With billions of dollars of cash on hand, and millions of working-class families unable to find affordable housing, corporations are increasing their share of the housing stock and expanding their portfolios. A 2021 report co-authored by the Institute for Policy Studies, Bargaining for the Common Good, and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund demonstrated how corporate and institutional… Source Source / Read More: Corporate Real Estate Investors Are Accelerating the Affordable Housing Crisis
Real Estate
Berlin’s Pledge to Socialize a Quarter Million Apartments Faces Obstruction
Just over a year ago, Berliners won one of the biggest victories in decades for tenants in large cities. On September 26, 2021, in a landslide victory, locals voted overwhelmingly in favor of a referendum that called for the drafting of a new law to socialize almost a quarter of a million apartments in the city. Such a law would clear the way for the largest expropriation of housing in post… Source Source / Read More: Berlin’s Pledge to Socialize a Quarter Million Apartments Faces Obstruction
Arresting Unhoused People Doesn’t Fix Homelessness. Police Do It Anyway.
In the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, residents gathered at a public forum last June to voice their concerns about the city’s growing population of homeless individuals. Over the last decade, rent grew twice as fast in Portland as the rest of the country, and the estimated number of people experiencing homelessness increased by nearly 30%. The effects of those dynamics were on full display in Lents, one of the city’s most racially diverse areas and among the neighborhoods where home prices had been rising the fastest. Encampments had sprung up in parks and along bike and walking paths, and…
Warren Demands Private Equity-Backed Firms Answer for Role in Rising Rent Prices
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is demanding answers from housing corporations with backing from private equity, who she says are involved in inflating housing prices for both renters and buyers. Warren sent letters to CEOs of Progress Residential, American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes to condemn rent hikes and rising house prices that she says are a result of corporations’ growing influence on the housing market. Her aim is to determine whether or not these businesses have been taking advantage of current housing shortages. “Our country faces an unprecedented affordable housing supply shortage,” she wrote. “Decades of underinvestment, coupled with…