One example of how the regulation isn’t really working as well as intended is in average renting prices. Which despite there being 10.000 empty apartments in my city isn’t coming down. (10.000 is a lot in Denmark). The sister company of my place of work is a landlord, and part of the reason they don’t lower rental prices is because it’s hard to increase it later. So for a period of years it’s better for them to “bet” on the market changing enough to solve our empty apartment challenge. It looked bleak for a couple of years, but thanks to things turning around the strategy has worked out.
You can’t protect the rental market from this sort of thing unless you start limiting how many houses private equity are allowed to build and own. Which isn’t something cities are really interested in currently. It used to be such that co-ownership rental-groups or whatever you call “beboerforeninger” in English, if there is even an English term for it. But they are basically non-profit landlords which are owned collectively by every renter. Anyway it used to be that these organisations could compete with private landlords because private landlords were smaller. They have no chance of competing with the kind of deals we can cut a city now, or the speed at which we can buyout and replace old buildings. Simply because we, and companies like us, represent a literal fuckton of money. This is made worse by international investors, but it’s not exclusively caused by them. Our sister company has 0 foreign capital, and we’re still capable of competing with international capital on an equal level. Leaving almost no room for the non-profit organisations and absolutely no room for small investors on any serious level.
I don’t know about the US, but here in Denmark there is almost zero chance of it changing. There just won’t be enough political interest in it. In fact there is a huge political interest against it. Both from the cities themselves, but also for basically every home owner in our country. Because our high rental prices keep the housing market high as well, as people give up a lot sooner than we do. As seen with how the housing market is now again increasing here in Denmark after a period of almost dying. It’s not just because no cheap rentals became available, but it’s part of it.