You are thinking about things in exactly the wrong way.
For every 1 story increase in building height in a San Francisco apartment complex, there is 10 less houses that have to be build in Suburbia.
10 parcels of land that can now be converted to national parks, and public spaces.
People need a place to live whether you like it or not.
We can either make room for them in the cities, by increasing density and building height limits, or we can stand by and watch as urban sprawl continues to destroy our environment.
But not everyone wants to live in an apartment/flat there are serious downsides to lease hold property's.
A co worker was on the residents committee for a block of flats (london UK) that had to have the roof replaced not cheap and the original contrcator did it wrong and they had to sue them and have it redone.
But living in your own house means you have your own roof, that can just as well needs maintenance, and you also can pick a bad contractor, and so on.
There are trade-offs. And there are external costs. Having your own backyard means usually having and using a car, taking up space close to downtown (because fuck commute times, right?) for just a family (and taking up road capacity too). These are currently undervalued.
The whole housing calamity in the Bay Area (and in London and Berlin) is manifestation of exactly this. (Plus idiotic zoning laws and height restrictions, and of course grafts, bribes, corruption, and the usual.)
Its the difference between a £250,000k Job and a £10k one ogh and coordinating 50-70 different lease holder to pay their share.
Even more extream if your looking at a listed building - which I did when I was looking at buying a ex alms house listed in Pevsner (one of only two buildings of note in my home town)
In my experience the paying the lease (or whatever the money due is formally called) is the least controversial part of it. You'll have more problems with the owners of the apartments. (So all the problems of the dreaded HOAs, exist for every building if it's owned by a group - which is quite usual in Europe.)
But these are very low-level problems, and they tend to sort themselves out pretty quickly (in ~5 years, let's say, if the building needs a renovation and the owners were not too keen on participating and saving for it beforehand).
If you are getting a mortgage, you usually buy it.
Also, if you want to get a mortgage for a lease, you can, if the mortgage repayment deadline is before the lease expiry. When it comes to property banks only care about getting a notarized mortgage contract and getting on the property's land registry sheet in a first position. (And this latter part is interesting, because most land registries - as far as I know - don't really have the concept of expiring records - so you can't record the fact of your lease.)
Thats fine, but we are already in a position where 10s of millions of people would rather live in the city, but are unable to due to how expensive it is. YOU don't have to move to the city, but if we build more houses in the city, then OTHERS will be able to.
If dense housing is available, this drives down the cost of living/price of houses. If suburbian homes are less valuable, it is cheaper to convert.
Also, driving down the price of housing prevents EXISTING public spaces and parks from being converted into homes, as cities will be less incentivized to do so.
There is already a lot of public spaces that are being converted to houses, so preventing a conversion to urban sprawl is equivalent to converting back to a public space.
In fact, urban apartment complexes in dense cities are much much MORE valuable and desirable than suburban homes. There are 10s of millions of people who would rather live in a desirable place like downtown NYC than the place they are currently living in, if it was as affordable as suburban homes.
The facts that back this up, are housing prices. Housing prices in cities are 4x higher than they are in the countryside, which, due to the laws of supply and demand, means that lots of people prefer city living to suburban living.
The statistics I've seen in the US are that about 1/3 of people would prefer living in city centers, 1/3 would prefer suburbia, and 1/3 don't care. And currently 80% of people live in suburbia because city centers are expensive. Apartments and suburban houses aren't the same but our tax and regulatory structure is strongly pushing people towards the later even if that's not what they want.
For every 1 story increase in building height in a San Francisco apartment complex, there is 10 less houses that have to be build in Suburbia.
10 parcels of land that can now be converted to national parks, and public spaces.
People need a place to live whether you like it or not.
We can either make room for them in the cities, by increasing density and building height limits, or we can stand by and watch as urban sprawl continues to destroy our environment.