04/12/2026
A major housing bill now before Congress seeks to discourage Wall Street from buying up homes—but it could turn away new housing construction altogether, Henry Grabar argues. https://theatln.tc/cHwsMMUg
For the most part, suburban municipalities permit only one physical form of housing: the detached single-family home. Although nearly 85 percent of these structures are owner-occupied, “there is no technical reason that a renter cannot live in a house,” Grabar writes.
During the 2008 financial crisis, corporate landlords began buying foreclosed properties, and over the course of the 2010s, companies scooped up houses. “In the eyes of many aspiring homeowners, these ‘Wall Street’ landlords were villains who had the upper hand in every bidding war,” Grabar writes. “For people looking to rent, however, the business opened up neighborhoods that had largely been accessible only with a down payment and a mortgage.”
More recently, Wall Street has “coalesced around a model that can deliver single-family rental properties at scale: building new rental homes from scratch,” Grabar writes. Today, these “build to rent” communities now account for nearly 10 percent of the country’s new single-family homes.
But legislation being considered by Congress may discourage corporations “not just from buying single-family homes to rent but also from building them,” Grabar argues. “Cracking down on the former, which makes the corporate landlord a scapegoat for a complex affordability issue, has the support of most Democrats, the president, the public, and even the home-building industry. Stopping big money from constructing rental homes goes a step further; it reflects a peculiar type of American populism that combines a right-wing fe**sh for suburbia’s homeowner society with a left-wing distrust of investment capital.”
Offering fewer houses to rent “does not mean one more house to buy,” Grabar continues. Instead, many of these homes “will simply not get built.”
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🎨: Lucy Naland. Source: Getty.
