Nowhere in the US does it at the scale to make a serious long-term dent in prices.

Nobody with enough money and exposure to large amounts of real-estate wants to kill the golden goose. Look at the post-Covid-migration build stories. Rents start to soften and development dramatically slows.

Like Austin - https://austinmonitor.com/stories/2024/08/as-construction-sl...

Or Denver - https://www.denverpost.com/2025/07/24/apartments-housing-rea...

You would need continued serious government investment to make sure focus continues to be on total units and consumer price instead of investor ROI.

Because even adding four fancy town-houses or condos helps if what used to be there was single-family or duplex. But it doesn't help NEARLY as much as adding 100 units by converting an old shopping center or 30-unit apartment. But there are strong incentives against developers doing "too much" of the latter if they know they can make the same ROI by selling fewer, nicer units.

Individual residential property owners take a lot of blame here but they're not even benefiting THAT much - every crazy price increase is putting any upgrade to their own situation further out of reach. And fighting low-density residential NIMBY-ism is a slow process if you still only can buy one lot as a time as it becomes available. So focus on underutilized commercial and industrial near major hubs or transit corridors where most of what you're displacing is ugly parking lots and empty storefronts that contribute to crime as well.

It was a series of studies earlier this year that made media rounds; searching for “Wall street housing 25%” returns a myriad of results from mainstream sources citing a number of different studies and papers:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/08/investors-buying-25-us-homes-...

I’m on mobile and can’t dig into total ownership figures at the moment, but I do know that in the sunbelt states property acquisition by investment firms has been a real issue. Even slumlords are getting bought out at top dollar, and affordable housing is increasingly just a trailer rented on land owned by - you guessed it - PE or REITs at consistently inflating rents.

> people who buy those are leaving their old houses

I do not believe this is accurate, at least not in the last ~10 years or so. The houses are purchased by hedge funds and other smaller investors.

> It's not new affordable housing, but the people moving in to the new expensive houses are leaving their old houses, and the people who buy those are leaving their old houses, so eventually the price drops happen on the older, smaller homes at the bottom end of the market.

I keep seeing this, but if the housing being vacated is in a different, less-desirable market, it's a bit tree-falling-in-the-woods for locals.

If a $450,000 house in a Chicago suburb is freed up by its owners moving to a $700,000 condo in Seattle, the people who can't afford a house in Seattle don't see the benefit of the condo building and aren't going to buy the house in Chicago, and the people who can't afford a house in Chicago don't recognize the Seattle development as the cause of the house hitting the market.

Yup, and the kneejerk response from economists is that the housing cycle suggests that new luxury stock would be inhabited by buyers who own existing stock, and what they sell would be more affordable to those buyers, and what those buyers sell would become more affordable to the next rung down, etc.

Except that’s not the reality. The reality is that a large chunk of the market (as much as 25% in some areas) is speculative in the form of PE-owned inventory and rentals. It’s not used as shelter, it’s used as a vehicle of growing capital. When that’s pointed out, suddenly economists blame the very same people who can’t get onto the “property ladder” for failing to “compete in the free market”.

In a vacuum, their original idea makes sense. In reality, it’s heavily exploited for the gains of those already on the ladder at the ongoing expense of those they actively prohibit from joining them. It’s societal exploitation leveraging the singular most basic human need after food and clean water: shelter.

One thing few people take into account is that demand housing is much, much more elastic than people realize - per capita people are consuming far more square footage than they used to. Houses that were built to be house multiple generations under one roof now only hold one generation. Usually elderly empty nesters. In our area we also see people buying up lots of older duplexes or triplexes and converting them into single-family homes.

So even areas where population is stable, and housing supply increases, it can result in very few tangible gains at the margin.

Starlink itself is an ISP. so you're going to circumvent an ISP - with an ISP?

The web is ripe for disruption.

Decades of historical baggage, technical cruft, and now a new set of encumbrances in the form of aggressive state surveillance under the moniker of "regulation;" it's strange to me that there are no movements in this space to replace an aging and decrepit web that has grown increasingly user hostile.