I presume a lot of the harm that hedge funds and similar housing investment operations do isn't in the buying and selling of a single house (though there is tha

I presume a lot of the harm that hedge funds and similar housing investment operations do isn't in the buying and selling of a single house (though there is that); but in the buying and selling of houses in whole markets, artificially impacting the price over the long run. And barring a catastrophic event like the housing crisis, housing prices never really go __that__ down. It's like broader inflation. If prices increase by 2% and wages by 1%, after 10 years that's a much broader gulf that is far, far harder to recover from.