If parcel A has a property value of X

And parcel B has a property value of 2X

Then you can have the same rent on both of them if building B is twice as tall as building A.

The whole “single family residential only” zoning in the US is the issue.

There are tons of natural limitations in all kinds of things and all sorts of Markets - which is why Free Market Theory is mainly bollocks: the conditions for it to work as advertised exist only in a handful of Markets.

In Housing, clearly Land is the main limiting factor in places like cities and surrounding suburbia, though if that was removed we would eventually run against other limiting factors, probably on some kinds of building materials or manpower (hence my mentioning of both), though all that could be overcome with time whilst Land limitations, although made worse by Landownership laws, are ultimatelly down to there not being possible to make any more of it (though different work patterns could make it be much more efficiently used if they weakenned the need for people to live in and around cities).

Also keep in mind that land usage efficiency can be increased by building more multi-story housing, though in the current situation with land ownership that possibility just gets translated into higher land prices, so in places like the US you end up with sprawl rather than medium density housing: the whole economics of Land and thus housing pricing make a bigger and nicer living place far from a city center be the same price or cheaper than a crummy appartment nearer the center, even though were land was used with higher efficiency and dwelling size is smaller the price per dwelling should actually be cheaper.

Nice to see you’re getting close to the core of the problem.

Yeah, Land is owned rather than belonging to everybody as it used to be back before monarchs and as land ownership works in this system - any one individual with massive wealth can own way more Land than they need - it can be easilly hoarded by those with more money in a way that’s impossible for those with less money to overcome (short of a Revolution) and thus create cartels or even monopolies in Land in desirable places to live, a market positions from where they can extract as big a rent as they want since everybody else has no alternative.

It’s from the massive imballance thus created by Law in the main, essential and irreplaceable, “raw material” for housing that the massive house prices we see come from, and landlords usually use their priviledged position in that highly imbalanced market to extract excessive rents.

The whole situation is actually the very opposite of the “Free Market” you state it is - Land (and thus housing) ain’t like teddy bears and soap were a competitor can just enter the market and make more of it when somebody tries to corner the market, quite the opposite: it’s dependent on a naturally limited resource on top of which a trully ancient kind of legislation makes hoarding extremelly easy for those lucky enough to have lots of wealth, artificially transforming the limits of that resource into an extreme kind of scarcity.

In this Not-At-All-Free Market, most landlords will extract excessive rents far beyond the value they add. If rents were not mainly based on exploiting a dominant position in a market dominated by hoarding and artifical scarcity and only paid for the actual service being provided by landlords, they would be tiny in comparison with the current situation and very few people would be critical of landlords.

no, you just took my reply serious ;)

Slavery is immoral

Instead, make being poor illegal (arrest people who can’t pay for the essentials), arrest them, and THEN use them as slaves, it’s fine since they’re criminals