Personal Finance

The fundamental misunderstanding in this view, IMO, is that greed is not something that landowners are uniquely equipped with. Rice is cheap as hell; are rice producers simply not greedy, and that's why rice is cheap? No, it's because an absolutely massive amount of rice is produced every day, and there's more than enough around to ensure anyone who wants rice can get it. Slightly more abstractly, there is more than enough supply to meet the demand. And like housing, cheap food is an absolute need. But unlike food, housing has been woefully underproduced for decades now in cities, and government policy has done a lot to cause that. It's illegal to build denser than single-family homes in most urban land, and the aim of policy has been more to protect people's investments rather than have housing be affordable - two goals that are fundamentally at odds with each other.

This isn't a coincidence, of course. A lot of federal housing policy goes back to the 50s and 60s, when you had suburbs that literally banned people of color from living in them. Housing policy was explicitly designed to advantage landowners and penalize renters, which is to say, wealthier white families pursuing The American Dream™ and urban Black families whose neighborhoods were systematically redlined and demolished to build highways for white suburbanites.