At its base, obviously, but there are a whole bunch of complicating factors on top of that which exceed the scope of this discussion (as @doctorow is aware). The phenomenon of banks/hedge funds/private equity firms becoming landlords with increasingly large single-family holdings despite a complete lack of core competency is now one of those factors.
We’re not going to get close to addressing the rampant and nasty avarice in the larger market if slumlords and other bad small-time actors can point to the corner-cutting and gouging done by these Wall Street greedpigs and call them “best practises.” That makes the “securitise ALL the things!” financial services crowd more than just convenient bogeymen for supposed NIMBY liberal hypocrites.
You bring up a lot of interesting points and debatable assumptions (e.g. high-density housing lowering property values), but I’m going to request that @orenwolf split it off into a separate topic.
ETA: I just added a General catch-all thread on urbanism-related issues here:
