Anecdata here but I'm a landlord in an area with low 10s of thousands of residents and low 100s of rental units. I absolutely do not care about new housing being built, other than encouraging it because economic development of the town is good for everyone.

My neighbors, the homeowners who don't rent, are typically on the other side. And it's not unreasonable to want to keep SFH neighborhoods predominantly SFH.

My main risks have have absolutely nothing to do with more housing. It's more physical risk to the property and depreciation.

Are you perhaps too privileged to have seen situations where owning land is a liability?

As we speak, close to a billion people are in the middle of ongoing wars. There are entire countries where land is worthless. Ukraine has several hundred square kilometers of land with a thick covering of fiber optic cables from drones.

We need to draw a box around the property owner, the previous owner, the owner before that, etc, because the current property owner does take price risk, but only by virtue of the payment they made to the previous property owner and so on. The intra-chain P&L distribution is not a legitimizing factor if you believe the entire ownership structure is an exercise in rent seeking (in the economic sense -- as you point out, development and management are not economic rent and I'd add abatement to that list).

Equivalently, we can just pretend that there has only ever been one owner.

The risk inherent in the ownership of land is having too much of your wealth concentrated in it, and having used leverage to purchase the land. Both are true for a large fraction of landlords in the world.

A real estate bubble bursting or anything that makes your area unappealing to live in would suddenly be really problematic and in the case of leverage get you negative equity.

Of course, that's how risk works.

Any high risk high reward strategy gets you in charge of creating the risk to chase a higher reward.

The math is fairly similar between spending 10$ to buy a call option and a 1 million down payment to buy a 10 million property with 15 apartments to rent out.

Definitely

This is why strong regulation is important.