How Wall Street is killing the middle class dream of owning a home

Twenty years ago, I bought my first house here in Central Florida for $92,000. I would later have trouble selling it because of the massive foreclosures in our area, thanks to the 2008 housing collapse. (It hit Florida particularly hard.) Now we have the opposite problem: My newly married millennial daughter wants to move into a small house nearby. She and her husband have great jobs and great credit, but after putting offers on multiple houses, they are frustrated and disgruntled.

There are plenty of single-family homes in Central Florida, but the problem is that most of them are rentals. This trend began when large firms started buying up cheap homes during the recession so they could turn the homes into cash cows. In fact, this area has one of the highest rates of single-family rentals in the nation, many of which are owned by a massive private equity firm. For the little inventory that is available, my daughter is competing with multibillion-dollar institutional investors and giant pension funds backed by Wall Street that are overpaying in cash. These entities aren’t just buying up single-family houses, but entire neighborhoods. They are easy investments and rent increases have gone through the roof. If all else fails, they can be flipped in this preposterous market that Wall Street helped create.

These firms are buying up so many houses that they are constricting supply, which is also making home prices skyrocket. Unfortunately, that’s kind of the point. A bad housing market for the rest of us is a goldmine for Wall Street. This is exactly the sort of thing that lawmakers should be fighting against, and there are many things they can do to help their constituents. Regretfully, with the exception of progressive champions like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, most seem to be more on the side of the Wall Street investors. In fact, there’s so much money being made that Wall Street landlords created their own lobbying arm to stop any regulation.