Of course, detecting it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, as some homeowners in Elliot Lake discovered.

Rental housing makes sense for people who aren’t intending to stay where they are in the long term (young single people or people whose situation is in flux in some way). If you’re expecting to move on, lumbering yourself with an expensive asset that will take years to pay for and may require months to unload when you no longer need it isn’t smart.

It may make sense to restrict rentals to multi-unit buildings, and also restrict the number of buildings or units under the same owner, but having none at all causes more problems than it solves.

There have been experimental deployments of Universal Basic Income, one of which lasted five years and involved an entire town, and none of those things ever materialized.