Building won’t fix the problem. A significant proportion of existing dwellings are unoccupied or under-occupied. They are unoccupied because we allow people to

Building won’t fix the problem. A significant proportion of existing dwellings are unoccupied or under-occupied. They are unoccupied because we allow people to speculate on real estate. Much of the real estate is bought by rich foreign investors and multinational corporations. This is a problem in many places of the world and just another aspect of globalization. Given all that, who benefits when new units are built? The developers obviously make money. The local government gets some mad money to play with. But mostly the real estate finance industry and big multinational corporations. Economists have run the numbers, the little guy doesn’t benefit at all from efforts to increase the housing supply. It can’t be increased enough to lower prices, it merely expands the speculative market, adding more wealth to the bottom line of the big winners in the game.