The problem is that it takes obscene amounts of money just to buy one modest house now. All those engineers who came into Apple and Google making $100K starting pay have quickly gone from being able to afford a house of their choice, to that being the minimum income required to buy any house, to now being “low income” for housing purposes. Corporate entities may be buying multiple houses, but I’m not sure a lot of people are (and the corporate entities would have to be fairly large to afford it). The people I know who own multiple properties bought them in the '80s or earlier.
The number of rentals in my lower-income neighborhood seems to have decreased - increasingly it’s owner-occupied houses, with the owners more likely to be renting out rooms/outbuildings/driveways (for campers) to afford the mortgages.
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