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Again. Housing should not be an investment full stop.

Every single landlord is stopping somone from owning a home. If people need to rent we can offer apartments.

This isn't rocket science.

I see now that you are making the distinction between single-family homes, which are primarily owner-occupied, and multifamily homes, which are primarily rental, and you are saying that the shift of some single-family homes to rental is a bad thing. First, there’s nothing wrong with a household buying a condo or renting a single-family house, so I don’t see why one should be banned.

But to explain the increasing share of rental housing, the book Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up explains that the problem is not investors overinvesting in houses, but residents who are locked out of the mortgage market due to post-Great Financial Crisis regulations that killed the homebuilding industry across the country. If residents had the same access to credit that they did before the GFC, then they would be able to outcompete investors. There’s no point in suppressing rental investment just because we mistakenly suppressed mortgages.

But whether you are looking to buy or looking to rent, more supply helps, so that is the underlying problem to address.

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