It's not the fault of private capital firms that local governments have essentially outlawed building new homes in many areas. The solution should be focused on restricting the ability of localities to do this, not restricting the ability of companies to buy real estate.

Yeah I agree with this here. Its simply to hard to build housing and the number permits and zoning restrictions have lead to localized housing shortages where people want to live. Its simply a difficult poltical issue to solve because most of the time zoning is handled at the local level and old people who have houses attend town hall meetings where zoning is discussed (if seldomly ever). Homeowners who have treated housing as a speculative centeralized asset have little to gain in allowing the market fixing itself.

> It's not the fault of private capital firms

Which doesn't really matter because they don't need to be "protected" in any capacity. Removing their ability to purchase those homes, and letting it get sorted between the people who are "outlawing building homes" and those who want to move there makes more sense.

Deciding who gets to buy what is known as central economic planning. It doesn't have a good track record.

In this case, by restricting who can buy, you're reducing the demand for housing. Less demand means lower prices. Lower prices mean fewer homes will be built, meaning less supply.

A better scheme would be to lower the costs of home construction by reducing regulations and taxes on them.

It kind of is, though. The political economy is a thing, lots of companies lobby for favourable legislation.

Sure, but if the price of housing is too high then price controls won't fix it either. You'd end up with no availability, or a decades-long waitlist for rent-controlled apartments like Stockholm.

The issue with housing affordability is that the market is often prevented from responding to high demand and low supply by regulation. SF is very restrictive with permitting housing construction, despite the incredibly high rents. It's not that the market forces are failing to incentivize housing construction, it's that developers are prevented from responding to market demand.

>Sure, but if the price of housing is too high then price controls won't fix it either. You'd end up with no availability

You're assuming a baseline of a functional market system.

If you have widespread price-fixing between landlords (say, via everyone using the same algorithm service that gives everyone the same recommendation) then rent control isn't introducing a price fix, it's just changing the level of price fixing.

If you can only rent for $X000, but the rent price is fixed to at least $X500, then for you, there might as well be no availability - the landlord is leaving the place vacant due to the price-fixing.

The allegations of rent fixing don't look very credible. RealPage had a single-digit market share in SF when that story was making the rounds, nowhere near enough to effectively fix rates. Furthermore, these cities don't have high vacancy rates. And lastly, cities that banned the use of the software and did not see a subsequent drop in rental prices.

> widespread price-fixing between landlords

This is called a cartel. The trouble with cartels is enforcing it. Cartel members cheat all the time by selling for less than the cartel price in order to get a larger share of the market. The setup is unstable as the incentives are much like the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Hallelujah. Shout it from the rooftops!

Markets are powerful tools--perhaps the most powerful tool we have to shape human interactions. But too many people believe in a sort of market gospel ("Supply Side Jesus"); that market forces are as inevitable and inflexible as the force of gravity. In reality, policy choices shape markets and careful market design can deliver politically-favorable outcomes.

Markets work for us, not the other way around. "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"

The government constantly tries to repeal the Law of Supply & Demand. That never works.