Jessica Moreno and her family lived happily in Charlotte, North Carolina, she said, until new owners bought the property where their rented mobile home was located, changing services and significantly raising prices.
“Where were we going to find a rent of 300 dollars? Nowhere. That’s why we had to leave,” Moreno said. “I constantly see that when companies buy houses, the poor have to leave because rents and services go up, it’s like that.”
Her family’s experience spurred Moreno to become a community organizer at Action NC, a grassroots mobilization group aimed at tackling inequality and poverty. “Maybe we don’t understand that we can push laws to change things,” she said.
Wall Street firms entered the single-family rental market after the 2008 housing crisis by purchasing foreclosed homes. Since then, their influence has continued to increase and the number of corporate landlords today is significant across the entire U.S. housing system: single-family and multifamily housing, manufactured housing such as mobile homes, subsidized affordable housing and student housing.
Many entities, such as hedge funds, were able to leverage their financial resources to purchase foreclosed homes wholesale. Instead of selling them, many investors chose to enter the rental market, providing a vital service at a time when many families were facing credit challenges.
By June 2022, institutional investors owned 3% of all single-family rentals nationwide. But in the most affordable markets, they owned considerable market share: in Charlotte, where Moreno lived, it was 20%, according to figures from the Urban Institute.
Corporate owners have been especially attracted to the Sunbelt states: After the Great Recession of 2007-2008, they invested in the region because there were a lot of foreclosed homes, and even today homes are cheaper there than in other parts of the country. It’s also a region that has seen the most economic growth in places like Atlanta,…
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