first, the numbers are incredibly misleading. if 86.5% of total housing is owned by the people that live in them, and 1% is owned by large corporate investors with 100+ units, how much of the rental stock is owned by large corporate investors?
the answer depends on the vague data provided by the other categories but is at least 1/13.5 = 7.5%.
however, of that 13.5%, the chart says that:
- 1% is owned by investors with more than 100 units, almost none of which would be lived in by the owners
- 1.6% is owned by investors with 10-99 units, of which some small amount of them will be lived in by the owners and
- 10.8% is owned by people with 2-9 units, of which some large percentage - 35-45% - is going to be lived in by people that own them.
so, split of a third of 10.8% and put it in the non-investor category. 100 - 86.6 - 10.8/3 = 9.8.
1/9.8 = 10.2%. so, roughly 10% of the housing stock in the united states is owned by institutional investors.
if you include the 1.5% that own more than 10 units, it's now 2.5/9.8 = 25%, or 1 in 4 houses.
these are more accurate and more reasonable estimates, but it apparently varies dramatically by region, with the cities in the northern states having almost none of this (yet) and cities in the south having a much higher percentage than 25% of the rental stock by owned by large investors.
it does matter who owns the houses. when 10% of the houses are being bought by the bank, it drives up prices and reduces availability. further, these are not your big, fancy houses in the suburbs, either. these are smaller, more modest houses that the banks can rent out to low-to-middle income people. that's the point; they're scooping the available housing up and forcing the lower middle class to become renters, rather than owners, while still handing out massive mortgages to fancier houses for richer people. it's like the institutions have decided that you have to have a certain level of wealth before you can have the privilege of ownership and it's just safer for the bank to own your house otherwise, considering you'll be paying off the mortgage until you're 60 anyways, and you're probably going to die before then because being lower middle class also means you're morbidly obese. your mortgage might as well be your rent. so there's no point in pretending you own the house to begin with; just let us deal with it.
now, that being said, that doesn't mean you should just hand the mortgages out like plots of land during colonization. americans with an attention span may remember what happened the last time that happened, and the answer is it crashed the whole economy for over ten years. but, the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. where we were once concerned about bad mortgages being traded on open markets (which was crazy shit) and blowing everything up, we're now concerned about it being too hard to buy a mortgage at all.
in canada, we have something called the canada housing mortgage corporation, and it buys bad mortgages and stops housing bubbles from crashing. our system didn't experience the effects of subprime mortgage lending due to the existence of this crown corporation that bailed everybody out, quietly, behind the scenes. the united states might want to look into something like that.
but we are experiencing the effects of housing shortages, and on greater scales because we have much less housing, a much smaller population and are recovering from much higher levels of recent immigration, proportionally. a ban on large investors in canada would not be the primary fix, either, but it would help, and it should be being considered. i have argued this point previously as well.
i don't know the percentages in canada, but it doesn't matter - whether it's 3%, 5%, 15% or more of total rental stock, it would make a difference in increasing ownership and reducing the ability of the rentier class to survive on rent as income.
second, the article describes the smaller category of investors - the ones that own 2-10 properties - as "small businesses". i do agree that these smaller owners are the larger underlying problem. calling them "small businesses" doesn't make them less parasitic, and if you look at the math, it's generally the opposite - "small businesses" don't operate on economies of scale, don't have unionized labour and are generally far worse actors, generally, than large corporations are. most socio-economic problems are made worse by the bourgeois class - which is the marxist term for "small businesses" - and the socialist solution to solving most of those problems is to consolidate the businesses into larger conglomerates, that can operate on economies of scale and afford to pay union wages. socialism is particularly contemptuous of the small business owner. it's the libertarians and the small-l liberals that are always jerking themselves off over the "small businesses". as a raving socialist, i'd like to essentially do away with all small business, by combining them all into huge corporations that are owned and run and operated by the workers. there's nothing left-wing or socialist about attacking big businesses; that rhetoric belongs to the free market libertarians, who exist on the political right. socialists want super production, and we want the end of competition, which we think of as stupid and wasteful. we want big corporations run by workers that are organized into cartels and don't compete with each other, but operate at full capacity, produce at scale, offer full employment and generate obscene profits, for the benefit of workers.
socialism isn't about the size of the enterprise and, to the extent that it is, socialism needs big businesses to function, not small ones. socialism is about who owns the businesses; it's about abolishing management and having the workers take over. a real leftist, a real socialist, would agree that attacking big businesses is right-wing populism, and not helpful in advancing socialism. socialists are supposed to have contempt for the small business owner, the bourgeois shop keeper that can only provide for themselves by exploiting their hired labour, and not for the unionized corporations, operating at scale, that have profits to distribute to the proletariat.
in context, it's the smaller landowners that are the ones eating up the bulk of the housing stock. the flip of the calculation i did suggests that at minimum 75%, and probably closer to 90%, of the rental housing stock is being taken away by smaller scale investors who are forcing would-be buyers to pay their mortgages instead of their own mortgages, by stepping in and outbidding the first time buyers. the article is presenting this as though these bourgeois, small-business owners are providing housing opportunities, instead of preventing them - as though the bourgeois rentiers are building the houses, rather than buying older stock, which should be available for new buyers, as first houses, but isn't because they can't compete with the more established buyers, when they come in and scoop the houses up. instead of paying down their own mortgages over time, these lower middle class renters instead end up paying for the children of the bourgeoisie to attend college, or to move into new houses in their early 20s. this exploitation of the lower middle class by the small business class, the bourgeoisie, is the much larger social problem, and the thing the state should really be stepping in to prevent.
i've suggested that one way to prevent small business owners from exploiting lower middle class workers in this way is to require some amount of actual ownership of a property - 75% or 80% - before you're allowed to rent it. this would ensure that you can't buy a second or third house and then get somebody else to pay the mortgage on it, which is not small business behaviour in a traditional bourgeois sense, whatever you think of that, but rather explicitly exploitative rentier capitalism. it's feudal thinking. it's immoral, in any civilized society, to buy a house and then immediately rent it out to pay down the mortgage, but this is what a very large percent of the rental stock on the market actually is. banning this exploitative behaviour would both force rentier capitalists to sell their investor properties to new owners, thereby increasing home ownership, and reduce rents across the board. the exploitative small business bourgeois class would suffer primarily in terms of their ability to pass on wealth to the next generation, but who gives a fuck about them? abolishing small-scale inheritance in favour of more wealth redistribution at the bottom is a good thing, not a bad thing, as this is real wealth, and what actually needs to get spread out more to better increase actual equality. those billions of dollars in elon musk's stock portfolio are not real wealth, they're just numbers in a database, and trying to spread it out is just going to crash the dollar and create inflation. real wealth redistribution requires redistributing real wealth. banning rentiers from renting properties they don't really own would be a massive step forward in any redistribution project.
for now, trump's proposal is reasonable and should be adopted. it's not a silver bullet, not a panacea, and won't solve the real problem, which is creeping feudalism in the bourgeois class and the state's tendency to enable small business to exploit the poor, and then call it beneficial (to them), rather than condemn it as exploitation, and pass laws to put an end to it. in bourgeois capitalism, the state legislates the bourgeois class above the law. however, it will help. it's a start.
don't believe the capitalist nonsense in the bourgeois press.