The Onion

Paying rent is "the significant tax" you're talking about except because landlords don't care about their properties past maintaining the investment value (which rarely correlates with actual maintenance or actual value) housing isn't improved and at times is barely up kept.

In a society where every building was owned by the people living or working inside it, yes there would be a small buffer not currently being used and yes that would likely have to be publicly managed. That would neither be difficult or expensive from a government perspective and it assuredly would be far cheaper to society as a whole than rent is.

This isn't even considering that my rent goes to some rich asshole instead of a government employee maintaining my community as a 9-5. I'd much rather create a new well paying job per 1000 homes than buy the rich another vacation or yacht.

You've been deluded into thinking that public/government managed equals inefficient and expensive.
If anything public managed (or at least owned) housing would be cheaper, because of greed having been removed from the equation.
Allowing people and corps to stash basic services away is what's expensive for the population because the leeches will always require the maximum fee the market allows them to invoice.

We already do. Nearly every city in america has some form of a housing authority for the inpoverish and the application list for them extends for years because we dont invest more into them.

People are already willing to pay that significant tax, it's just currently known as net profit.

People already pay for all of these things, and every single one of them has a % tax added by the business supplying them to generate profit.

Not only do they have a profit tax attached, that profit tax is maximised to what the company believes they can get away with through "free market demand and supply" with no accountability except the ability to boycott (assuming there's another company you can move to, if it's a monopoly or oligopoly, good luck).

The difference that public ownership brings is a reduction in costs because there's no profit motive and an increase in accountability because of elections. Unfortunately in undemocratic "democratic" systems like America that accountability never materialises so it's misunderstood what that means.

In Scotland, we have a proportionally representative system. It's not perfect, we're still attached to Westminster via FPTP and the Barnett formula, but the parts that are genuinely democratically publicly run work brilliantly.

Scottish Water, for example, are a publicly owned company which (as the name suggests) supplies fresh, clean water to every home in Scotland. We pay a tax called council tax which is based upon the value of your home and a percentage of that tax covers sewage, drains, and water. We have some of the cleanest and safest water in the world. There's no meter tracking usage, we can use as much as we want. Businesses pay per litre but citizens have carte blanche.

ScotRail has recently been taken over by the government, this isn't as perfect an example as Scottish Water but it's also got a lot of the private corporate culture still to rip out of itself. But the service even now is considerably better than when it was privately owned.

We have what are known as Council Houses which are owned and maintained by the local council (local government) and rented out to generally poor or people in need. The rates charged are set by the council and can range from almost on par with private landlords to free, dependent upon needs and the situation. It's not unheard of for an old lady who's lived in a council home for years with 3 bedrooms who's family have moved out or died to swap houses with a young family in a 1 bedroom flat who have a baby and another on the way. Public housing allows that flexibility. There's no coercion allowed, you have the right to stay where you are, it's your home after all, but if the old lady is happy to move then it is facilitated with ease.

That is what public ownership and infrastructure allows. It's cheaper than private ownership, provides better service, and has a reasonability and flexibility that the private sector normally doesn't. Unfortunately, we live in a world where money means everything and profit motive is seen as the epitome of motivation so moving from private to public ownership of anything is an incredibly uphill battle and as most people only know the private world (and public projects often get bogged down in capitalist conservative countries) they're reluctant to comprehend let alone try it.

Public ownership works, it just needs to be set up and maintained properly, and unfortunately that means fending off capitalist saboteurs and vultures at every turn.