>>Remember the people walking away from their mortgages and houses during the Great Recession?

Of course. But they were walking away because the values of those properties were substantially less than what they had paid. Add to that that part of what drove the runup to the great Recession was lenders giving out loans to borrowers for whom the payments were beyond what they could afford - and a lot of those borrowers were looking to 'flip' those properties, so it was absolutely rational for them to walk away.

That said, we are seeing those same lenders buying up homes and renting them to people who otherwise would have bought them. There’s a ‘vicious cycle’ here, corporate buyers with cash resources can snap up properties as they come up, which pushes up real estate prices, forcing those otherwise-buyers to rent, raising rents — so the buyers are faced with rising prices if they buy, and lowering resources as they pay rent. IMO, we should have bailed out the borrowers (even the flippers) instead of the lenders — who would go on to award themselves huge bonuses.