This was a thought I had the other day. As a city becomes more wealthy and grows and with ever larger companies forming / coming to the city, the city becomes more wealthy. This drives up the cost of housing to the point where while the on paper the average person makes much more money than in a smaller city. Any increase in wealth gets effectively absorbed by landlords and increasing property taxes. Making it more difficult and competitive for the average non tech non finance worker to be able to live there. In the end it seems kind of pointless? A lot of cities could very well be better off being composed of mostly traditional jobs. Baristas, barbers etc rather than these higher paying jobs.
Houseing-as-an-investment isn’t an unalterable fact of the cosmos. In fact, it took a lot of effort to make it happen. The benefit of housing-as-an-investment isn’t just that it makes landlords money, it makes all capitalists money, because it cripples labour’s ability to negotiate a fair wage. It’s no random happenstance things are this way.
You also run into the problem that existing homeowners like it to, and homeowners typically vote more in local elections.