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HOUSING CRISIS - Across the United States, communities are facing an acute housing affordability crisis. Rents and homelessness are rising while home ownership feels increasingly out of reach for millions.
What’s driving that crisis? In a word, inequality. Increased corporate control over our housing market — by billionaire investors and their for-profit entities — are driving these trends and placing significant barriers to the preservation and creation of permanently affordable housing.
You’re personally experiencing this crisis if you’re among the over 653,000 U.S. residents who are unhoused — or the many more who are doubled-up in crowded housing, unable to leave a bad living situation, or who cannot afford to live independently.
You’re experiencing it if you’re among the 22.4 million households — half of all renters — who spend more than 30 percent or more of your income on rental housing. You’re experiencing it if your wages aren’t keeping up with your rent, if your neighborhood is flooded with Airbnb’s, or you can’t compete with affluent or investor home buyers to get a place of your own.
You’re experiencing it if you have an absentee corporate landlord, a government-subsidized “affordable” apartment that’s increasingly unaffordable, or a long commute because you can’t afford decent affordable housing near your work or school. Even if you own a home in a mobile park, you may be worried an investor could buy the park and hike your pad fees.
You may blame your housing challenge on your personal failure or a bad local market. But all of us are caught up in a larger housing system that is out of kilter and distorted by the participation of a class of ultrawealthy investors.
Typical solutions involve simply building more housing. But a focus on expanding housing supply through for-profit development misses this key driver of the housing crisis: as wealth concentrates in the hands of billionaire investors, their predatory investment and wealth-parking in luxury housing defines our housing markets today.
We call the consequences of billionaires’ increasing control over real estate the “billionaire blowback.” This report, jointly published by Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies, highlights the role of the billionaire class in driving our housing emergency — and outlines the policy solutions we need to protect the public interest.
Much more detail and citations are available here.
(Chuck Collins is director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org.)
