Government-owned apartments don't need to have a profit-focus, and can instead have a service-focus.

You'll still be paying continuously for a condominium - there are plenty of things related to living in one of those that aren't free. Having an ownership-focused model of housing and incentivizing as such comes with a whole host of undesirable problems as well, so it's not strictly speaking a silver bullet. That being said, housing coops can under the right circumstances be a force for good.

True, but he means nationalized, so publicly owned, publicly funded.

Not only is rent there seen as temporary ownership (same in Germany), with really strong protections but the rent itself is like $300-$400 euros a month, barely anything for a top tier apartment that's basically a solarpunk megabuilding.

I honestly think that's preferable to paying mortgages for also for-profit banks and 'climbing the ladder'.

The lack of ownership as an option also prevents the accumulation of such wealth that someone can buy it all out and make it all worse again

Most landlords. I was a landlord for a while because I was underwater on my mortgage, I had just gotten divorced, and I wanted to move closer to work. I rented the house out at a loss so I could afford an apartment.

So...instead of paying rent to the landlord, people will be paying a mortgage to the bank?

Buying houses to keep empty is mostly a land speculation-kind of deal, probably best solved by something like a Land Value-Tax.

Back to the claim though, I'm highly skeptical that the U.S would have a huge surplus of houses in areas where there truly is demand for people to live, i.e. larger cities.

It's more like lots of rowhouses and like 5-10 story apartment mixed-use apartment buildings - hardly a cyberpunk kind-of deal.

An interesting thing is that megabuildings only make sense in the most extreme of circumstances, think Manhattan-levels of location desirability. After a while, adding more floors becomes exponentially more expensive because of the new engineering challenges. Hence it's rarely worth it.

My hope is that it wouldn't be as bad as one might think. Dense living arrangements are more profitable for cities and local businesses and can allow cities to focus on infrastructure improvement and welfare. A problem with the megabuildings could be if they are solely owned by megacorps, but hopefully people will start looking into housing cooperatives to reduce costs and put more power in the hands of tenants. It doesn't have to be like we only build skyscrapers either, but imo we need to have more of a gradient in terms of building height depending on distance to the city center; different apartment building heights have their own benefits. This is just my dream, though.