[mjevans]

Were the market functioning, there would be sufficient additional housing near jobs that investors could not sit on and rent-seek reselling property near those jobs as a source of profit.

The market is not free. It is heavily regulated by what can be built where when. There is a distinct lack of planning and regulation to protect consumers in this market.

[JuniperMesos]

It's true that there are heavy regulations on what housing can be built where, but I don't think this is primarily driven by "investors" (in the sense of people who make their money by being commercial or residential landlords). I think it's primarily driven by homeowner-occupiers - people who own the homes that they themselves live in, who are not professional investors trying to maximize their rental profit, and who care a lot about the ways in which new construction or the ability of more people to live near them might negatively effect their quality of life in the place they live.

[crooked-v]

Here in SF in particular, there are a huge number of people both at the local level and in the city government who just categorically oppose any change of any kind, leading to cases like the historically-designated laundromat [1] where the property owner had to fight the city for years in lawsuits and pay for a $23,000 historical report just to be allowed to demolish that laundromat to build housing [2].

[1]: https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...

[2]: https://sfyimby.com/2022/05/san-franciscos-historic-laundrom...

Of course, the tone of thse first article makes the problem even more obvious, in a black comedy kind of way, with the writer complaining about "luxury prices" of the resulting apartments without considering even for a second why the prices might be so high.

[epistasis]

I agree, except those homeowner-occupiers are still investors, and profiting just the same.

The moral difference between BlackStone and the random NIMBY homeowner is that the homeowner exerts control over the planning process while Private Equity just piggybacks on the homeowner efforts.

[thrance]

The free market consolidated into this on its own. Some actors became too powerful for it to remain "free".