Yeah, that’s the proximal cause. A small cartel gains control of the limited supply, allowing them to set higher prices.

This happens all the time. The thing is, free markets have a solution for that. It’s a negative feedback loop that goes like:

1. Party A buys up all the Xes, then raises their price by 100%
2. Parties B, C, and D, who weren’t interested in making and selling Xes before, suddenly see a profit in it now that the prices are higher
3. Instead of putting their resources into producing Y, they switch to producing X, chasing that profit
4. With more parties entering that market, supply increases
5. This nullifies A’s ability to control the supply

The problem I’m talking about in our housing market is that step 3 is blocked. Despite other companies or individuals wanting to get in on this gravy train, by building their own housing to start producing profit, they can’t because there are laws prohibiting them from doing so.

Now, it’s not impossible to do new construction. But it is far more expensive than it naturally would be.

Like, let’s say a certain area is highly sought after. Let’s say there’s 1000 people who’d like to live there. But there are only 100 units (houses, apartments). Some billionaire buys all 100 units, and now controls the supply of housing. For each apartment they have ten candidates willing to outbid one another. They get to crank those prices up like mad.

The solution in a free market would be that a different billionaire (or maybe a lowly millionaire, or a coop composed of twenty fifty-thousandaires), or a big corporation, or whoever, decides they’re gonna build 500 more apartments.

Now you’ve got 600 apartments for those 1000 who want to live there, and you don’t have quite the same power to ask ridiculously high prices.

But the way our housing market works, it’s either extremely costly (like you need an environmental impact statement and you don’t know how it will turn out and if it turns out against your favor you can’t proceed, losing everyone you’ve invested so far), or zoning says “you can’t do more than ten dwellings per block here” and instead of 500 new units you can only build 50, or it’s just straight-up impossible to get permission to build.

That’s what I mean by an artificially-constrained supply.

The real ideal is for those 1000 people who want to live there, you’ve got 1100 housing units, and now the landlords are in competition with one another to attract tenants. 100 units are vacant and that is a source of negotiating power for the tenants.

But because we’re so stuck seeing that would-be investment — that would expand the supply — in terms of rich people getting richer, (and for many other reasons) we block that new construction and keep supply limited, which is to the benefit of the people who control that supply, and to the detriment to both (a) the people who would like to come in as alternate suppliers, and (b) to the people who need to use that supply.

I mean, even if we don’t want to think about incentives or negotiation, if we only want to focus on physical events in the world you can see, if there’s a housing problem the solution is to build more housing, and laws against building more housing are a problem.