The problem with renting is, that it will return to you a temporal value(a space to live in each month, after the month this value is basically gone), whereby buying a house will return a lasting value, which you can even use by selling the house. In order to tackle this, the law should be implementing mechanisms to return value to the renter, like the ability to buy the flat after living in it for a certain number of years(like 15-20 years) for a multipel of the monthly rent. This would encourage people to rent longer and would return a fraction of their paid rent to them. But the details would be very complicated, like how do you prevent the landlords using the contract to kick people out, when they've rented the flat almost long enough to buy it?
As rents were cheaper in the previous decades compared to the monthly income, this mechanism would not be necessary. But basically burning half of ones income in order to live somewhere must return some value or around the world not only in the US we will have very poor renters and very rich home owners. This can even lead to even more radical political movements.