the second anyone was allowed to use houses as an “investment” to gain wealth we basically guaranteed this. obviously anyone with a lot of money tied up in housees is going to try and make their value go up. once we got multinational billion dollar conglomerates involved it became child’s play for them to make that number go up through infinite methods of varrying complexity carried out by thousands of people working together with billions of dollars behind them.

this problem is inherent to a housing market that people are allowed to speculate on. we just need to make that stop entirely. limit house ownership. no one needs 100 houses. especially not companies. if that results in less rental houses than desired, we need to build more apartments. apartments are different beast, but if the cost of houses are lower then it will be harder to inflate rent if they can afford a house instead. this may result in some people who want to rent a house, but not an apartment, unable to find that. that’s not a big problem. they might just need to rent an apartment instead. certainly it’s much less of a problem then the current state of no one being able to afford housing.

the rich don’t need this vector for growing their wealth. they have enough others and are doing quite alright at it. the world will function just fine without mult billion dollar corporations investing in buying properties for the sole reason that they think they can extract wealth without contributing anything. houses should be for living in, not for extracting wealth.