Copenhagen has an interesting bit of accidental resistance against that (at least I think it's accidental): the residence-registry system combined with the common coop-ownership structure conspire to make it unattractive to be a foreign non-resident owner of city-center real-estate. The coop-ownership part is that for historical reasons a huge percentage of central apartments are structured as owner-occupied cooperatives, where the residents own the building. And these typically require the owner to declare it as their residence, except for short-ish (up to 2 years) periods where you can live abroad and rent it out. Now whether you actually spend your nights there people won't check, so you could perfectly well buy a place and actually live in NYC or Paris or Tokyo, only flying in occasionally to eat at Noma. But whether you declare it as your residence is easy to check. And that's where the residence-registry system comes in: to declare it as your residence, you have to declare to the municipality that you live at this address as your main abode. By doing so you've of course also declared that you are a Danish resident. Most wealthy non-Danes don't want exposure to Danish income taxes, so they won't declare this residency, and they therefore can't own these flats, which does a bit to insulate local housing prices from global real-estate speculation.
I think this prevention of value capture is one of the under discussed aspects of socialism. I mean, sure, the market isn't able to discover that a mall or office building the locals don't want would be more valuable, but it doesn't seem to destroy cities.
It destroys people's livelihoods. Regular workers in Vancouver have to pay an absurdly high percentage of their income towards their mortgage payments, because of outside investors that jack up prices and provide no economic growth to the city.
We don't seem to be on the same page. My argument (restated somewhat) is that the ownership controls keep the value distributed among the residents, instead of allowing it to be captured by an outsider (or one insider or whatever).
