In London a lot of commercial rents in newly gentrified areas have went up 10x+ in the last 10-20 years. There has been an awful of lot of value transferred to these landlords for really not a huge amount of work in many cases.
I don't disagree with you in principal, but unfortunately, we have a parallel problem of how the debt market works, which is essentially to generated and then sell the debt to investors, diffusing the "risk", or rather, I think of it more as displacing it. Much less incentive for active participation in investing via debt. People who end up holding the debt are many steps away from being able to have conducted due diligence.
Not to harp on a point, but the big theme of this whole fiasco starts with the displacement of risk from the risk taker. And since we've permitted that, we're all stuck with it.
And they should face the losses. And maybe learn from their mistakes.
And the people that were responsible with their money, didn't take on the risky assets that generated out-sized returns will be able to invest because they preserved capital.
The US is thirty years out from the previous commercial real-estate reckoning. The S&L crisis. Everything that was booming a year ago was built on top of that reckoning.