Do you have a source for this because I’m not convinced. Maybe a small portion do but the majority face no penalties. When I was in college the number of questionably legal homes for rent was insane, but I didn’t have time to go after them. A friend of mine did and won, but it required a lot of time. Most of the time the landlord does what they want and the renters don’t have the resources to go after them.

You make it sound like it’s the renters who take advantage of the landlords but most of the time it’s the landlords who do whatever they want. The ones who stopped paying rent probably were doing so legally because a lot of them were forced to not work.

Most folks don't want to saw off the branch they are sitting on, though, so they play nice.

They do that enough times, and all of a sudden now speeding is legal because no one was charged with speeding, but with "driving with an invalid instrument".

This would basically get rid of the "easy plea downs" and basically make fighting against the book the norm.

IRL example:

I once pulled out of my driveway and passed a stopped school bus (with lights on, but no stop signs extended) on a divided highway (barrier between my side of the road and theirs), a cop saw me do that, went around the barrier and pulled me over a couple minutes later. I was charged with something that was going to instantly take my license away.

I went to my local courthouse on the designated day, the prosecuter brought me in and told me he would drop the charges to failure to stop at a stop sign. I said I didn't pass a stop sign, and that the bus didn't have them extended, just stopped with lights on, across a highway from me.

Prosecutor said, that I'm allowed to argue that in front of a judge along with paying some large sum, and potentially lose my license, or take a point, and pay $150 today and be done with it.

I chose the latter.

Tons of kids aren’t taught that, some of them start businesses, and they may struggle to make ends meet (or at least to thrive like they could be) because raising prices to market rates feels so unfair to them that they won’t do it unless prodded to and told it’s ok by someone else (and they still might not)

I definitely am not convinced market-rate-is-ethical-and-fair is natural thinking for most people, or the kind of thing they want to do.

(I’ve been the one telling people they should raise prices and I still can’t shake the feeling that it’s kinda wrong…)

tl;dr: they pivoted from offering services adjacent to "learn to code" (among other things) to vibecoding

2) Less than 40% of households are fully owned. The rest have mortgages or are rented.