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If investment companies that already own tens of thousands of homes buy them and keep increasing the rent, the problem has not been solved.


Investment companies own only about 2% of the housing market, and most of these are rented out. Investment companies aren't really the cause of housing prices remaining high - in moderate- and high-demand areas, we simply aren't building enough to keep up with demand.


Investing in housing only makes sense when supply is limited. The way to stop investors from hoarding housing is to make housing a bad investment by building a lot of it so cornering the market is impossible.


Except they cannot increase rents when there is enough supply for a market to actually work.


The market will remain irrational longer than…

Of course they can when they own them all. See De Beers diamonds. Buy them all, keep the price artificially high.


Diamond prices are famously crashing now due to artificial lab made diamonds (increased supply)


The De Beers cartel was able to avoid anti trust scrutiny because the best reserves are outside (Africa/Canada/Russia) of the most lucrative markets (US/Europe/Asia).

Corporations control only a small faction of housing supply.


They can only do that (own them all) with government assistance. See De Beers diamonds, who leveraged the legal system to create a monopoly.

The solution is to build more housing and get the government out of the picture.


Insanely stupid restrictions on residential construction make it easier.


land value tax would fix this


No, build more housing.


That's not a different choice. LVT makes it more expensive to hold land that's less productive than it could be, the result of which is that development is encouraged.


No, building more housing. Read the article.


You literally didn't read the article.

Build more housing.


I do really enjoy all the arguments coming up in this post that are pretty easily defeated by “build more housing”. No one has been able to come up with a compelling argument about why this doesn’t work.




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