Reddit reviews Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy (Mercatus Center at George Mason University)

Remarkably, Leilani Farha never once mentions the fundamentals of supply and demand in explaining high rents. And she also doesn’t mention low interest rates and property taxes as explanations for speculation. Instead, she blames only institutional buyers, even though in the Bay Area, rents and prices go up regardless of whether the owner is a large landlord or a small landlord. Institutional buyers may cause some problems (if they raise rents more diligently than small landlords, or if they buy enough houses in an area to have monopoly power), but I think it’s far more likely that they play a minor role while rents rise across the board.

The best explanation I have heard of the rise of institutional buyers in America after the financial crisis is Kevin Erdmann’s thesis that policymakers restricted credit, preventing people from becoming homeowners and creaing an opening for investors to buy cheaply (see Economics Detective podcast or his book Shut Out). According to this view, institutional buyers are a symptom, not a cause, of the anti-homeowner policies that caused high rents nationwide (outside of San Francisco, whose problems are entirely self-imposed).

Then there's the #edgy position: there was no bubble.