Housing prices are skyrocketing in my area and there are stories on the news about investment firms buying up homes and putting them up for rent. What's to stop these well financed institutions from buying up more and more real estate and forcing more people into renting?
Nothing and they are already are doing it.
Blackrock raised billions during COVID on the idea that once the evictions kick off, lots of homeowners will lose their homes and those tenants with black marks will have to pay more and more to rent.
Every person abusing the COVID moratorium just to screw over the "landlord" who owns one property is just one more nail in the US clusterfuck coffin.
Edit: it's Blackstone.
Here in Norway, businesses are entitled to financial aid if their income has been affected by COVID.
Meanwhile, the real-estate market is white hot at he moment, while the rental market is slow/stagnating. People with money want to purchase, while poor people can't afford to rent.
Turns out, rental companies and investors have speculated that if they just keep their rental units vacant, instead of lowering rent and attracting new tenants, they can apply for financial aid. win/win for them - they can sit on appreciating assets, without having to deal with wear/tear, administration, etc. on their units. All while getting bailed out by the gov.
And once small landlords/owners can't cover their costs due to broke tenants going for months/years without being able to pay their rent, no doubt there are investors and REPE firms lined up to buy those units.
Just another transformation of wealth.
I think there is a lot of hate directed to BlackRock, which is really meant to be directed at Blackstone. BlackRock is an absolutely huge financial company, to be sure, but is soley in the business of ETFs and asset management, which aren't exactly abusive or extractive.
And no it doesn't help that the names are so ridiculously similar.
Edit: just learned that BlackRock started as an asset management arm within Blackstone, and the similarity was intentional. I think the operations have diverged enough since then that there's a worthwhile distinction between the two.
In many areas of the country it is illegal to build anything but a single-family home. To people familiar with supply & demand this should be an obvious problem.
Land is in extreme abundance and multi-tenant properties are almost always built and owned by corporations.
In theory, a manufactured home community could also be a co-op, and setting one up would be less capital-intensive than building multi-family homes.
It is worth noting that so far as land-use is concerned, MHCs are significantly denser than typical single-family home neighborhoods (even older, denser ones) due to the small lot and home size, absence of two-vehicle garages, etc. They are comparable to the lower end of multi-family housing density due to the parking lots those are typically surrounded with, though of course multi-family housing that has good access to public transit can be much denser.
The density is good because it's valuable to be near other things, and density is the only thing that allows more proximity?
Maybe it would help to realize Japan, Korea, and California are all mountainous and prosperous. Mountains helped force good land use (though lately stupidity in California has been beating it).
The intuition behind the LVT is that increases in the value of land, in urban areas, are mostly driven by a growing local economy; therefore the community should benefit from them. Increases in the value of structures, OTOH, mostly come from investments by the property owner.
There's a fascinating book (well, if you have any interest in economics) about the LVT, from 1879, by Henry George: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm
I also wonder how many of these real estate firms are backed by Chinese investors too.