Category: Housing crisis
Trump wants to ban institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes
President Donald Trump said in a statement on social media that he is moving to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes and that he wants Congress to “codify” the ban into law.
The president has made easing the housing crisis a goal of his second term, and many have pointed to institutional investors as a large source of the problem.
‘People live in homes, not corporations.’
In a post on Truth Social Wednesday, Trump mentioned banning institutional housing purchases and hinted at other solutions to ease the housing crisis.
“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream. It was the reward for working hard, and doing the right thing, but now, because of the Record High Inflation caused by Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress, that American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans,” he wrote.
“It is for that reason, and much more, that I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it,” the president added. “People live in homes, not corporations.”
Trump did not provide details about these “steps” in the post.
He went on to say that he would discuss the policy at a speech in Davos, Switzerland, during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
Housing prices skyrocketed during the pandemic, when interest rates were lowered to encourage economic activity and many Americans moved to larger homes to take advantage of work-from-home policies. While interest rates have returned to historic averages, housing prices continued to climb, albeit at a slower pace.
Many have blamed companies like BlackRock for purchasing single-family homes as part of their investment portfolios, but some say institutional investors make up a small portion of the market.
Others say that encouraging more housing construction would lower housing costs by easing regulations and increasing supply to meet the demand.
An email to Blaze News from a spokesperson for BlackRock denied that the hedge fund owned any single family homes and linked to their statement online about the issue.
“A number of other large asset managers and private equity firms are very active today in purchasing single-family residences. BlackRock is sometimes confused with them,” the statement reads. “As a fiduciary asset manager, we invest and manage capital on behalf of our clients in a vast array of public and private U.S. real estate markets — but buying individual homes is not one of them.”
The company also referenced an Investopedia report saying many confuse BlackRock with BlackStone, which purchased housing stock after the 2008 financial meltdown.
BlackRock’s stock slid by 2.3% in the wake of the announcement.
Editor’s note: This article has been edited after publication to include a statement from BlackRock and to remove the company from the headline.
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The REAL solution to the housing crisis nobody’s talking about
The American dream is slipping away for many young Americans, as life becomes increasingly unaffordable — especially home ownership. Soaring home prices and interest rates and a housing shortage bar younger generations of people from purchasing a house. Today, the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 years old.
Many ideas are being tossed around regarding how to bring home ownership back into the realm of possibility for young families — most notably President Trump’s polarizing 50-year mortgage proposal.
But Sara Gonzales, BlazeTV host of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered,” says we’re ignoring a simple solution: eliminate property taxes.
Right now in the state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) is aggressively pushing for the elimination of property taxes, condemning them as “rent to the government.”
Abolishing property taxes, says Sara, is a “standard conservative position.” “You should not have to buy a home and then spend 20, 30, 50 years paying off that home, and yet you still never truly own your home because you would still pay rent to the government,” she says.
And yet there are conservatives who oppose the elimination of property taxes, claiming it encourages older homeowners to hoard inventory.
“So you’re basically saying … we should what? Kick all the oldies out of the homes that they’ve paid for so that young people can buy them up? Like, I’m sorry, are we conservatives or are we not?” asks Sara.
Further, senior tax caps allow older homeowners to pay significantly less in property taxes than younger homeowners, meaning Boomers are already incentivized to not sell. But if we were to enforce higher taxes on our senior population, as some conservatives suggest, we’re now guilty, Sara argues, of the same thing we criticize socialists for — taxing the rich.
Another pro-property-tax argument is that the tax accounts for significant funding for education. But public schools, says Sara, aren’t something most true conservatives want to fund anyway because “they’re indoctrinating your children.”
If we really want to make sure the essentials, like police and fire services, are well funded, we should first look at eliminating all waste, fraud, and abuse. If it’s out of control at the federal level, then it’s almost certainly out of control at the local level, says Sara.
All in all, eliminating the property tax benefits everyone, says Sara. Not only will it prevent people from being forced to pay lifetime rent to the government, but when older homeowners eventually do die, younger families have a better chance of affording those vacant homes because they’re not inheriting enormous property taxes.
“Take this into consideration,” says Sara.
“Say you have parents who are wealthy because they’ve worked hard and they own a lot of land … that they would like to give to you when they die. Consider you will not even be able to keep your parents’ property or home with the astronomical property taxes that you will owe at the end of every year on land and a home that they already paid for.”
“If you’re young and you ever want to own a home, you should recognize that [property taxes are] a problem for everyone. So let’s solve the problem for everyone.”
To hear more, watch the episode above.
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