Answer: Will banning large institutional investors from buying single-family homes help solve the affordability crisis in the US housing market?

For context, this is a question I answered on Quora

Large institutional investor ownership of single family homes is but a drop in the bucket. They own less than 1% of single family houses. Not only will banning their acquisition of single family houses have almost no effect on the national level, the average single family house is 2,400 square feet and has a median cost in excess of $400,000. People who are rent burdened and struggling to find affordable housing are not in a financial position to buy single family houses. This proposal is not only completely useless it’s also a complete misdirection.

All of these proposals:

Are demand side subsidies. The housing shortage is a supply side problem. We are not only not building enough housing in general, but we are not building enough starter homes, including the missing middle (town-homes, row houses, apartments) that low income people can afford. Subsidizing demand when there is bottleneck in supply always has the same outcome and it’s never a more affordable end product.