Comment by orangecat
2 days ago
Landlords owning property is not a problem.
Correct.
It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system
To the extent that this is true, it's not why housing is unaffordable. Even if Larry Ellison buys a dozen mansions and keeps them empty most of the time, that's not going to noticeably affect the market for normal people. Houses are expensive because they're scarce; you're far more likely to be outbid by the guy who makes $10k more than you than by an evil billionaire.
You're inspecting entirely the wrong end of this spectrum. The problem isn't that the average person is being outbid by a trillionare on their two bedroom. It's that an corpuscular capital class has so much money that all assets are being wildly inflated, housing included, while simultaneously depriving more than half of the population of anything close to the capital to buy even the cheapest house. There is no 'being outbid' for the average American who makes a hair over 45k. It's a laughable impossibility to even be in the game. The system is broken and the average user of this site is way too comfortable to recognize it but it's a daily reality for almost everyone else, particularly the young generation.