[winkeltripel]

> It’s all the yuppies from California that are the cause of the problem

Yuppies may be a piece of the puzzle, but the massive surge in institional home ownership is surely the larger factor (the NIMBY obstruction of home construction is surely a factor too). Which means that it is indeed the billionaires fault, since it is their money backing it.

[rayiner]

That's wrong for the reasons mentioned here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-cr...

For one thing, institutional buyers don't buy up enough of the supply to really move the needle in most metro areas. For another, institutional buyers generally turn homes into rentals. They can't really overpay for the housing unless there's lots of yuppies around who can pay the high rents.

Supply shortages are certainly a factor, but they're related to the problem I pointed out. California knowledge worker yuppies are facing supply shortages in their own market, and getting pushed out to cheaper markets like Oregon. That has a particularly negative effect because they have so much more money than the people who are already living in those places.

[AmVess]

Not really. That is a local issue. People leaving the west coast have completely swamped everything from Nevada over.

Starter homes in the nice cities in Idaho went from $85k to $400k in 4+ years. It isn't corporations buying these homes, but rather people fleeing the west coast in massive droves. The same is true for the east coast.

Flights of large numbers of people from both coasts have put pressure inward, too. Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have had large increases of people moving there with attendant pressures on housing prices and availability in those areas.