Politicians and developers love to tell us why housing costs so much: it’s basic supply and demand: not enough homes and too many people. The solution? Build, build, build.
But here’s what they never tell you: it’s not just that there aren’t enough homes; it’s that too many of them are being hoarded by the rich.
We’re not in a housing shortage. We’re in a housing heist.
The rich are stockpiling homes
If there are 50 homes and 50 people who need one each, there shouldn’t be a problem.
But that’s not how this market works. Because a small number of rich people are gobbling up multiple properties, treating homes like trading cards: flipping them, renting them out, and locking out the working class in the process.
It’s not just supply and demand. It’s supply and control.
And who controls it? Investor. Landlords. Developers. Private equity firms. Even politicians, who own rental properties while writing housing policy.
Real estate: the golden goose of the wealthy
For the rich, housing isn’t a human right: it’s a money-making machine.
They know home values will keep increasing, especially if they make it harder for the rest of us to buy in. So they park their money in real estate—buying 10, 20, even 100 properties—then sit back and rake in rent from people who have no choice but to hand over half their paycheque to live in someone else’s investment.
Some even leave homes empty. Not because they’re waiting for tenants, but because they don’t need the rent. The appreciation is profit enough.
They call it “passive income”. We call it parasitic.
Building more houses won’t stop the bleeding
The popular fix is to build more housing. But let’s be real. Whether we build 100 more homes or 100 million homes, it won’t matter if the same people just keep buying up everything that gets built.
All we’re doing is giving the rich more properties to buy, more rent to collect, and more wealth to extract from people who’ll never be able to own a home of their own.
Housing is a class war
This isn’t a crisis—it’s a class conflict. It’s the logical outcome of a system that treats housing as a commodity instead of a basic need. And it’s fuelled by governments that bend over backward for investors while throwing renters a few crumbs and calling it policy.
We don’t need more free-market solutions.
We need public housing. We need rent control. We need limits on how many homes one person or corporation can own. We need to tax vacant homes and multi-property ownership into the ground.
And most of all, we need to stop pretending this is accidental. It’s deliberate. The system is not broken. The system is working exactly as designed—for the people who designed it.
We don’t need to build more houses. We need to take back the ones we already built.
