Corporate food production should not be allowed. Free markets are not fair enough to make sure everyone is properly fed, and once enough of it is owned they will price gouge. There are plenty of other places for companies to make money.
The thing that's really worrying is this - real estate is inherently unproductive. Investment capital ought to be steered into areas that yield technological progress, not into the equivalent of gold stored inside a mattress.
That's the real reason that policy that keeps housing affordable is needed. It's not only good social policy but also good technological policy.
The issue I forsee is deep pockets cornering specific markets and dictating the price to people who haven't got as much flexibility. Corporate scale slum lords, in other words. It is already happening with private real estate investors.
Anyone can ship in and sell potatoes, I can even buy them online. The market forces work because I have so much flexibility. Not everyone can move, nor should they have to move just because money moves in. People live in communities not investment potfolios.
But within a given city you have a choice of hundreds, or even thousands of landlords? Any specific building might only be owned by one landlord, but you don't exactly have to move to the other side of a city to get away from that landlord.
Columbus has recently found itself to be the new largest city and center of economic growth in the state, and changed rapidly and radically over the past couple of decades. As a result, it's nowhere near as seasoned and well-established as many other major metros, and the massive influx of new monied interests into the area quickly cornered their respective markets.
Moving back to the Cleveland area, which was quite the boom town a century ago but has infamously been in near-perpetual decline ever since (with many residents, like I had, migrating to Columbus), has much healthier competition in the rental market.
Perhaps in a few decades as new assets are built and today's ones slosh around the economy, Columbus will have healthier, more diverse competition and see your point ring true. It's certainly healthy in other sectors—one of my favorite things about living there was the great wealth of hole-in-the-wall bodegas, ethnic grocers, restaurants, and food trucks around me that meant even on my last dime I could always try new cuisines—but at least for those of us for whom even a high five-figure income is a distant dream, options are very limited.
[1] https://perc.tamu.edu/PERC-Blog/PERC-Blog/U-S-Farm-Subsidies...