I think CarrotStick your points about the regulation of the rental market being detrimental to the market and the common good and contrary to a concept of social justice (due to two identical landlords receiving different rents) are valid but may be too abstract to ever be actionable legally and certainly hard to get consensus on here. The eviction ban would of course further impact on your original post because presumably the property would have to be sold with tenant in situe at a significant discount at the moment. IANAL but I suspect the government linking the eviction ban to homeless numbers could be legally challenged - why should the private rental market be seized up to take up the slack for homelessness? Whatever the differential to the benchmark acceptable number of homeless is (11,000?) why doesn't the government use other emergency measures to house the excess instead of relying on emergency measures that impacts the private rental market only. I think in those terms a case could be put forward by someone with deep pockets and a lot of time on their hands.
I think many on here do recognise the big picture issues but are loath to admit to that for some reason, they reiterate nonsense about landlords exiting not affecting net numbers of units in the rental market, ignore that an evicted family, when a small landlords sells right now, are probably looking at much increased rent anyway, as the only available supply in the market to move to is coming from institutional landlords (new rents are increasing 14% year on year even in RPZs), and claim that all of the continuous populist regulatory changes are somehow a reasonable risk of investing etc. (and have presumably no concern at all of impact on investment needed for supply everyone knows we need going forward).
Consumers/renters are getting a worse and worse deal out of this but getting any agreement on that on this consumer site seems very difficult - I don't know why this is because anyone I talk to 'in the real world' sees the situation as very short sighted. My own suspicion is that there is politics at play on here too.