This comment nicely attempts to paint high earning (not necessarily wealthy) upper middle class professionals as the scapegoat for an issue they did not create. The reality is, the people who are actually wealthy (think deca millionaires on up through billionaires) and investment firms and corporations are the ones suppressing supply for individual home owners.
The vast vast majority of homes in the US are owned by single family homeowners. And even if that wasn't true it wouldn't make much of a difference. Investment firms don't purchase homes to let them sit there, they purchase homes to rent them out. To whatever degree they're competing against single family homeowners they're just causing a small percentage of housing to shift from owner occupied to rental housing which should actually lower the cost of rentals.
Especially in NYC and SF the cause is very simple: local government has made it illegal to build enough housing to keep pace with demand.
Who's more instrumental in driving housing policy?
Homeowners?
Mortagage generators & holders (that is, creditors)?
Developers?
What of markets with significant concentration of property ownership?
Or of commercial property owners, who can also skew zoning and construction / land-use patterns?
What of interest groups which can create red-tape nightmares even through good intentions by various mandates: setbacks, offsets, minimum clearances, ramp requirements, etc.
Podcats / video channels / blogs such as StrongTowns or Shane Philips (UCLA Lewsi Centre) are all great starting points for how a tangle of minimum requirements and/or prohibitions starts blocking any possible change from traditional urban-sprawl patterns. Most have observed that the highly-desireable dense development of older cities and towns (1870s -- 1950s, typically) simply isn't possible under current laws and regulations.
I'm generally a fan of regulation, but it's got to be good and effective, rather than simply piled on. As with software, code requires occasional refactoring.
My comment isn’t blaming anyone. I didn’t say these folks are the cause of housing prices going up. I’m just trying to understand the psychology of how they’re reacting to that phenomenon.
My suspicion, though, is that ballooning upper middle class salaries, combined with tax rates on the upper middle class lower than the Reagan era, really are a key driver of housing price inflation.
Investment firms, certainly, are a red herring: https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac... (“However, the idea that institutional investors are somehow largely to blame for the current housing market catastrophe is wrong and obscures the real problem. Housing prices have been skyrocketing due to historically low supply, low mortgage rates, and the largest generation in American history entering the market looking for starter homes.”).
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars ... is about a billion dollars.
The upper extremes of wealth are truly mind-boggling.
And for a family with a few million in nonliquid assets --- housing which they require to live, and investments earmarked for retirement --- a million-dollar cushion at the end of working life is not much.
(The fact that many people reach retirement with far less is not only a tragedy but a looming national catastrophe for the US.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...