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> our collective failure to build enough housing

There has been net transfer of housing ownership to the wealthy through increasing LTV and rentals - interest and rent are two ways of transferring money from the working class to rentier capital. Framing this as simply a supply issue is obscures the dynamics of wealth transfer undergirding the rise in housing scarcity.

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The ultimate reason the wealthy are earning so much in rent is housing supply shortages.

It’s actually a trend since 1980s. Things like deindustrialization and financialization, outsourcing (which collapsed the unions), deregulation (incentivizing externalities primarily felt by the working class - the 2008 collapse, environmental deregulation in Louisiana, etc), inflation (which benefits those with assets and harms those without), tax cuts for the wealthy. The wealth gap grows which means assets like housing shift to asset holders (the wealthy). This in turn allows asset holders to increase cashflows from the working class to the ownership class in a feedback loop.

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