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Housing prices == rents and vice versa. If housing prices collapse so will rents, because they are the same thing. As long as someone or something is able to purchase at an ever increasing price, housing costs will continue to rise.

this is all correct. US homeowners bear more blame than corporate investors for the current environment. my point is that, given that housing prices == rents and people need housing to be able to live and work, anyone who doesn't already own their primary residence (presumably with a locked in 3% interest rate forever) is going to be priced out of being alive before prices could theoretically get high enough to destabilize profitability.

I probably used the wrong term when I said "artificial scarcity". I know more housing exists than people. what's kept artificially scarce is housing that is sold/rented for prices that can be afforded by most people on the wages paid by most jobs. Bourgeois economists describe this as a problem of "overconsumption" as though minimum wage workers have the option of "reducing their consumption" of things like housing or medical care below the minimum required to be able to continue working.

SFH should be for the most part destroyed for climate reasons when Socialism comes

agreed