They also centralize poverty, which has effects on the local area. The workers in those buildings need to travel all over for their work.
Small, two to four story apartment buildings can largely be managed by handymen. They can be distributed throughout a city, placing them in communities that can support them. The people who live there can work in their local communities.
Beyond that, their initial capital costs are lower, and it's easier to find land that is zoned for 4 story buildings than 40 story buildings.
> Isn't Amazon cheaper than your local electronics store?
Cheaper? Maybe. Better? Absolutely not. Amazon might save me a couple bucks, but the hassle and time dealing with quality control issues, poorly managed inventory, lack of local experience, etc makes the dollars I save disappear I into increased headaches.
The thought of renting a home from Amazon vs the local bookstore is nightmarish to me.
Even if every regulation was struck from the books tomorrow, housing supply doesn't have anywhere close to the same flexibility. It's limited by the availability of undeveloped (or redevelopable) land, and just as importantly, by the location of that land. You can't just create more land next to the metropolis of your preference. There are practical and physical limits.
The above comment saying corporate investors lobby for reducing supply isn't true though. It's individual old NIMBYs and small time developers who lobby for that. Big companies like BlackRock are passively investing because it's so easy when the local government already wants to help them by restricting supply, but they don't individually show up to city council meetings and lobby for this stuff.
You really can defeat them by showing up. No California YIMBY policy has lost someone an election yet.
(Or they could stay in place - California requires this to be possible through "right of return" laws.)
Many types of housing are simply not feasible to build and operate except by large investors (e.g large apartment buildings), and banning entire categories of in-demand housing artificially restricts supply and drives prices up.
Imagine if we banned CPUs built by large corporations. Do you think that would make CPUs cheaper or cause massive shortages and drive prices up?
Investors buy a quarter of all stock and have an incentive to lobby for keeping supply low.
The solution is more government regulation reducing the number of units big investors can own, building small public housing units throughout their cities (not big projects), and making investing in property less appealing for big players via rent control, landlord tenant laws, zoning up, etc.