Also, what I’m saying isn’t a “theory”, it’s an observation of data. You keep trying to rationalize it away, but whatever way you slice it you can’t get rid of the 16 million vacant houses that are not in use, while we have half a million homeless people and rising costs housing costs.

I am not trying to “rationalize it away”. This is a phenomenon that exists, a large stock of unused real estate. The question here is why it exists.

Monopolies in certain areas. Your response? “They can move”

You argued that there are localized monopolies. This is a contentious point already, so I pointed out a mitigating factor, that people (not all people, sure) have the option to move if such a monopoly became unbearable. You seem to want to frame this like I’m just dismissively telling people to move if housing is too expensive or whatever, but the point of bringing this up is to demonstrate one item in the long list of things that prevent your theoretical phenomena of “big players hoarding real estate to raise prices across the market” from occurring in the real world. And I really don’t appreciate trying to be depicted like I’m spouting alt-right viewpoints here, which I’m absolutely not.

Holding onto vacant rent controlled apartments to force people into more expensive units. Your response? “It wastes money” (untrue, in this situation it makes more money, which is why it happens in the real world).

This is circular reasoning. You’re citing your theoretical “hoarding real estate to raise prices” phenomena as proof that “hoarding real estate to raise prices” occurs.

There are 16 million vacant housing units while we have half a million homeless people. Your response? Nothing, I guess those people’s interests aren’t as important as preserving the right for housing scalpers to hoard unused property.

And right back to trying to smear me as “not caring about the homeless”.

Again, the point here is to figure out why this phenomena of a big surplus of vacant property exists. Doing a thorough root cause analysis is how you actually solve the problem. Latching onto popular pseudoscientific talking points about the problem and ignoring any attempts to investigate the problem is how you guarantee the problem continues. And trying to smear people who want to figure out the nature of the problem is absolutely ass backwards.

Gonna go ahead and disengage at this point, happy to actually discuss this if you want to do it intelligently and not adversarially.