Comment by conradev
2 days ago
An article making that case: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
A rebuttal to that article from Derek Thompson: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-anti-abundance-critique-...
2 days ago
An article making that case: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
A rebuttal to that article from Derek Thompson: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-anti-abundance-critique-...
Noah Smith on "Corporations aren't the reason your rent is too high", with nice things to say about Thompson:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/corporations-arent-the-reason-...
Quoting Thompson:
"The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—in which BlackRock is an investor—owns about 80,000. (To clear up a common confusion: The investment firm Blackstone, not BlackRock, established Invitation Homes. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t name them.)
Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market."