>the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment

People pay money for all kinds of things that aren't investments. Ever eat at a restaurant? Ever buy a car?

I agree with parent: houses should be more like cars and less like stocks. Prices should be lower, there should be less debt-financing, and we should end the expectation that home prices will go up endlessly forever.

I mean the fancy thing about living in a liberal democracy is that they do get to decide this in a limited sense. They get to have an opinion, advocate for it, and if they can convince people through the political process they do get to determine the outcome!

To actually advocate for their position: the US housing market isn't the consequence of natural market forces; it is the consequence of government intervention in the market to force a specific outcome. Housing prices have been rising as a percentage of average income for a long time. That cannot continue forever, so it won't, there will be a breaking point eventually (arguably we're just about at that point which is why it's become a political hot topic). We can choose policies to gracefully reduce prices over time or we can just let prices climb and the housing situation become ever more acute as it becomes increasingly difficult to people to own homes.

Housing prices going down will undoubtedly disadvantage people who made homes their primary investment vehicle. Though those people also just an investment path was dependent on the government creating artificial scarcity combined with interference in the loan market to keep the ship afloat. It will undoubtedly hurt. But it also hurts right now for individuals who did not choose the current set of regulations and suffer under the fruit such regulations have born (sky high prices, a lack of starter homes, etc.) The current housing situation is one without easy answers. It is a crises of our own making, but now that we're in it we will have to rip off the band-aid or just let the wound fester till it's something even worse.

You don't get to decide it either. It's decided via politics. But you started the thread by being annoyed with people doing politics. You need to pick a lane.

When you buy a property you buy a property, not a view. Check the deed for the property you bought; the view won’t be listed on the legal docs. The view is an externality. If you are lucky enough to have a view across someone else’s property, lucky you. Having had a free benefit does not mean that other people’s right to their own property should be restricted to maintain access to a positive externality for you. In other words, if someone else can build something that blocks your view, it wasn’t your view, you were just lucky enough to be able to have access to someone else’s view for a while.

If you want to maintain the view, you should pay the cost of that, whether that is buying the property that the view crosses, or compensating that other property owner for the loss of use of their property.

Using regulatory means to shortcut other peoples property rights is - in my opinion - horseshit. It also sets a dangerous precedent to regulate out the ability to change. It’s all fun and games until someone out maneuvers you at a city council meeting and now you can’t build a carport without hiring a lawyer and 6 months of hearings (real story, had to do this because our house was old enough to be considered historic. For context the carport was being put in an alley next to a dumpster and a cinder block apartment building. No historic element was involved)