Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
Generative AI is definitely this. You can tell by how personally offended people got instantly. How they freaked out about what this could change, and how despite their strong feelings towards it, they don’t learn to use it.
Also, it’s a paradigm shift - it basically lets you grab a random high schooler and ask them to do any task at 1000x speed. Maybe it’ll be great, maybe it’ll be done all wrong and full of made up facts. It’s a random high schooler, you’re not sure what they know and you can’t trust what they give you, and if you try to blame mistakes in your work on them no one is going to accept that as an excuse - but if you hand them appreciate tasks and properly check their work, you can accomplish tasks drastically faster