It used to be that when you moved from point A to point B (for retirement, career-change, whatever), you'd sell your home in A and buy a home in B. Modern comm

It used to be that when you moved from point A to point B (for retirement, career-change, whatever), you'd sell your home in A and buy a home in B. Modern communications + financial tech have converted homes into cash-flowing assets that can be managed at a distance at 1/10th the risk-adjusted cost of 40 years ago. Home-owning people of the age 55+ do not sell homes when they move, they rent them out and use the cash flow as leverage to buy a new home. This has been happening at least since 2008, but is a secular trend. In my opinion, talk of "not enough housing" is a mind trick to get you to ignore the fact that we actually do have adequate sqft/people in desirable areas, but ownership of that square footage is distributed incredibly unequally. The % of homes that are lived-in by owners is approaching all-time lows in most high-COL regions in the U.S.. Those people pass their assets on to their children, who often have no ties to the region, and to whom real estate is purely a financial asset to be squeezed for maximum cash flow to subsidize their unearned lifestyles. We live with the consequences: rent that is increasingly unhinged from reality, and allows for dismal savings rates for our youth. IDK, it's pretty bleak as somebody who wants to be a homeowner in a community that feels like home. I keep suspecting that there'll be a populist anti-landlord policy movement in my urban area (NYC) but outside of maybe 2-3 months during COVID it remains a pretty fringe idea.