We are in the beginning stages of planning a day of peaceful national housing protests for a September date yet to be announced. Please check back here for shareable social media links, and help us bring the Great Housing Rights Movement to fruition!
The mere presence of investors organically inflates housing prices three ways:
1) Investors increase demand above and beyond the naturally occurring demand of owner-occupants. In a Feudalism-free housing market, potential owner-occupants would only be competing with other potential owner-occupants to buy a home. However, when investors are allowed into the housing market, would-be owner-occupants now have to compete with investors. This brings about an increase in demand, which significantly inflates housing prices.
2) As investors buy up homes and turn them into rentals, they constrict the supply of homes available to hopeful owner-occupants. This decrease in the supply of available homes is inflationary and drives housing prices up more.
3) Investors bring about a huge increase to the money supply available specifically to land & housing. Their cash reserves and access to credit enable investors to outbid would-be owner-occupants, which significantly drives prices up even more.
But that’s not where investor-induced housing inflation stops. The above-mentioned inflationary factors occur simply by allowing investors to buy investment properties, and don’t even take into account the greedflation investors big & small giddily take part in as they set rental rates and sales prices as high as they possibly can. As long as we allow our land & housing system to prioritize the hoarding of land & housing by investors in order to make exploitative, non-productive rentier incomes and non-productive inflationary real estate asset gains above what the priority should have been all along – housing people – these forms of investor-induced housing inflation will continue to fuel our perpetual affordable housing crisis.
This allowing of investors into our land & housing system sets off a feudalistic, inflationary cycle. The more property we allow investors to hoard, the more housing prices inflate, and the more would-be owner-occupants are then unable to purchase their own homes and are instead forced to be renters. This in turn makes it easier for investors to hoard more & more property, which they excitedly do, causing housing prices inflate more, and the cycle goes on and on, with housing becoming more and more unaffordable as time goes on.
The only way to rid our land & housing system of the inflation that real estate investors cause is by banning real estate investors. The reason our perpetual affordable housing crisis has only gotten worse and worse over many decades, despite the multitude of housing strategies implemented over that time, is because not one of these strategies has ever dared to address investor-induced inflation. This root-level cause has been routinely ignored in favor of status-quo preserving strategies that address symptoms only…often making things worse over the long-term.
Why not just ban the big corporate landlords?
Small landlords collectively own more properties than the big corporations own, and are collectively doing the most harm. It is no less inflationary and exploitative when a small landlord owns a rental property than when a big corporation owns a rental property. If we were to get rid of only the big corporate landlords, the small landlords would have a field day buying up those big corporations’ forfeited properties in order to expand their own little real estate empires. Even if we set the lowest limit possible – allowing only one property per landlord – we’d then have a situation where one half of the country could economically enslave the other half. (Actually, if we counted multi-unit properties as one property, that ratio would be even lower.)
How would a ban on landlords of multi-unit properties such as apartments complexes work?
Given the exploitation, greed, and even neglect that most multi-unit landlords subject tenants to, transitioning to tenant-owned co-ops is a preferable option. However, given the fact there are some tenants out there who, for different reasons, prefer the landlord/tenant relationship, tenants should at the least have the democratic choice to opt in to owning their unit as part of a co-op or to remain in the landlord/tenant relationship.
One misleading narrative we often hear is “It’s just a supply problem.” The reality is, could have all the supply in the world, but as long as we allow investors to hoard that supply, we will still have affordability problems. Investors are unnecessary yet inflationary middlemen. The minimal contributions they may make are vastly offset by the non-productive rentier profits and inflationary asset gains they extract from renters and buyers.
Another common but ill-founded narrative we often hear is “Companies just need to pay employees a living wage.” This has never worked in the past, as investors simply raise rents and sales prices accordingly, with any increases in wages going in and out of workers’ pockets and into the pockets of the people controlling land & housing within a couple of years. This failed strategy begs the question “Why should it be the responsibility of employers – who are actually being productive and making some kind of positive contribution to society – to fund the greed of the non-productive real estate investors who are making no meaningful contribution to society…if not a negative contribution? This failed strategy has many negative effects, such as making it much harder for small businesses to employ workers at these higher wages while continuing to make enough net income to stay in business; such as making it harder for domestic manufacturers to compete on the global market while paying these higher wages; such as driving general prices higher and higher, as businesses must then raise prices in order to offset the higher wages they must pay employees.
And again, why should we endure all of these negatives just so investors can make money without having to work for it, without having to put in the time and effort to it takes to make some kind of positive contribution to society?¹ Why do we have a feudalistic land & housing system that rewards the non-productive while punishing those who actually are producing and making real contributions to society? What kind of foolish economic strategy is that? Shouldn’t an economic system encourage productivity by rewarding productivity and refraining from rewarding non-productivity?
One thing is clear, the asset-class, and their pawns in every branch and every level of our government, desperately want – and need – to keep our unlimited, feudalistic property laws firmly intact in order to keep the non-productive revenue streams they are so dependent upon going. And the longer we allow this, the greater the number of people that will be subjected to the oppression brought about by real estate investors.
The time has come to send our dysfunctional, exploitative land & housing system to its eternal resting place, and build a highly-functioning system in its place that equitably and affordably houses everyone. With a presidential election coming in November, and a chance to put pro-housing candidates into all levels of our government, the time is RIGHT NOW to force candidates to start talking about comprehensive, root-level solutions to our perpetually unaffordable housing system.
Please join the Housing Revolution to manifest a national day of peaceful housing protests this September. This day of protest will require lots of grassroots organizing at the local level. Housingrevolution.net will list any and all peaceful National Ban Landlords Day protests by time, city, state, and a link to more info, that are submitted to info@housingrevolution.net with “Protest Listing” in the subject line. Please note, protests will be listed only after submitted info-link is verified.
We also intend to, in the run-up, hold a “Best Protest Sign” contest here on the website. So get those signs going, and submit pics to info@housingrevolution.net with “Best Sign Contest” in the subject line.
In the meantime, please check out the Videos page for lots of in-depth discussion about our dysfunctional land & housing system, the AHFA 12-year plan to decommodify land & housing, and lots of status-quo-preserving narrative busting.
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¹Not that corporate greed and gross discrepancies between workers’ wages and upper management wages of many companies aren’t exploitative and in need of limitations. That is a very real problem, but one that needs its own comprehensive solution specifically targeted at problematic companies. Holding ALL businesses – big AND small, corrupt AND integritous – responsible for funding the greed of the non-productive landlords and real estate investors is not a meaningful solution to our housing problems nor to corporate corruption and greed.