Authored by Matt Stoller via BIG,

Based on a vote last week,it seems very likely Congress will ban corporate ownership of most existing single family homes."People live in homes,"said Trump in January. "Not corporations." While Trump has sometimes talked a big game on constraining Wall Street, he generally hasn't followed through. In this case, though, he did. And somehow, a very corporate-friendly legislature came through as well.

It's almost impossible to believe, buthere's the relevantprovisionin the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Actthatpassedthe U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, by a 396-13 margin.

And here's the White House'sstatementsupporting the bill.

As called for during the State of the Union, this legislation includes the President's signature priority: banning large institutional investor purchases of single-family homes. Section 1001 delivers a framework that addresses Wall Street's dominance in the single family housing market and protects Main Street homebuyers.

And the House followed the Senate, which in Marchpassedan even more stringent ban, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren. There are some important caveats here, which I'll go into.But it's still a remarkable accomplishment, and a shockingly weird Warren-Trump alliance,that no one would have predicted a year ago.

I wrote up thefull accounttwo months ago, when the Senate acted.The short story is that voters were mad about high housing costs in 2024, and voted against the Democrats as a result. In January, Trump realized voters were now mad at him for high housing costs. And so he wanted to do something. But what could he do? He was trying to impose his will on the Federal Reserve, which could lower rates for homeowners. But that wasn't working out because he couldn't get the Supreme Court or the Senate to go along.

And beyond that, mortgage rates aren't the only driver of costs. So what hiking housing prices? There is a split in both parties over that question. One theory comes from a group of Wall Street-friendly liberals and libertarians, known as the "Abundance movement,"who argue the problem is that we're not friendly enough to capital, and the solution is to remove zoning limitations. Yet despite the removal of many such limitations in states like California, there hasn't been a spurt of homebuilding.

A different theory comes from anti-monopolists, who believe that the consolidation of financing power and homebuilding capacity led to supply restrictions.That group argued that Wall Street cash was pouring into single family housing as an asset class, driving up prices for ordinary people. And those buyers, as corporate landlords, didn't serve renters particularly well. There is substantial evidence behind this theory.

Institutional ownership is regionallyconcentrated, with investors buying up properties in particular cities. In Atlanta,for instance, large institutional investors havedominant sharesof the market…

Source: ZeroHedge News