I think the whole problem is that global market access plus nearly limitless product replication (software, media) has resulted in extreme differences in money availability for different subsets of the population. So we have some people who can buy many properties, and some people who can’t buy a single property. This low level of product sales friction and reach hasn’t really happened before in human history, and I’m not sure classical free market economic theory accounts for it. Back in the day there were only so many boats/shoes/whatever one company could physically sell.
Continuing to grow the population under these conditions doesn’t help either.
If this was true, it would be true of other durable goods like appliances and cars. But people with lots of money know that investing in appliances and cars is pointless because millions of new ones are created constantly. There is no scarcity to benefit from as an asset owner.
Unfortunately, in North America and other Anglosphere countries, we have decided that a scarcity in residential floor space is a public good and our planning rules tend to create such scarcity and enforce it. This allows incumbent homeowners to profit, and they fight for vociferously to protect that profit. Of course, if a company also invests in residential floor space they can also profit, but it’s not clear why we are so concerned with who profits, rather than the fact that we are enforcing the scarcity that produces the profits.
Land is fundamentally scarce, though, unlike other durable goods, so what you say does not follow. And by land, I mean land situated near geographically and/or economically useful areas. To make land like other durable goods, you need to convince people to treat all land equally, which is against human instinct (ie good luck with that).
This doesn’t mean nothing should be done and things are great, but if we mischaracterize a problem we have little hope of solving it.
Land is scarce, but we are making residential floor space far more scarce than it needs to be through restrictive planning laws. Simplifying it a little but, say all 20M people in the greater New York area want to live in Manhattan, which has a population of about 1.7M. That means that people will bid up the price of housing until only the top 1.7/20=8.5% of people can afford it. We can pack manhattan full of sky scrapers and get a lot more people in there.
On affordable housing: there’s no such thing. There are enough millionaires around that will live in a 600sqft apartment if it gives them the lifestyle they want.
In fact, it might blow your mind to know that building luxury accommodation actually lowers house prices as well as affordable housing, because wealthy people have to live somewhere, and if all that’s available is mid-range housing then they’ll live in that. That will push the middle into the lower income housing, pushing the lower income people out of the city.
Additionally, if you only build cheap housing to make it affordable, you end up with a city of cheap housing. If you build a ton of luxury housing, then in a few decades you have a ton of older high quality housing coming into the more affordable range as “luxury” buyers follow the new luxury construction around.
People do not live in land, they live in floorspace.
Of course well located land is special and will never behave like a durable good. But whether there exist 250 sqft of livable residential floorspace or 250,000 sqft of livable floorspace on that land is at the moment, an entirely political decision that we can reverse at any time.
There's basically no evidence that big companies own enough property to matter in the market. Even if every individual unit was owned by a different person, you'd see exactly the same outcomes we do today.
Continuing to grow the population under these conditions doesn’t help either.