Housing Crisis
Housing in America has been transformed from a basic need into a financial instrument. Corporate landlords, private equity firms, and real estate investment trusts now own millions of single-family homes, driving up rents and prices while extracting wealth from communities. Meanwhile, homelessness has reached record levels in many cities.
Gen Us covers the housing crisis because it exemplifies how corporate financialization of basic needs — enabled by lobbying and light-touch regulation — creates massive inequality while mainstream media treats it as a natural market outcome.
We trace corporate landlord acquisitions, document the financial engineering behind housing as an asset class, analyze how zoning and land use policy is shaped by real estate lobbying, and investigate the gap between housing production claims and actual affordable unit construction.
Key Questions We're Asking
- •How many single-family homes are now owned by institutional investors, and what are the impacts on local housing markets?
- •What role do private equity firms play in driving rent increases and evictions?
- •How does the real estate industry's lobbying influence zoning laws, rent control policy, and housing subsidies?
- •Why does the U.S. have a shortage of millions of affordable housing units despite record construction profits?
- •How do short-term rental platforms like Airbnb affect housing availability and affordability?
What Mainstream Media Misses
- •Institutional investors buying single-family homes is covered as a market trend rather than as a systematic extraction of community wealth.
- •The real estate industry is one of the top lobbying sectors, yet its influence on housing policy is rarely framed as a conflict of interest.
- •Homelessness coverage focuses on individual stories and encampments rather than the policy and financial decisions that create the crisis.
- •The connection between housing financialization, monetary policy (low interest rates), and inequality is too complex for most coverage — so it gets ignored.
Follow the Money
- •Institutional investors own an estimated 5-10% of single-family rental homes in the U.S., with concentrations much higher in Sun Belt cities.
- •The real estate industry spends over $130 million annually on federal lobbying, making it one of the top five lobbying sectors.
- •Private equity firms like Blackstone, Invitation Homes, and American Homes 4 Rent control hundreds of thousands of rental units.
- •The mortgage interest deduction costs the federal government over $30 billion annually, disproportionately benefiting high-income homeowners.