Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor.

That's quite an extreme political take.

A more humble basic economic theory question would be:

If you ban large institutional investors from buying homes, and then you ban small institutional investors from buying homes. And only owners directly can buy homes, no renting. Would that be good? Sure homes would be cheap, but very shortly after that the supply of new housing would drop dramatically, as there's no one to finance building homes, maybe the ultra rich will just invest in their own mansions or yachts?

Just very basic economics is the discussion here, not tariffs and china politics, but just a variant of the highschool/red-scare question of, "will anti-wealth laws have a positive effect on the economy"? in the past it was determined that no, and that you were a communist for suggesting it, but maybe there's a nuanced take like making a difference between some type of "institutional" investors and other types of investors?