If rents go down, as they should, you won't have people flooding into new construction unless it's cheap. You're not wrong about it being a housing supply issu

If rents go down, as they should, you won't have people flooding into new construction unless it's cheap. You're not wrong about it being a housing supply issue, but it's not because we don't have enough - it's because this software-facilitated rental price fixing and collusion scheme allowed a few individual property management companies to take over 80% of a market, raising prices so far above valuation that they could warehouse more than 20% of those rentals while still meeting their repayment obligations, artificially pushing people into houses, which private equity had also been investing into. It was the biggest scam of the century. Supply doesn't imply mere existence, otherwise someone could just claim all the gold in the sun was theirs. In this case, the demand was for "affordable housing", and the supply was artificially constrained so that mortgages became more affordable than rent. And who are the customers of mortgages? Largely wealthy pensioners. Blame them, not the feds (for housing, at least... it's not a federal power). Hell, blame the local homeowners that voted to zone out new construction, MFDs, manufactured housing, or anything that might allow any transient or poverty associated person into their schools and communities.