Wall Street Is Killing The Housing Market

Investment giants are buying up homes and pricing real people out of the market. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

By Garrett Brand, OtherWords

There are few things more important than our homes. Alongside providing our shelter, homes are where we make memories with friends and family — where bonds are formed and strengthened.

Unfortunately, the right to a home in America is under threat. Rents have skyrocketed, homelessness is rising, and home ownership is increasingly unattainable for most Americans.

There are multiple causes, but one culprit stands out: classic Wall Street greed. Massive private equity corporations and hedge funds are buying up homes by the thousands — houses, apartment buildings, and mobile home parks alike — and then jacking up rents.

This trend accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, when investment firms snatched up homes in foreclosure and began renting them to the growing number of people locked out of ownership.

The result? An epidemic of corporate slumlords.

According to a recent study, nearly a fifth of all homes sold in the first quarter of 2024 were purchased by investment firms — including over a quarter of low-priced homes that might have been affordable to working people.

With their vast wealth, these companies are able to easily outbid real people, often paying a premium to buy properties before they even hit the market. This reduces supply — and encourages developers to sell at higher prices that only Wall Street can afford. Once a firm owns a property, they rent it out at an inflated, algorithm-fixed price, further driving up costs for working people.

Take Blackstone. The trillion dollar private equity giant owns over 300,000 U.S. residential units, making it the largest corporate landlord in the world. The company has hiked rents in its properties by as much as 64 percent over just two years. While Blackstone’s tenants often can’t make rent, CEO Stephen Schwarzman now enjoys a net worth north of $50 billion.

I’ve seen the impacts of Wall Street’s assault on our homes firsthand.

According to a Georgia State study, my hometown of Atlanta has the highest concentration of Wall Street-owned single family homes in the country. In the past 15 years, mega-corporations have purchased over 70,000 homes in Atlanta, accounting for over 30 percent of all single family rental properties in the city. In some districts, as much as 99.6 percent of the market is owned by corporate investors!

As a result, longtime residents have been pushed out, housing costs have soared, and inequality has multiplied. For me and many of my friends, the idea of owning a home in the city we grew up in feels less realistic every day — an unfortunate truth across countless towns and cities in America.

As a fundamental need, housing should be a right for all people and families — not an investment commodity for the ultra-rich. In the short term, rent control and increased tenant protections could ease people’s pain in this corporate-controlled housing market.

In the longer term, there’s an alternative that would allow us all to have the homes we deserve: social housing.

Social housing refers to housing developed by non-corporate entities like non-profits or local, state, or federal governments. Social housing is permanently and truly affordable, controlled democratically by its community, and never resold for profit. There are a variety of models, but they all share one key component: they exist outside the for-profit housing market.

Cities and states can take the lead in developing their own social housing, like what’s happening in Seattle after a citizen-driven referendum. There, a tax on rich corporations will fund a city-owned social housing developer — a great model for cities across the country.

Housing should be a source of safety and joy for everyone — not yet another source of profit for the ultra wealthy. By rejecting corporate home ownership and supporting social housing, we can build a world where that’s the case.