this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Simply WRONG. Companies like Blackstone (and many others) are buying up single family homes as fast as they can, with an eye on controlling the rental and purchasing market, and they are already having an effect on prices. Even MAGA is considering regulating it.
And of course you can sell your home in a HCOL area, and buy a new one in a LCOL area, but what if you don't want to leave the area where you grew up, raised a family, made friends, where you family still lives etc.?In order to access your retirement fund, you have to leave your home and go somewhere far away, to place that isn't nearly as good, away from everything you built in your life.
And where are those LCOL places anyway? Florida used to be the big one. Sell your expensive house in the Northeast, and buy a nice house in the Florida sun for a quarter of the price, and all your relatives and friends will come and visit often.
Except Florida housing is as expensive as NY now, so that doesn't work. Perhaps you can find a reasonably priced house in a small town in Alabama, or Mississippi, where the nearest movie theater is an hour away. That should be fun. I'll bet your relatives can't wait to visit you in Buttfuck Holler, Kentucky.
And yeah, it's simple economics, except you forgot the part of the equation where housing prices have skyrocketed, while decades of harshly suppressed wages, and crippling student loan debt, have made it increasingly impossible for people to afford housing. We have now entered an era where your "simple economics" have led to living in your vehicle being considered a viable housing option.
Employ some Critical Thinking Skills, and don't just parrot empty Conservative talking points.
only 9% of residential housing is owned by corporate entities. corporations are no sizable impact on housing prices in the market at large. 91% of homes are owned by individuals.
housing prices have skyrocketed because residential homeowners and renters, oppose new housing. the USA has systematically build less housing than it needs since the 1990s, meanwhile the population is has grown by about 100 million, while only building new homes for about 1/3 of those people. in 2024 the USA build 1.35 million new homes, willing adding 3.2 million new residents. we are building about 1/3 of the housing we need just to stabilize prices. if you want to lower them, than you'd need to build more houses than there are incoming people.
in my own city, which has highest housing costs in the country, renters groups systematically oppose new housing, and wonder why their rents go up 5-10% a year. we build about 3000 new units of housing a year, meanwhile we have 30K incoming residents a year. if you have about 10x the population coming in every year as you have new housing, rents are going to skyrocket until you build enough housing to meet demand, and rents won't go down until you build enough housing to exceed demand. if rental groups stopped opposing new housing, we'd have more than double the amount of new housing, and rental prices would be less than they are.
people liek you are the problem. because you blame CORPORATIONS MAN. when it's people like you that go to your town/city meetings and demand all new housing projects be stopped or downscaled because you don't 'want anymore people moving here since i already live here'. but when it comes to say, adding jobs to the local economy you are all for it.
my city recent approved a massive development that will bring 20,000 new jobs. this new development is also building 200 new units of housing. it was proposed with 20K jobs, and 2000 new units of housing. but the people who live this city thought that was 'too much' and wanted the 20K jobs but 1/10th of the proposed housing.
the issue is everyday average people including renters. they don't want new homes to be built. so the prices keep going up.
if you want prices to drop or stabilize in your city, then go to city meetings and demand that every any any housing project be built ASAP and as largely as possible.
First off stop looking at all home ownership and the percentage owned by corporations as that does not dictate pricing as a whole, you should be looking at what percentage of houses that are being purchased over that past few years are owned by investors. Those new purchases and homes that trade hands are what drive the cost of a home. Most of that 91% is not continously buying and selling, they are holding on for long term and even passing on properties to their kids. The corporate entities on the other hand are buying up surplus real estate to drive the pricing of the market as there is very little liquidity in the housing market when you compare it too the shear total amount of residential properties in existence.
A good way to determine what percentage of the housing surplus (the real liquidity in the market that drives the price as a whole) is owned by corporate entities would be to look at different data points. Like say what percentage of vacant homes are owned by corporate entities. Here you get much more staggering figures like the fact that corporate entities own over 50% of vacant residential properties.
Take exhibit a:
And exhibit b:
Source: https://nationalmortgageprofessional.com/news/investors-hold-most-empty-houses
Now corporations holding over 50% of the liquid market of housing is a much more substantial fact here and highlights how they are controlling the market as a whole to drive prices up for their benefit while pricing the average person out of ownership market and into the rental market.
Now that we can see they DO control a majority of the liquidity of the housing market lets also see what percentage of rentals are owned by corporate entities as well.
So lets actually brake down your little 9% figure and explain why its a terrible metric that obscures reality and is just also misleading, as you seem to think 9% of residential properties being owned by corporations means on 9% of residential housing is owned by corporations.
I am going to be using US rental housing stats from 2020: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47332
First we have:
Ok so first we can see that a lot of residential rental properties are single unit properties. Over 85%. But how does that actually relate to the amount of units available for people to rent and does that meam that your little 9% of properties could be hiding the real kicker that corporations own most of the actual residential rental unit supply?
Oh so its does hide the fact that most of the rental units available are in multi-unit properties. So while 85% of all residential properties are single family unit rentals, that 85% only covers about a 1/3 of the rental market, with the rest of the market being dominated by multi unit properties.
Hmm well surely since you seem to think owning 9% of properties is small and irrelevant to the housing and rental market that must mean that most of those multi unit properties must also be owned by individuals and not corporations right?
Hm I guess not. I guess while single family units make up 85% of the properties it turns out most rental units are in those massive multi unit properties. Meaning just shy of 2/3rds of the rental unit market is owned by corporations.
So lets recap here shall we.
Corporations own over 50% of the liquidity in the residential housing sphere so they have a massive influence on the pricing of houses on the market.
Corporations also own nearly 2/3rds of the rental market supply when you amount for units instead of just properties. Also granting them the ability to have a massive influence on the rental price market.
So yeah your right corporations may only own 9% of residential land across the US, that completely hides the ugly truth that they control the market by dominating the liquidity which underpines the pricing of housing market for ownership and also obscures the fact that on that 9% of land they have so many multi-unit properties that they own nearly 2/3rds of all rental units allowing them to control the pricing in the rental market as well.
So no the problem is corporate greed in the housing market you are just too willing to listen to corporate propaganda that misrepresents reality by cherry picking what statistics they push out to the public to placate them into feeling like its their neighbors or generic human greed that causes these problems not them.
Next time before you start acting so stupid maybe actually check the sources and dig into how they got their numbers in the first place to make sure it paints an accurate picture of what you are buying into.
First of all, 9% is a HUGE number, far large enough to start influencing prices, and it is growing quickly. That 9% will be more like 20% within the next few years. We can see the trend clearly, do we really have to wait until it is an irreversible problem before we even acknowledge it, and then abandon hope for a solution because it's too late? Or maybe we say, "Hmm, 9% and growing? That's going to become a problem, maybe we should do something about it NOW."
Secondly, good for your state or whatever who is putting controls on building. My state, and my area, is not. I travel the entire east coast for work, and traffic in Central Florida, where I live, is easily the worst on the East Coast (the only competition is the DC-Baltimore stretch at rush hour, I avoid it at all costs), and they can't build huge housing developments and apartment complexes fast enough, and dump more cars on the streets. And just this week, they just announced that the Mormons, who own a giant tract of land east of Orlando, are going to build an entire new CITY, with a population that will rival Orlando. The state has already approved a new TOLL highway that will connect the area, and that new Toll road will run through two protected conservation areas, which the county is not happy about. In Florida, conservation land is really important...until you have to build on it.
Of course the state is happy to cooperate with attracting a few hundred thousand Mormons to Central Florida, diluting the Democratic voting strength in the last Democratic stronghold in Florida.
So nice try, but your experience is not what's happening in MAGA regions of the country. They are using housing to service the only MAGA constituency - the wealthy.
you're wrong. objectively. you are delusional and making ridiculous statements that are objectively false, both about housing and about MAGA, neither of which have anything to do with each other.
democratic voters have higher incomes than republican voters. most high income people (100K+) vote democratic in the last election the groups that voted republican were working-class incomes between 30-100K.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
What are you talking about? Do you not understand the concept of TIME? What does the income of Dems vs Repubs have to do with it?
There is an obvious trend of investment companies buying up single family houses. This is not "objectively wrong," it is the truth, and ALL those companies have publicly stated they intend to buy up so many single family homes that they will control the cost of housing in America. This is FACT.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106643
So it doesn't matter where it stands NOW, the important point is that they own a larger percentage of the market than they did a year ago, and they will own more a year from now, and even more a year after that.
Your solution is to ignore the growing problem, pretend it doesn't exist, and then when it is too big a problem to ignore, wonder why someone didn't do something about this a long time ago, say, when they still owned less than 9% of the market, like now.