https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...
The vast vast majority of homes in the US are owned by single family homeowners. And even if that wasn't true it wouldn't make much of a difference. Investment firms don't purchase homes to let them sit there, they purchase homes to rent them out. To whatever degree they're competing against single family homeowners they're just causing a small percentage of housing to shift from owner occupied to rental housing which should actually lower the cost of rentals.
Especially in NYC and SF the cause is very simple: local government has made it illegal to build enough housing to keep pace with demand.
Homeowners?
Mortagage generators & holders (that is, creditors)?
Developers?
What of markets with significant concentration of property ownership?
Or of commercial property owners, who can also skew zoning and construction / land-use patterns?
What of interest groups which can create red-tape nightmares even through good intentions by various mandates: setbacks, offsets, minimum clearances, ramp requirements, etc.
Podcats / video channels / blogs such as StrongTowns or Shane Philips (UCLA Lewsi Centre) are all great starting points for how a tangle of minimum requirements and/or prohibitions starts blocking any possible change from traditional urban-sprawl patterns. Most have observed that the highly-desireable dense development of older cities and towns (1870s -- 1950s, typically) simply isn't possible under current laws and regulations.
I'm generally a fan of regulation, but it's got to be good and effective, rather than simply piled on. As with software, code requires occasional refactoring.
My suspicion, though, is that ballooning upper middle class salaries, combined with tax rates on the upper middle class lower than the Reagan era, really are a key driver of housing price inflation.
Investment firms, certainly, are a red herring: https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac... (“However, the idea that institutional investors are somehow largely to blame for the current housing market catastrophe is wrong and obscures the real problem. Housing prices have been skyrocketing due to historically low supply, low mortgage rates, and the largest generation in American history entering the market looking for starter homes.”).
The upper extremes of wealth are truly mind-boggling.
And for a family with a few million in nonliquid assets --- housing which they require to live, and investments earmarked for retirement --- a million-dollar cushion at the end of working life is not much.
(The fact that many people reach retirement with far less is not only a tragedy but a looming national catastrophe for the US.)
Maybe about 5 years ago I would have said that people making 200k are wealthy. Today I would say that they are a lot of people that have been duped into a lifestyle where they "think" they are wealthy but are not. They spend MOST of their salary on non-essential and non-asset building things. So in a sense they are people that should be rich, but are not. Instead they don't own property (renters) buy lattes, restaurant food (for every meal) and the rest of that income is just going to payments - the tesla, rv/campers/boats, storage facilities for the stuff that doesn't fit in the apartment.
Those people certainly could become winners of the economic system if they stopped paying everyone else - but they identify with wealthy people making 400k but have absolutely no appreciating assets (ok except for their self driving module that Elon duped them into - which it turns out isn't actually "sellable" to the next owner anyway!).
I don't think these people identify with working class - instead they are pushing a narrative for themselves as poor to feel less guilty about that large salary and how poorly it's being pissed away.
That's the closest I can "explain" that from my personal perspective at least.
Honestly - you sound really out of touch and like you know no one who makes $200k/yr in SF. Where would you put your boat if you even could afford one? Where would you put a camper? Do you think people at 200k in sf are renting houses often? Houses with space for boats and campers?!
Sounds a lot like someone who likes to bitch about avocado toast. I wish people like this didn’t even post on HN - because it’s clear they don’t live in SF and don’t have a clue.
I'm interpreting "living in SF" to mean broadly within the SF Bay Area metro region, which would include much of the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa. Arguably parts of Marin and Santa Cruz. For some of the longer commutes, Sonoma, Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, and San Joaquin.
Housing is scarce and expensive throughout the region. It's one of few economic hubs in the US let alone the state. And people have increasingly been priced out, or simply unable to find housing (including replacement after natural disasters).
"Choice" isn't a binary, or absent profound implications, opportunities, and/or consequences.
Ok Mr. Old Republican Avocado Toast hating throwaway troll account - wish you the best of luck in your distorted world. Your worldview is a sad deeply inaccurate take and I hope you realize that before its too late.