My mother was actually thinking about selling my grandparents house to them.

I'm not sure if I changed her mind, but I straight up told her the second she mentioned them that I would burn the house down before the sale went through and would be chilling in a cell with a smile on my face for it.

She decided not to sell to a company.

Does that make me unhinged? Maybe. But that's one less house going to a rental company and one more family getting a house they'll live in.

Make a secondary house all but impossible to own via property tax, and make it illegal for corporations to own property. Watch housing cost plummet through the floor.

Blackstone. Everyone blames BlackRock, but it's Blackstone doing this. BlackRock is maybe a little bit evil, but mostly they sell ETFs, so ways for retail investors to invest in the stock market indexes. They make a fee off that, and at their size that's a huge amount of money already. Blackstone is more active about what it invests in, it strategically buys up neighborhoods so they can unilaterally raise rents. Among all kinds of other morally dubious investments.

I mean a lot of what BlackRock sells is index funds like vanguard etc.

That's a lot of people's retirements more than it's private equity.

I think you'll have more luck changing the rules of the game rather than chasing the players. If black rock disappeared tomorrow all that money would just move to another ETF manager and you would instantly have another BlackRock.

Also I think BlackRock (which is far from blameless in a whole lot of affairs) gets confused with black stone. It was the latter more directly investing in real estate iirc.

I used to dream of owning a small shack to live in but now I truly don't give a fuck, I'm soon to be homeless and no longer care about society

Also what i find very interesting about this topic is how demographics plays into this

i personally think that the UN predictions about how the population numbers are going to evolve are utter bullshit. it is well known that the population pyramid looks something like this:

and it's going to get thinner and thinner at the bottom as time progresses.

anyways, i think a lot of organizations that could build housing are a bit reluctant mostly for that reason. a company thinks "if i build a house today, there's a good chance that there won't be demand for that house in 30 years, so it might not pay off". and municipalities, i'm afraid, are way too under-invested in building social housing in general because that would be communism or sth.

after a quick search on the internet, about 1.6 million people live in public housing in the US in 2024. that's about 0.5 percent. Source

Meanwhile in Europe, about 9.3% (45 million people) people live in public housing according to this article, with some countries like Austria having 24%. (8% of EU according to this OECD study).

The law of supply and demand still applies whether you try to paint one of the participants as a villain or not. Even if every market participant were an individual, that (presumably not overly wealthy) single mother of four is still going to get out-competed.

The only actual solution is to increase supply, which means abolishing the wealthy-favoring laws that make it illegal to build (i.e. the laws mandating things like single-family houses and minimum parking requirements).

Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y'all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.

lacht in Friedrich Merz

Saint Luigi, hear our prayer. May justice rain upon the parasitic real estate holdings firms.

YDI. Shouldn't have been poor. If elon musk can pull himself up by his bootstrap and become a trillionaire, why can't that lady? YDI.