As of now, bills have been introduced in several states to block corporate ownership of single-family homes.
Arizona. Connecticut. Indiana. New Hampshire. New York. Oklahoma. Texas. Utah. Virginia.
Several of these have been filed just in January. At this rate, the country will soon be blanketed by them. I am stunned by the ignorant blanket language in just about all of them.
These are generally just filed bills. There is a long way between where these are now and being signed into law. But, here they are.
The speed at which we are moving to unhouse ourselves is disturbing.
First, city-building had been part of the human experience for millennia before we outlawed it in the 20th Century with zoning rules against multifamily dwellings. Then, car-centered suburbs full of homeowners took its place, and in 2008, after about a century of that, we cut off about a quarter of households from that market with the mortgage crackdown.
Now, we are killing the only remaining outlet for new housing—large-scale providers of single-family homes for rent—before it really even has become a significant sector.
Since this source of housing is being killed before it can even exist, it is hard to convey how awful this will be. How could it be so bad to stop something we don’t even have?
We need something like 15 to 20 million new homes, and under current conditions they would have to all be single-family rental homes. There are currently about 11 million single-family rental homes across the country. They are largely owned by small local landlords.
Fixing the housing shortage under current regulatory conditions, landlords that can scale will be necessary. Builders are just starting to ramp up single-family neighborhoods that they are selling as a whole to investors. As I read them, these bills will kill it in the cradle.
There are just too many stones to overturn, and I get why it’s a hard sell for most people.
On this particular issue, I feel like I am a lone voice in the wilderness. You first have to see what happened in 2008 through my lens. Then you have to accept my forecast—my speculation—that new single-family rentals at scale are going to continue to expand rapidly, and that they will have to expand rapidly, for the bleeding to stop in the housing crisis.
Banning a market that hardly exists will be the most self-immolating form of housing obstruction yet, after a century of them? Even many YIMBYs, understandably, can’t see it. Many of them support the bills.
If these bills are widely passed, we will have, finally, removed every single release valve for potential new housing. It will be done. Homelessness will be the law of the land. However tragic you think things are now, it will get worse.
The typical young family with, say, a 720 credit score can’t buy a home today. We won’t build more apartments as a substitute. I recently watched a large apartment building get blocked in the Phoenix area, and one of the big complaints was that if they allowed it, families would live there. This all happens quite explicitly. In every case, the obstructors just imagine that someone, somewhere, will be allowed to build something.
The sponsors of these bills think the same thing. If we ban corporations, surely there is some mysterious figure on the sidelines who will build the new homes instead.
No. They won’t. The rest of them have already been banned. About a million homes are built for the portion of Americans still allowed to buy them. Another 500,000 apartments are built for tenants. That’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.
So, where is that family going to live? They aren’t allowed to buy a home, live in a new apartment, and now, potentially, they won’t be able to rent a single-family home.
None of those are personal choices. They all should be very easy and normal things for a family with a 720 credit score in 2025 America to do. But government at all levels blocks it. On the margin, that next new 720 score family has to live somewhere. Where?
Of course, that family will live somewhere. It will take more rent than it should, for a less nice home. Somewhere at the bottom of our deranged game of musical chairs, some person or some family that has the least capacity to deal with this will be pushed out of an extra bedroom, or evicted when they can’t make rent. And they will be on the street.
I just can’t believe what we are capable of doing to ourselves simply out of ignorance.
I’ve been watching for it and predicting it, but until today, in the back of my head, there was a little voice saying, “No. Surely not.” But, it’s happening.
