Housing Truths - the Hard Facts

“You have created a situation where ordinary Americans aren’t bidding against other families, they’re bidding against the billionaires of America for these houses. And it’s driving up rents and it’s driving up home prices.” – U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (Oregon)*

The 4-part image shown above features the covers  of four remarkable recent studies on the hijacking of housing by greedy corporations and individuals seeking to profit from it. Canada, Australia, and the U.S. are all being hit hard. We posted earlier a blog on Crisis Capitalism and Housing. Read it HERE. Our new post looks at  how this crisis was fostered and promoted in large partwith an aim to push local communities such as ours to remove core zoning and other guardrails that have helped to keep our historic more naturally affordable housing in place.

We urge you to read all four of studies described here. 

The three books featured here are available at local Cambridge area bookstores - and we encourage people to shop locally! One can also find them at local libraries and at the links below from Amazon. 

Urban Planner, Patrick M. Condon's Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality and Urban Crisis is available  HERE

Economist Cameroon K. Murray's The Great Housing Hijack  is  available on Amazon: HERE

Housing Expert, Carolyn Whitzman's Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis is  available on Amazon HERE

The important 2024 report: "Billionaire Blowback on Housing: How Concentrated Wealth Disrupts Housing Markets and Worsen the Housing Affordability Crisis" by Amee Chew, Chuck Collins, and Omar Ocampo  is available for download as a PDF HERE

The Executive Summary of "Billionaire Blowback on Housing" Report reads as follows :

• Predatory billionaire investors have bought up an unprecedented share of single-family homes, apartment buildings, and mobile home parks to extract more rents from already economically squeezed residents.
• For instance, Blackstone is the largest corporate landlord in the world, with over 300,000 residential units across the United States. Blackstone owns 149,000 multi-family apartment units, 63,000 single-family homes, 70 mobile home parks with 13,000 lots, and 144,300 beds of student housing in 205 properties. Blackstone also recently acquired 95,000 units of subsidized housing.
• Corporate landlords and their billionaire investors are targeting communities of color in particular with rent increases and high rates of eviction. Their actions exacerbate race, gender, and economic inequality, as displacement harms the most economically vulnerable people in our communities.
• In cities and communities across the country, homelessness is growing — but vacant homes actually outnumber unhoused people several times over.
• Nationwide there are 16 million vacant homes — that’s 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person.
• Wealthy investors are buying up properties but holding them vacant to profit from real estate appreciation. They make money not from rents, but from treating real estate as a luxury asset to park their wealth in.
• Billionaire investors are entering the short-term rental industry, removing a substantial portion of rental housing from the market.
• For instance, in one Dallas council district, returning entire home short-term rentals to the housing market would make 62 percent more rental units available.
• Billionaire investors are helping skew new development towards being increasingly high-end.
• Although housing production has actually exceeded our nation’s growth in households, new construction is increasingly unaffordable to low-income households.
• Nationally, we have sufficient and even an excess of housing for the wealthy, alongside not enough housing priced at rates affordable to low-income households in need
• Billionaire-owned private equity firms have entered the government-subsidized affordable housing sector.
• They receive tax breaks and public benefits to invest in affordable housing and exploit programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. But too often, they are not providing working-class families with dignified and truly affordable homes.
• Instead, they exploit their role as investors to profit from rent increases, eviction, and neglect, as well as from raising rents to market rate when affordability restrictions expire.
• Corporate landlords and billionaires are profiting from low-income tenants and mobile home residents by increasing rents while neglecting maintenance and repairs.
• Through algorithms and exorbitant rent hikes, corporate landlords are inflating rents to artificially higher prices.
• Rising rents are a primary driver of homelessness.
• Wealthy buyers are bidding up land and housing prices, inflaming gentrification and resulting in huge increases in the cost of housing.
• First-time homebuyers and people of color who have historically been excluded from the market are competing against billionaire private equity funds and wealthy buyers who make swift cash offers.
• Billionaires have influenced government housing policy, striving to give themselves tax breaks, oppose tenant protections, and expand their housing acquisitions even further, at the expense of the public, low-income residents, and communities of color.

This report also offers a list of things that local housing advocates should be doing instead: 

• Lawmakers at the federal, state and local must act to defend our communities against the billionaire blowback in housing, starting with providing stronger protections and housing options for unsheltered people and low-income tenants.

A key system intervention is to expand the social housing sector: community-controlled or publicly owned housing that is outside the speculative market, such as quality public housing and other forms of nonprofit-owned housing. In our definition, social housing is:

• Permanently and truly affordable, prioritizing those with the lowest incomes most in need.
• Publicly owned or under democratic community control.
• Never resold for profit. For-profit investors are barred or severely restricted.
• We must tax the rich and regulate billionaires’ harmful behaviors, while directing funds to this protected permanently and deeply affordable social housing sector.
• State and local policymakers do not have to wait for action from the federal government. They can protect residents in existing affordable housing and generate revenue for affordable housing through a number of interventions. These include:
• Protecting tenants from billionaire landlords and hyper-extractive gentrification and displacement.
• Ending the criminalization of the unhoused and establishing “Housing First” programs to rapidly provide permanently affordable and supportive housing to the unhoused, without prerequisites.
• Requiring ownership transparency so we know who is buying our neighborhoods.
• Limiting the corporate ownership of housing.
• Giving tenants the “first option to buy” apartments and mobile home parks when they come up for sale — and public funding and support structures to make these buy-outs possible.
• Taxing luxury real estate transactions (aka “mansion taxes”) and dedicating the funds to expanding the supply of non-profit and social housing.
• Controlling short-term rentals to protect the long-term rental housing market.
• Prohibiting keeping units vacant for long periods of time.
• Promoting public land banking, public banking, and using public pension funds to resource and finance social housing.
• Promoting the transfer of expiring affordable housing, property with tax liens or habitability violations, property owned by abusive corporate landlords, and other corporate-owned properties into the permanently affordable social housing sector — while keeping residents in place.
• Creating local Offices of Social Housing and Social Housing Development Authorities to support the above, with the input of tenant unions, unhoused people’s organizations, and other impacted community members.

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Also see the CCC blog post with key sources “Housing Profits: Crisis Capitalism – the Cambridge Example” (12.9.2024) HERE This post addresses the risks of Disaster Capitalism in Housing (money made from misery) and provides insights from others working on this. 

Other Sources to Explore on this Topic include the following:
“Additional Building Won’t Make City Housing More Affordable Says Fed Study” Forbes (8.3.2018) HERE

“Yimbys, Yombys, and California’s Housing Crisis” Fox and Hounds Daily (3.20.2019)
HERE

“Zoning Reform Isn’t a Silver Bullet for U.S. Housing" (Bloomberg News 1.31.2019)
HERE
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​*citation from "Billionaire Blowback"