New Legislation Proposes to Take Wall Street Out of the Housing Market

Fucking do it you cowards.

They should never have been allowed to buy them to begin with.

The second best time is now.

And this is the sort of legislation that should be passed by direct referendum, will of the people, and not by representatives who have been bought out by special interest groups. Desperately needed but unlikely to happen.

This will pass at the same time as the healthcare, world peace, and word hunger bills.

Looking at companies like Blackstone, who buy up houses at auction, lightly flip them and put them back on the market as high-priced rentals. THEY'RE the big reason for the lack of affordable housing.

Capitalism and its endless profit motive should never be near the things that have direct effect on people's well-being and livelihood. All the human basic necessities should be capitalism free, housing, healthcare, education.... etc... If you want to built a better and healthier nation of course, but no one cares about the nation, money is above everything to these sick fucks.

How does this limit a corporation from doing the same thing?

So a hedge fund doesn't do it, but a specific company does the same thing and that's fine. What am I missing?

If we actually had a democracy, there would be a total of 0 people against this. It's so incredibly unfavorable to want corporations to buy houses for profit.

Inb4 the Republicans vote it down

Please do. I'd love to see more supply.

Home Ownership and protecting the middle class used to be phrases so often uttered by the Republicans 40 years ago that I yawned.

I'm glad to see someone pick up the gauntlet. Boggles the mind that this hasn't become a huge political issue yet.

it’s cool they had the idea. hopefully they act on it

Now what’s the chance of this actually passing?

Please make it happen, it's an important first step

why were they ever allowed to do this? why should the system allow you to gamble on houses?

Who ever tabeled this needs to run for your president. Seriously

Step in the right direction, hope some version of it gets passed.

What about private equity?

Wall Street is not the problem, a lack of new housing is, according to David Howard, the chief executive of the National Rental Home Council, a trade association. The country needs anywhere from 2 million to 6.5 million units of new housing, according to various estimates.

“Policies really need to be shaped and crafted so that they support the production, investment and development of new housing,” Mr. Howard said. “I think bills that work against that ultimately are just going to perpetuate the challenges we’re already facing.”

While I certainly disagree with this person on some of their specifics, and don't necessarily agree with the "teeth" of this bill (10k per home owned isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, and can just be priced in to an already out-of-control market), seeing a trade organization argue for the actual long-term solution bodes really well for the future of solving the housing crisis.

In case you want to learn about the bill:

NYT article (archive link):

https://web.archive.org/web/20231207070056/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/realestate/wall-street-housing-market.html

Press releases:

https://www.merkley.senate.gov/merkley-smith-lead-bicameral-action-to-ban-hedge-fund-ownership-of-residential- housing/

https://adamsmith.house.gov/press-releases?ID=637A8E58-8F0D-4CB0-AECC-1D4690A00725

Text of the bill:

https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MCG23660.pdf

DNC really driving it home what their platform is with actions instead of words, lately.

I do like this.

Can we expand this to multi-family houses? I don't think we need it for apartment buildings too, but triple-deckers, for example, are not that different.

Will be nice to have anything close to this, but 10 years is too long of a ramp down.

They are holding housing hostage in the interim. They don't feel that at all, the people do

It'll never pass, unfortunately.

I will be SO surprised if this happens.

Permanently Deleted

And why just houses? Why not apartments? Poor people can't afford houses.

Property taxes are run at the local and state level. My area has a provision where owner-occupied homes pay at 50% of the assessed rate, while 2nd (3rd, etc) homes pay the full rate. Fuck it. Triple the tax rate, and adjust the owner-occupied discount down to compensate.

There are things that can be done at the federal level, but this is a problem in every jurisdiction regardless of party control in the area.

https://youtu.be/rLXWqdry3Qc?si=LItEsEzrkK2DTL2D