At scale, it limits the supply of available homes to buy which increases the prices.

When we constantly read stories about people not being able to afford homes today, it’s all driven by pure supply and demand. When a firehose of money gets aimed at any aspect of the economy everything gets more expensive.

This is from institutional investors. Sometimes it’s government when we are talking about the price of education or healthcare for example.

None of this is happening "at scale", but either way, you're talking about the price of deeds on houses, and affordable housing isn't about home ownership; in fact, the urge people have to drive this issue towards "starter homes" is a big part of the problem, because the highest-opportunity areas have strictly limited carrying capacity for single-family homes in the first place, and what we desperately need to do is upzone and diversify the housing stock.

> it limits the supply of available homes to buy

It also lowers the demand (it increases the supply of an alternative).

It’s literally a new development. Someone went out and turned some raw land into rental houses. If they had left it as raw land, there also would have been no change in supply of houses to buy.

Instead, now they’ve created a slight reduction in demand for houses to buy by offering a housing alternative that didn’t exist before.

Isn’t manipulation of zoning an example of why it’s important and how even with a small share they can have an outsized influence on the market? Also I seriously doubt the return to work directives are driven by anything more then the projected drop in property values.

No. I actually don't give a shit whether corporations can buy single-family houses, by which I mean, I don't care if that's banned. My problem is that high-opportunity high-value residential areas are deeply resistant to upzoning and are actively using this "corporate investor" narrative as a reason why they should wait. Corporate investors are not why the inner ring suburbs with the good schools in major metros are expensive; zoning is. This is literally a distraction from affordability work.

There can be more than one problem at once. Two different solutions can be tried at the same time.

This doesn't acknowledge anything I just wrote.

You said blaming corp buyers is a distraction from NIMBYISM. I'd argue corp buyers are a problem as well as NIMBYISM. Both should get blamed and be addressed.

In fact, it's the opposite: corp buyers are associated with declining rents. I don't care what happens with them either way, they're a second-order factor, but most of what people are saying about this phenomenon is just wrong.

And neither is rented strictly better than owned. You would care if you wanted to own but couldn't.

I agree, in the same way I'd care the other direction if I wanted to rent, which is why I don't understand the concern about inventory shifting to rentals.

In my experience, there are a lot of people who don't consider renters as people that deserve consideration in governmental decision making. So if rental supply becomes available, it doesn't matter, not only because the person doesn't want to rent, but more so because renters are not considered permanent citizens of the local city and therefore they don't matter.

This is a recurring theme k see among both right wing and left wing people when it comes to looking at single family homes.

Yes, it's a real problem. A surprising number of politically-well-connected people in my muni believe that renters don't even pay property tax.

Can you point to any municipality anywhere in the USA (or anywhere else, if you like) that prevents renters from voting, attending public meetings, donating to candidates and otherwise participating in local decision making?

No but that is not what my comment was talking about.

> there are a lot of people who don't consider renters as people that deserve consideration in governmental decision making

How does it matter whether "a lot of people don't consider" something if there are no laws or enforcement actions that make their opinions actually effective in the world?

> no laws or enforcement actions that make their opinions actually effective in the world?

How do you come to that conclusion? The people who show up to local planning meetings are clearly very effective at enacting their opinions in the world, and local planning is the place where a tiny number, perhaps 3-5 people, can drastically change the results for an entire area.

The line I quoted from you concerned people who don't consider that renters should be involved in local decision making. I'm asking you what difference it makes what they consider, when they are not actually able to enact any barriers to participating in local decision making? I mean, sure, they make think that renters should stay out of the planning meetings, but if they do not stop them, what difference does it make what they think? Renters vote too ....

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that because renters can vote, they have equal impact on planning decisions, and therefore a bloc of voters that do not consider renters' needs as being valid for the city is OK. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I have two objections to that.

1) Local planning decisions are not made on the basis of democratic votes, they are political decisions made by a tiny number of people that are highly susceptible to influence. In particular, money and local political power has a huge effect on who gets elected, who is paying attention to what happens, and who benefits. There's very little attention paid to these matters except those with highly conflicted interests, which means that highly conflicted decisions are the most common outcome. Which leads to suboptimal results over longer periods of time, as happens in any system that appears to be democratic but is actually corrupt.

2) Even in democracy, one bloc deciding that another bloc's interests can be ignored and don't matter to the functioning of government is an extremely toxic environment which results in awful outcomes. I view any system where there are second-class citizens as a fundamentally un-American idea and counter to the goals of our nation. Those who wish to exclude an entire economic class from their community are trying to create precisely that sort of second-class citizen.

I agree that political decisions are arrived at by imperfect, corruptible processes, and that these tend to favor those with capital interests (e.g. home ownership) in certain outcomes.

However, I do not think there is any reason to require that all voters respect the interest of all other voters, and any system that is predicated on such respect is doomed to fail in worse ways than the one we have.

Democracy is hard work. Good things don't happen by just casting votes. There are almost always other interests at work that are likely to conflict with your own. You can't wish this away, you have to do the work.

The one thing I will say that I think is actually blatantly corrupt is when planning meetings are held at times or in locations that make it challenging or impossible for the people most likely to be renting to attend. And this really does happen, far too much. In spite of this, I think that focusing on the attitude of the voters who oppose the interests of renters is a mistake, and that one should focus on how to fix the process.

Are you concerned about physical DVD purchases shifting to subscription-based websites?

Not remotely. As someone who came of age in the 1990s, I can say with complete confidence that it has never, ever, in the whole of human history, been easier for ordinary people to access more film content than it is today. If I had to pay every single time I watched a film, as opposed to opting to "buy" (say) Big Night, I'd still take that in preference to going to a fucking video store.

But either way this has nothing at all to do with housing affordability.

My point is that the rent vs own model is taking over every industry and it's never good long-term. If you had to watch the same movie every day, and you knew that fact in advance, and your only option was pay-per-view, wouldn't that suck?

You're doing my job on this thread for me by trying to set rental up as some kind of second-class residency we should be skeptical of. I agree, that's the subtext of this corporate investment stuff: that renters are bad.

> renters are bad

Uh, no, don't equivocate "forced rent" with "renters". That's bad faith.

No, it isn't. This is literally the subtext behind the policy. You see it all over this thread: the idea that converting an owner-occupied unit to a rental, even though it lowers area median rent, is a bad thing. There's no other interpretation. If reading that makes you uncomfortable, recheck your priors on the policy itself!