US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

The reason institutional investors are blamed is that they usually have significant holdings elsewhere, and demonstrably will just wait out a market, taking loses they write off against their other businesses in the meantime, rather than actually participating in it. That ability to wait out the market on a finite resource rather than participating is usually otherwise only seen during antitrust market activities. The fact that many cities are considering adding significant vacancy taxes on properties, citing specifically this behavior as a driving factor, is pretty damning.

Additionally, it's not necessary for these institutional investors that are ignoring the market pressures to own a majority, or even that large of a share. Any portion they own and ignore the market for is effectively just removed from the market entirely and reduces the remaining pool of what's available. And the second-order effect is an overall damping of market responsiveness since they are simply refusing to respond to the demand half of supply and demand. I don't have the models to run the math myself, but it should theoretically be possible to calculate how much their involvement without participation impacts the prices as a relation to market share, and I'll bet it's a nonlinear result with a steep curve at even low volumes.

When enough institutional investors are all doing that same thing, the market suppply becomes restricted, especially in focused regional areas. It ends up indistinguishable from collusionary antitrust, though there's no actual communicated collusion so it's not technically illegal. In a normal situation like that, all it takes is a single participant to cave and drops prices to take advantage of the demand. But in this case the institutional investors can keep taking the losses indefinitely so no one ever feels the need or benefit to "break" first, and they can maintain it forever.

You do realise you don't own all of America, right?

Nobody actually forced you to take 30 million immigrants into your home, because your home stops at your property boundaries.

I've seen this nonsensical argument in my home country, the UK, too. If you want to claim *all of [the USA]* as your country because you're a citizen of that country, then *any other [USA] citizen welcoming migrants into [the USA] is already taking all these "strangers" into their own home*.

(Works just as well if you substitute any other nation for [the USA], everywhere has people who think about their nation the way you think about yours).

> …and if your infantile logic has any value, why don’t we just cram every single human on earth into the USA, at your expense of course, right?

You should talk to more non-Americans. People like me, for example. I don't want to live in the USA. So I don't.

I mean, we'd physically fit quite easily, you've got most of a continent there, every time people like me suggest things you can do to make your nation better the collective response keeps being "oh but the population density is so low we couldn't possibly make public transport or cheap broadband work". We keep suggesting stuff like this because a lot of us just don't look up to the politics or the infrastructure you've got, certainly not any more, although the reasons are various and our interests are a dis-aligned from each others' as much as from yours.

> freeloading foreign nationals

The foreign nationals in the USA come in three broad groups:

1. People like Elon Musk, who took billions of taxpayers' dollars for self enrichment but are somehow really popular (today only with the establishment, but used to be more broadly) despite this.

2. People who do a huge amount of work in the construction and food industry, without whom the USA would collapse in about 6 months, who get all the hate because they're poor and undocumented (AKA "illegal") immigrants.

I'd like to draw your attention to the word "construction" in there specifically, as it's the other half of "supply and demand".

3. People in the middle with the boring work visas doing middle of the road work. By having in-demand skills, they command above-average salaries, but by commanding an above-average salary they drive up rent and house prices, with that money going to landlords etc.

Of these, only group 1 is "freeloading".

> squatter from your home is in fact justified

A squatter is a person who settles in or occupies a property without legal permission or claim to the property. Squatters live on land or in buildings where they have no title, lease, or right.

Ironically, this is how the USA got Texas from Mexico.

You claim 30 million. I don't know where that number comes from, as it doesn't seem to correspond to either documented or undocumented groups. Too big for estimates of undocumented (~10-12 million estimated) too small for documented immigrants (~40 million).

But it's false in any case, that number does not consist of squatters.

If you do have a lot of capital ($100M+), you don't, because you can spend that money to build or buy an apartment complex that gives you something like 5x as many tenants per dollar spent. And is cheaper to maintain in the long haul.