Meanwhile the American citizenry with humble dreams of one day owning a house feels their dreams drift farther and farther out because some people won’t acknowledge that there’s even a problem. Others want to reward these corporations by building more inventory.
If a single corporation owns all homes, they can artificially limit supply by buying up any new properties and leaving them empty.
If multiple companies own all homes, then they can try to artificially limit supply by buying up any new properties and leaving them empty, but there's huge incentive for each one not to: if it rents out every property it buys, it makes even more money than if it left any of them empty. It's the prisoner's dilemma - if all companies collude and limit supply they maximize total profit, but if any individual company "cheats" it stands to gain even more for itself.
It is possible for cartels to collude and pull this off (OPEC etc), but it's not possible when there are thousands and thousands of companies and many of them are too small to "take one for the team" and leave a property empty, or too disinterested in any collusion.
Mine’s an environmental concern. NIMBYs are just trying to protect their housing investments.
Your concern is actually pretty common among the affluent homeowners who prevent development. Probably the second most common concern behind "neighborhood character", which is really just another type of environmental concern (city environment). Very few NIMBYs are purely after money.
"Housing defies economic laws and is terrible for the natural and/or city environment" is the prevailing opinion of NIMBYs today, based on the discussions I've been in.
It seems like you’re on the side of the upper-class trying to trade the environment to prop up their investments. This is just like BTC scammers trying to trade the environment for their investments.
So no, if one side of this is more like BTC scammers, it isn't mine. It is the guarantee of scarcity that underwrites the entire BTC enterprise, even for the miners who are today wasting electricity on generating more of them.
Renting has absolutely nothing with our housing problems. There are majority-renter housing markets that have nowhere near the affordability problems we have. Supply is far more important than who has the deed.
If you want rich developers to make less money, unleashing supply is the way to do that. Automakers and grocery stores have relatively low profit margins because there are no government-imposed supply constraints on them.
Frankly, though, I think it's more admirable to help the poor than merely make a doomed attempt to punish the rich.
Would you at least agree in a hypothetical US in which it is not possible to build further supply that banning renters would be the next logical step? Again, this is not to say or not say that supply should not be further built.
Owning means saving a lot of money and accepting a lot of price risk and transaction costs. I own a house and like it, but I know for a fact that it's not for everyone.
If there was one monopolist landlord who charged through the nose, that could be a problem, but I don't know of any housing markets like that. Landlords keep raising their prices because demand outpaces supply and they can get away with it.
It is not the case that, because an oil monopoly happened in 1900, we need to be hypervigilant to hypothetical monopolies in other industries where nothing remotely like that has ever happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri...