Housing is an essential good. Profiting off an essential isn't so great suddenly. Yes people need to rent, but many would buy if prices weren't pushed up.
Are they or the hand sanitizer guy assisting the market in any way here? Or are they parasitic?
People are going to be asking a lot about unfettered capitalism after this.
We are going to see many ugly examples in America before this is done.
It's a clear narrative for people who are looking for it who are deeply suspicious of how real world humans interact in alignment with the hypothesis of the traditional mathematical models, but to those who don't share the suspicion, you'd have to spell it out.
I've had to, it's been painful. People have been penalized for thinking in sociological terms about economic culture all throughout school, because such considerations lead to dramatically conflicting answers.
For instance, the more extreme example is private property markets require buy-in from the participants. If a group decides the rules are simply unfair, the game is called off. As a producer of physical assets I've always been keenly aware of theft and sabotage possibilities and prices are kept fair to keep people from doing such things.
The market isn't a separate entity, it's made of humans interacting.
If the market produces bad outcomes for years on end, which it in some narrow cases it does, do we 1) keep with it regardless or 2) do something else.
I think you will find there are quite a few people who will choose #1
It's a contemporary human social construct and a set of rather arbitrarily defined cultural rules. Market fundamentalism is a form of political convenience, not based on any empirical study of reality.
So let people buy up what they want, and let producers make nice profits.
(Alas for housing, lots of American cities do have decided to fix their supply. But that's their choice.)