Securing housing doesn’t mean competing just with other people who want to use it to live in. It means competing with people and corporations who want to use it to make money. More than 68 percent of the world’s wealth is held in real estate, and 79 percent of that is in residential housing. In 2020, the total residential real estate value in the US—the second-largest share in the world—amounted to $258.5 trillion: that’s more valuable than all global equities and debt securities combined, more than twenty times more valuable than all the gold ever mined.59 To speak in the language of supply and demand, the price of housing is not determined just by local demand for housing, but by the global search for opportunities to seek profit.60 The housing market doesn’t produce homes, it produces opportunities for investment.