This trend is starting to reverse. Most suburban areas in the US are being assaulted by investment firms.
And while we're at it, let's implement a Georgist land value tax, so that gains in the value of the land itself, which nobody affects directly in a vacuum, does not inure to the landowner, be it BlackRock, The Rock, or your average Joe.
But a third of all Americans own homes[0], and I guess by now everyone is used to having the full faith and credit of the United States government be a tailwind to their own labor-free enrichment.
Tenants always pay for the land value. If a new train station opens up and the costs of an apartment have not changed, you better believe the landlord will raise prices given the raised demand from the new value associated from the train station. The monthly payment that a tenant pays has nothing to do with costs.
The effect whereby taxes are passed on happen because when you tax something you get less of it, and with less of it it moves along the supply and demand curve and so prices rise. Since the supply of land is fixed, this does not happen with land taxes.
The question then becomes do you pay the value to the landlord, or do you pay it to the community?
This is the precise point, and thank you for elucidating it. With an LVT, the value of a highly-desirable piece of land inures to the community as a whole, and not whoever holds the title to that land. If the landowner wishes to come out ahead of this taxation, they are forced to improve it, whether in the form of tilling the soil, mining the minerals, or (most relevantly to our discussion) building a house or apartments on it.
As a side effect, it prevents the absurdities you see in many North American cities where there's a huge surface parking lot smack dab in the middle of a dense downtown area.
More importantly for a Georgist LVT scheme vs. regular property taxes is that with the former, you're only taxed on the unimproved value of the land, vs. the value of the lot plus the improvement (i.e. housing) on it. It's arguably the most economically efficient as well as the most socially just form of taxation, as that which is taxed is the thing that nobody created or made valuable.
2) buy houses
3) lobby govt for more immigrants saying "diversity is our strength"
4) Hire PR firms to say "diversity is our strength"
5) Immigrants need to live somewhere so housing prices go up because of demand
6) Profit
If you use Google there is plenty of research disproving you from Canadian sources that pander to both Liberal and Conservative readership.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, like the saying goes "the road to ruin is paved in good intentions".
The “missing middle” is what we should be building.