Please identify this "huge class of people" who own more housing than they can possibly live in.
I don't believe they exist.
If you are referring to corporate owners of apartment buildings, that's one thing. But to say there is a huge class of people who are landlords is just unrealistic. Very few people own more than one home, and even fewer people own more than two.
You don't believe individual landlords exist? They have a whole, entire subreddit, r/Landlord. Voilà, quod erat demonstrandum.
To wit:
> Of the approximately 50 million rental housing units in the United States, around 41% of the rental units are owned by mom and pop landlords, also known as individual investor landlords. That means approximately 20.5 million units are overseen by mom and pop landlords.
Also, from the same site, the average landlord has 3 properties. That means there are more than 6 million individual landlords in the US. I'm not going to nitpick whether that's "huge" or not; the point is proven.
I'm not going to debate whether enough people to fill multiple major cities is a "huge" class or not. Go nitpick someone else if that's your only point.
I don't believe they exist.
If you are referring to corporate owners of apartment buildings, that's one thing. But to say there is a huge class of people who are landlords is just unrealistic. Very few people own more than one home, and even fewer people own more than two.