Possibly, but I don't think its required.

The Irvine Company is very similar in Southern California. It seems like they own everything when you want office real estate.

So, it's corruption, right?

Well, except that if you talk to any contractors (like your internet provider installer) you find that they love The Irvine Company because there is someone who has a little bit of competence for them to talk to when they need to. As opposed to every other real estate company that seems to be staffed by brain-damaged monkeys.

So, you can posit corruption. Or, you can posit that real estate management is one of those markets that tends toward monopoly because you can amortize the costs more effectively the more properties you own.

To add further color to this, the Irvine Company benefits enormously from Prop 13. This law guarantees that once you hold property for long enough, your tax burden will be so much lower than everyone else you have a cost advantage that newcomers will not be able to match. So the current state law favors older companies over new ones.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Your tax burden would stay the same, relative to future buyers, if prices stay flat. At which some point, they're bound to plateau. How many people or institutions will buy single family homes once they're $10 million each, but the median household income is still somewhere around $100k? It's a subtle point, but the benefits of Prop 13 aren't a function of time, they're a function of appreciation. It just so happens to be the decades following Prop 13 came with great price appreciation, some of that attributable to Prop 13 itself, but most of it attributable to local rule of land use policy.

I think inflationary monetary policy (a good thing) more or less guarantees that in dollar terms (the thing that matters for prop 13) prices will go up every year. I think prop c does allow for some price adjustment for inflation, but it has a crazily low cap

Property taxes can go up 2% per year. That's reasonable from an inflation perspective if you are just living there. (Supposedly inflation has been that low for a long time, but doesn't feel like it in real cost of living)

I think you need to defend your claim that inflationary monetary policy is a good thing. How is it good for the residents of a country?

I mean to the best of my knowledge basically all economists think it is, but beyond that imagine a world where we had stagnation or worse deflation. You would have much less of an incentive to invest money rather than just keep it in the bank.

Well, the corruption comes in when they start influencing politics, and also when they use their monopoly in shady ways to evict people and such. I agree it's problem regardless of corruption.

Land is already a monopoly in its own right. There is no real estate without a monopoly even if it is a tiny one.