>The younger generations are fucked because of profit incentives, and now the cartel ass algorithms are squeezing every paycheck because rent is being decided by soulless code. Yeah it costs money to make houses no shit.

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profit incentives are what build homes in the first place --nobody builds a home to loose money. think about why profits are rising, but supply is not.

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consider the inputs to housing: its not like the drywall, nail, lumber and concrete manufacturers are sharing these windfall profits. so the physical inputs to housing are more or less unchanged real prices. its a regulatory bottleneck. --- my neighborhood has seen home prices 2x in the last 5 years, yet the city hasn't legalized one additional home here. in fact, the quantity of homes in my neighborhood hasn't changed in 80 years. 80 years, and not one additional home. thats crazy

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>Zillow or BlackRock can buy 1,000 houses, and that’s just a drop in the bucket to them. They can swallow up an entire community like it’s nothing, and then what? they effectively control the regional markets?

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it actually doesn't change anything. since those homes already commanded monopoly level profits, zillow owning them doesn't confer additional rents. because if they did, the landlords would already be charging those prices.

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zillow faces the same rental market that the landlords do, so demand isn't really changing. ie -- the people zillow rents to and the people the landlords rent are the same, so they are both cost constrained in the same way.

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>I feel like this is grade school, literal monopoly board game logic. We’re literally the most prosperous nation on the planet and the majority of people are just fucked.

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Its not really wrong. NIMBY's basically control the city council and entrenched landlords/home owners are able to extract massive rents simply because they have their thumb on the supply. They know that if they legalize housing more broadly, prices will fall. So they purposely keep supply so constrained....and often limited to expensive large-scale development.... they purposely lag supply to maintain their extra-normal profits.

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Its basically regulatory capture by homeowners against renters.