"Prison slave labor builds homes"
No landlord wants new housing build. And prison labor is rarely used in residential construction, or really construction at all.
Treating housing as an investment is the real culprit of the current housing affordability crisis. Banks sold people on the idea that a house isn't just place to live but an investment, and people want their investment to appreciate in value, which by nature means it has to get more expensive. There is a natural incentive for current housing owners to restrict supply to inflate value, this is true both of a company like Blackrock that owns thousands of homes, your local residential property kulak who owns two apartment buildings and a laundromat, and your grandpa and grandma who own a 3 bed room and plan on selling it to retire to Daytona Beach.
I wonder how much of the official American GDP is just property value appreciation and not Actually Real (I know most of other aspects of it aren't real I mean just this part of it being not real, also)
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Can't explain the housing crisis without addressing land rent itself as well as financialization. The whole system is bound to housing values always increasing faster than inflation.
I was thinking that you'd think some sections of the bourgeoisie would realize that landlords being free to increase rents constantly and with nearly no restrictions is fucking them over because it's a constant pressure on them to raise their own employees' wages,
but then I realized the bourgeoisie is all invested in mutual funds and shit and on average probably benefits more from rent and property value increases than they lose out on even when they're forced to raise wages
I think on the whole, the goal is for workers to be in a precarious position so they need to work for capitalists under conditions unfavorable to workers. Making housing cost a large part of income helps with that. Basically like you're saying. Looking specifically at money or a certain way capitalists make money doesn't really help much because everything is interconnected.
that requires long term planning though and you'd think most petty bourgeois fucks would be like "Hey, these fuckin' landlords, my workers want more money every fuckin' year cause they say their rent's goin' up" instead of 
ing over the intricacies of class relations
I think on the whole, the goal is for workers to be in a precarious position so they need to work for capitalists under conditions unfavorable to workers. Making housing cost a large part of income helps with that.
Yeah but at a certain point you'll just end up with people moving into shanty towns and dropping out of the economy almost all together, you don't make any rent off of someone living in a tent.
With shit like Costco building a giant affordable housing complex in LA I think some of the haute bourgeois are realizing the petite bourgeois real estate Ponzi scheme isn't sustainable. What people like Blackstone probably wanna actually do is throw up the capitalist version of commie blocks to milk Amazon slaves for their measly wages. But the US had a much bigger and more entrenched petite bourgeois class that's blocking them from that so they can AirBNB their third property.