The multi-trillion-dollar national real-estate investment firms thank you for your service towards growing the permanent rental class from which they will extract wealth in perpetuity.

They are most welcome!

It’s an incredible PR coup.

The progressive position in the 90s was anti-gentrification, anti-greedy rent-seeking developers; “the evil developer” was a common trope in pop-culture.

Now? Dust off your ceremonial hard hat and golden ground-breaking shovel, because apparently, facilitating a massive and permanent wealth transfer to those same greedy developers is now progressive orthodoxy.

Density proponents are just unpaid lobbyists.

Sure. Nobody needs to pay me to lobby for density. I'll put energy into advocating density on its own merits.

What merits, other than enriching real-estate investors and disenfranchising more of the population, exactly?

Could you rephrase that question in a way that makes it perhaps less clear how much bad faith it's being asked in? Thanks!

It must be difficult holding that brush, given how broad it is.

(And maybe, just maybe, you might not know what you're talking about, living all alone in the forest, far removed from all this.)

You know that people own townhouses and apartments right? It’s not always just companies.

I don’t know about America but in Germany apartment buildings are often owned by the residents and they have to work together in a financial collective for certain things like roof repairs, city negotiations, fencing, etc. But then internally to their unit they are able to make many permanent alterations within limits.

I don’t list these constraints claiming them as benefits. No these are the hardships one must endure but the benefit is of course property ownership. The benefits of property ownership in general are well known, it’s primarily a matter of accessibility to those benefits that is being discussed.

Exactly. If there's an issue with ownership, then that's a completely separate topic from density.

I do think we should encourage individual home ownership, even in dense developments. And would have no problem with legal nudges towards this. I.e. upzoned for density only if units which will ultimately be individually owned.

Furthermore, in the majority of desirable areas, creating high-density, individually-owned homes would increase access to home ownership, as the unit economics would allow lower pricing than equivalent single family homes in the same location.

(And before someone pulls out the construction cost economics / high-price-only rebuttal, that's yet another topic, with a different set of fixes)