alternative to the private rental sector, because it's clear that whilst the moral obligation towards housing people is broadly considered to be paramount, wholesale tinkering with the private sector status quo is yielding inefficient improvements to the lives of those who need help the most.

So I think I totally agree with you about the high level priorities here, but I think the approach should be radically different.