Of course they have an agenda, but I think it's much less nefarious than some think -- it's that they think housing insecurity is a major problem in the United States with knock-on effects in education, health, and household wellbeing. Of course it is a complex issue on how to address this — what mixture of regulation and free market solutions best serves people -- and I think the authors land in a position that is more in favor of regulation.

I strongly recommend Desmond's earlier book "Evicted" — houses, while assets for some, are filled with extremely real people with extremely real challenges as a result of income inequality (and, moreso, differences in household wealth). OP is totally correct in noting the importance of returns in drawing investment; OP is reminded that markets forces can yield exploitative conditions (as simple evidence, consider colonialism).

Attributing the situations in Evicted to inequality or differences in household wealth is pretty off base. It's Milwaukee, not San Francisco. Competition from wealthier households has minimal to zero weight as a factor in the price of low-end housing.

Rather, a bunch of people have incomes that are below or precariously close to the carrying and maintenance costs on the cheapest possible shelter. You can tell that this is a poverty problem and not an inequality problem because the situation is worse, not better, if everyone falls down to that level. (Example: we might be legitimately better off in a world where no one is a billionaire, because billionaires have access to outsized political power that can harm other people. Money in politics is an inequality problem. I don't think you can say we're better off in a world where no one can securely afford good housing).

And if we look at places in the world that deal more successfully with such low economic productivity, one of things you'll find is a regulatory bar for "minimum viable shelter" that's more in line with what people living there can afford.

so let me get this straight: We are saying that there are some people who are doing okay in one place, and in another place, they have poverty.

And this is not inequality?

Honestly though, its been far more clear to me living and working in a country with much better income inequality how much the state of some places having rampant poverty and other places in the same country having massive profits. It seems like a cliché to say, but how is it that in the country with the highest average salary in the world there is so much poverty?

It's because there is a much sharper distribution: the wealthy few make far far more in america than they ever do in europe, but everybody else is better off.

The sharpness of this curve is what indecates inequality to me. I'm sure there are all sorts of fancy ways economists have quantified this, along with economic mobility (also shockingly low in the supposed land where anyone can make it)

Sure, there is inequality. You can remove it by destroying all housing wealth and evicting every American every month. But that makes the situation worse, not better. So the inequality is not the interesting or problematic aspect here.

“Of course it is a complex issue on how to address this — what mixture of regulation and free market solutions best serves people -- and I think the authors land in a position that is more in favor of regulation.”

The interventions we already have are largely responsible for the problem in the first place. Governments intervene massively to increase the cost of housing as a backdoor give-away to incumbent homeowners.

Doubling down on intervention will not work because there are diametrically opposed requirements—-politicians want high and monotonically increasing home prices but low and stable rents.

Thank you for addressing my concern with the claim. My immediate thought on the article title is that low income properties come with a host of extra work and risks that "higher class" areas do not have, and the higher margin on paper is the market's reflection of this fact.

I am an aspiring real estate investor and of course have considered low income properties. The forums online are chock full of the same question and the resounding response is "Yes, on paper you can make more money, if $bad_thing doesn't happen -- e.g. $bad_thing { a, b, c, d, e ... z } happened to me or someone I know and they actually lost money over 5yr. Good luck!"