America needs more housing inventory. We ALSO need to stop private equity firms buying up homes

[CousinIT]

...both apartments and single-family homes and subsequently driving up prices and evicting people if they can't afford the jacked-up rents.

Congress should pass the "End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act". You can write your reps here: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/end-hedge-fund-control-of-american-homes-act/

[A HERETIC I AM]

1. Private Equity firms, not Hedge Funds.

There's a difference.

I agree with you, but lets be accurate, OK?

[CousinIT]

2. Gotcha. The article itself used "Hedge funds" and so does the name of the bill

Merkley and Adam Smith have put forth. I don't know if that's a misnomer or what, but I changed the title of my post.

There may be a couple bills floating around about stopping or limiting private equity firms buying up housing, but I'm not aware of another one.

Whatever they are, they are contributing to the increase in housing prices and rents. Greedy bastards, pricing people out of their homes so they can make profit. Fucking robber barons.

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. Think of a Hedge Fund as a Mutual Fund for "Qualified Investors"

Which is pretty much what they are. You have to demonstrate a specific net worth and/or an annual income above a certain threshold to become a client of a Hedge Fund.

Private Equity firms are just what they sound like. Private = not public and equity = money. The same types of people might use either or both (really rich fucks!) but they do tend to invest in ways that are unique to their business model.

But the vid is making a valid point and it is a really bad direction for housing to go in this country. I fear the top 1% and the CEO's of the Fortune 500 really do want to take us back to the early part of the last century, before there were any of those pesky labor laws and 8 hour day rules and all that.

They want to go back to the days when the American worker was chronically underpaid and desperate, full stop. Do away with all the social safety nets, do away with or privatize Social Security, do away with labor unions, etc. Keep women in the kitchen and pregnant to raise more desperate workers.

And worst of all, Trumpy has said he wants to give the police free rein by doing away with the ability to sue officers for wrongdoing, so any riots because of the bullshit conditions we are headed for, the police would be able to fire live rounds into crowds with no consequences. That might sound extreme, but that's what it looks like to me.

I don't think too many Americans realize that in the days before Social Security came along, the leading cause of death for an elderly person living in the northern cities was hypothermia.

There were no pensions, no 401(k)'s, no safety net at all, so when a factory worker in Chicago or Cleveland or wherever that was paid shit wages all their lives now find they couldn't work anymore and was fired, if they didn't have a family to go live with they often didn't survive more than one or two winters simply because they couldn't afford to heat their apartment or tenement. And the owners of the companies they worked for fought tooth and nail AGAINST the implementation of SS!

THAT is what their dream of American Capitalism is. I'm convinced they want to go back to that.

[CousinIT]

4. You can count on it. Their Project 2025 details their planned war on the working class

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gop-war-on-working-class

Project 2025 offers a plan to thoroughly dismantle more than a century of workers’ achievements in the struggle for both dignity and simple on-the-job survival.

. . .

It’s not exactly news that conservatives, who present themselves as the friends of working people, often support policies that threaten not only workers’ livelihoods, but their very lives. This fall, as we face the most consequential elections of my lifetime (all 71 years of it), rights that working people once upon a time fought and died for—the eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, protections against child labor—are, in effect, back on the ballot. The people preparing for a second Trump presidency aren’t hiding their intentions either. Anyone can discover them, for instance, in the Heritage Foundation’s well-publicized Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a “presidential transition” plan that any future Trump administration is expected to put into operation.

As I’ve written before, TheNew York Times’s Carlos Lozada did us a favor by working his way through all 887 pages of that tome of future planning. Lacking his stamina, I opted for a deep dive into a single chapter of it focused on the “Department of Labor and Related Agencies.” Its modest 35 pages offer a plan to thoroughly dismantle more than a century of workers’ achievements in the struggle for both dignity and simple on-the-job survival.

[multigraincracker]

5. They are turning Manufactured Home

communities into overpriced trailer parks.
Like reverse Robbin Hoods, stealing form poor and paying off the rich.

[jimfields33]

8. I was shocked to find out that a coworker of mine pays 680 a month for the land rent on his mobile home.

I only pay a thousand dollars on my three bedroom two bothroom 2,000 square foot block home. This is Florida. I was shocked! I also felt bad for him as it will certainly increase as the years go on.

[Oppaloopa]

9. Yes I pay 820 others pay 1000 just for lot rent owned by a LLC

Average rent for a apt is 2,000 plus utilities. This is a a low wage state

[TexasBushwhacker]

13. Yup, I was called by a recruiter to work for one of those

I didn't even interview. I looked at their website and saw it was PE and said no way. It's really just a way to hang onto land, make some money on it, until they want to sell it. The people who live in the mobile homes are lured into buying the homes with low lot rentals the first year. Then the lot rentals are raised and the owners of the homes have to stay or pay thousands of dollars moving their home. Many end up abandoning the homes, which are flipped to another victim. After a few years, the land is worth enough that the PE firm owners decide to sell it. No new leases are signed for lot rentals and in a years time, all of the mobile homes owners have to pay thousands of dollars to have their homes moved or walk away and be homeless.

I actually think mobile/manufactured homes make a lot of sense but you put them on your own land. Finding affordable land that's unrestricted is a challenge unless you're happy living in BFE.

[David__77]

14. The days of relatively low priced manufactured housing seem numbered.

That is unfortunate and will lead to a significant crisis in itself.

[JustAnotherGen]

6. I'm a Council Member (elected) and

Planning Board (member) and Public Works liaison in small NJ Borough. I'm coming in this year on a shitastic Master Plan and 30 years of Councils kicking the infrastructure can down the road.

Unfortunately - the prior two mayors gave the farm away with PILOT Agreements to two developers. One we WERE able to get changes to - the other we weren't.

Sharing that background info to queue up my distaste at what these two developers consider 'affordable'.

$2300 for rentals and $300 K for affordable town homes/condos - $600K for market rate.

The master plan in place says we need 1000 more units of housing in our 1.17 square mile borough.

None of it makes sense - but I'm here now. So we aren't getting anything beyond those initial 300 units unless it is TRULY affordable for young people, seniors and veterans. I can't control what Fed Gov or State Gov does -

But I can block development of one units renting for more that $1500.

May seem steep to folks in the square states - but based on two young'uns room mates at the very minimum ($15 an hour) that's doable. Average of college grads at $65K to $80K - again as room mates affordable and allows room to pay student loans.

My first apartment in the Great Lakes in 2004 was $710 a month. I was in sales with a draw of $30K annually. I'm saying 20 years later in a high cost of living area - affordable is no more than 1500 a month.

I'm also imploring people to start going to your Planning Board meetings. There is time for public comments and YOU the Resident can advocate for those who are struggling at the most local level possible. You can change the zoning laws and raise hell about Variances that allow these greedy SOBs to destroy the housing ecosystem.

You have power at the local level. Use it!

[jmbar2]

7. It's part of the destruction of the economy through financialization

Thanks for the vid. Very important danger to today's economy!

Just read a good article on it:
Mad Money: The Financialization and Rising Inequality of the US Economy

Over the last few decades, the financial sector in the US has been taking up a larger share of gross domestic product (GDP) and financial profits as a share of the total corporate profits have been increasing, as seen in Figure 2 below. This trend of the growing size and importance of the financial sector in the operation of the overall economy is referred to as the financialization of the economy.

The process is self-perpetuating—as more funds are directed towards financial assets, the price of those assets increases, generating potential for profits and encouraging further investment in financial assets. ...However, because the rise in asset prices is partly driven by speculative demand, and not an increase in the intrinsic value of these assets, economists have warned about an impending economic crisis from the bursting of this asset bubble, which could have damaging consequences for the broader economy.

Economic gains from extracting from the US economy have accrued to the highest incomes, while they apply AI and layoffs to reduce labor's share of the pie.

It is unsustainable and needs a lot of attention. Thanks for keeping this problem visible!

https://www.bu.edu/eci/2022/08/02/mad-money-the-financialization-and-rising-inequality-of-the-us-economy/

[twodogsbarking]

10. Let's not rule out another housing crash.

[peppertree]

11. Probably. The vulture funds got a taste of how much they could earn during the '08 calamity - and they want some more

The Mnuchization of the residential sector.

[Hikerchick57]

12. They were trying to buy my home for a while, I guess they gave up.

I have a small dwelling with a nice yard (1st n forever home)! Low mortgage, I’m dying here…lol

[twodogsbarking]

15. Built a house in 88 and still here. It was on the edge of town when we built it. Now it is nearly the middle of town.