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What about the many, many thousands of homes that have already been bought up?
If they cannot be resold to other speculators their price can go waaay down
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it is only 0.5% I would prefer that large institutional investment firms not be allowed into the housing market.
actually, they are actively beneficial owners. They can do things more efficiently than small time owners.
Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…
It also seems like it might be important to determine what share of _new_ development is being created for investment. The share of existing homes being owned isn't as important.
There's also the 2nd order effect. The price of property might go down if there weren't investors with tons of money to spend on a property.
The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses. There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Here's an article on…
I think the relevant quantity we'd want to look at is what constitutes most of the property being bought-up by investors. Counting investors is going to bias the count towards multitudes of little-guys.
Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…
Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor. That's quite an extreme political take. A more humble basic economic theory question would be: If you ban large institutional investors f…
So if you aren't staying long enough to want to deal with a mortgage, you'll be stuck with an apartment only?
It might help in the long term, as it can force cities to stop densifying. And as we all know by now, densification is the leading cause of unaffordability. The US has more houses than households, but people are forced by economic forces to move into denser and denser areas. But short-term it'll hurt availability. One of the most common ways to enshittify cities is buying an SFH, demolishing it, and plopping a 3-4 ap…
This sounds backwards? Density means more units available, which should lower costs. Supply and demand. Rentals in a dense complex are cheaper than standalone rentals or duplexes, townhomes are cheaper than SFH, etc. I don’t think cities should force density, but there’s no reason to go the other way either as long as growth is managed properly in terms of traffic, transit, and infrastructure.
Nope. The ONLY way to get cheaper housing is by reducing the city population.
> Supply and demand.
Sigh. No. You assume that the demand is fixed. It's not. By building new housing, you _increase_ the demand. And always faster than you can satisfy it.
I just love this example:
Forbes 2016 - "Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build", "The Great Urban Myth: 'Cities Can't Build Their Way To Affordable Housing'"
Reuters 2023 - "Surging Tokyo property prices squeeze out young professionals",
Japandaily 2025: "Housing Crisis: Families Struggle to Buy Homes in Tokyo" ( https://japandaily.jp/housing-crisis-families-struggle-to-bu... )
> Rentals in a dense complex are cheaper than standalone rentals or duplexes, townhomes are cheaper than SFH, etc.
Try to find a city where dense housing made it cheaper.
The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses. There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties. Here's an article on…
But make no mistake, during the housing boom post 2019, in a lot of 'hot' metro areas, "wall street" was buying way more homes than individuals. Especially in the south. In the area I lived in, Invitation Homes, some weird shell company of Blackstone, was buying up every piece of tract housing they could get their hands on. At one point, they were making agreements with builders building out new neighborhoods to not sell to individuals since they wanted them all.
So no, I care far less about what my neighbor is doing because he or she isn't attempting to price out an entire city.