Stop preventing new housing construction too. Instead of relying on protests to change landlords’ behavior, use the protests to change government’s behavior, then let the profit motive of new construction to overpower the landlords’ ability to engage in price fixing.

Landlords are greedy. They’ll raise rents as much as they can. Fortunately, markets have the power to limit how much they can. But only if the market is free, ie if people can engage with the market as they see fit.

Right now we have a huge deviation from freedom, in the form of heavy government suppression of new investment, ie new construction of housing. This results in a market with artificially-limited supply, and those conditions allow the landlords’ greed to run un-checked by any opposing negotiating power.

The more landlords there are, the less power any given landlord has, because landlords compete with one another for our tenancy.

But if the supply isn’t allowed to naturally grow with our demand, ie if new housing can’t be built, then there’s no negotiating power on the side of tenants because they have no alternate choices about where to live.