They can’t buy “all” the housing and make money off that. You can simply defeat them by building more housing.
Same reason car companies sell you cars instead of keeping them for themselves. They naturally depreciate, except we intervene in the market to help boomers’ retirements.
Yeah, because it's good-to-essential for boomers' retirements and they're the median voter. Young people are pretty bad at voting in general (they take any excuse to stop doing it) but unfortunately even besides that, wouldn't be the median voter because of population demographics.
But if you're a young person who doesn't own a home, X corporation owning the homes isn't worse for you than random boomer landlords owning them. Corporate landlords at least don't take things personally when you ask them to do maintenance, and theoretically you can be part owners of them since they're publicly traded.
And corporate landlords didn't defeat the social housing legislation in California just now, boomers did.
Same reason car companies sell you cars instead of keeping them for themselves. They naturally depreciate, except we intervene in the market to help boomers’ retirements.