flipping houses isn't driving up the cost of housing. The costs go up for other reasons. Flipping is simply trading, aka providing liquidity in exchange for taking volatility risk.
> flipping houses isn't driving up the cost of housing.
Yes it is.
> Flipping is simply trading,
Usually, not: flipping is typically short-timeline buy-improve-sell cycles (that is, it's exploiting market irrationality where certain improvements add more to market clearing price than they cost to add.)
Since there aren't many easy ways of shorting housing (besides rather exotic securities), speculative activity usually distorts prices upwards more so than it does down.
