Not sure you will ever be able to ban investors from owning properties that are rented out long-term - a fair amount of the population wants to, or can only afford to, rent - and someone needs to be the landlord.
On the otherhand, it seems like AirBnB's, i.e. short-term rentals, are ripe for some legislation to undo the negative affects they are having on many communities.
> Not sure you will ever be able to ban investors from owning properties that are rented out long-term
Why not? We are making up the rules as we go. The government has the guns, it can do what it wants.
> - a fair amount of the population wants to, or can only afford to, rent
Well a fair amount of the population wants to buy a home remotely close to where their job and family is, but it turns out there's a population representing 30% of all sales that thinks they ought to be landlords.
Housing co-ops are a thing that exist. Governments can also conceivably own rental properties. It’s property management that does most of the work anyway and they get paid like anyone else to do a job.
Landlords are a drain on the economy and there are viable alternative models. We do not need landlords.
Landlords are the people that own the property and take profit for it. Sometimes they manage the property, in a lot of cases they don’t. Sometimes they are corporations, sometimes they aren’t. In any case they are collecting rents and taking profit from those rents solely by virtue of owning the property.
In the alternatives I mentioned, co-ops and government, neither of those entities need profit. Co-ops are just owned by the collective of the residents. They would pay their rent in order to pay off taxes and utilities and maintenance expenses.
On the otherhand, it seems like AirBnB's, i.e. short-term rentals, are ripe for some legislation to undo the negative affects they are having on many communities.