Again, this isn't California. This is the Midwest. We have gentrification problems even in cities that are still losing population. And we've never constrained housing, for our cities that are slowly growing, many have built more new units than residents for years now. Most cities have no meaningful housing shortage here, but every city currently has a housing market manipulation problem.

> If the demand is there in the first place, doing so just means that the people who are interested will insteaad buy or rent existing homes that could have otherwise gone to lower-wealth families.

Or you could just reduce demand. Perhaps Pension Funds shouldn't be allowed to buy housing at all. Make them invest in something that doesn't hurt citizens. That would reduce prices instantly, without requiring the construction of fake-unusable for-equity-firms-to-hold-only housing.

In what world does it make sense for real humans to have to compete with private equity firms or pension funds for housing? Real humans are constrained by their incomes (incomes that famously haven't grown in decades), everything else is not.