Government policy is married to outdated expectations of how we live

Government policy? You sure its not another thing?

Here’s what happens when private equity buys homes in your neighborhood

So Erb and his cousin raised money from investors, bought homes in places like the Chatham-Arch neighborhood in Indianapolis (which was affordable, had a growing population and was benefiting from redevelopment), and rented them out — presumably to people who wanted a house with a yard but couldn’t afford to buy one. Erb says it was a profitable business.

He was not the first New York finance person to profit from single-family rentals across the United States. The private equity firm Blackstone (commonly confused with BlackRock) more or less invented this buy-to-rent strategy in 2012, under the moniker Invitation Homes. It’s now a public company valued at more than $18 billion.

The response to this development — of Wall Street buying Main Street, or at least some of its cul-de-sacs — has been bipartisan, populist and patriotic condemnation. Both JD Vance and Kamala Harris called for bans on these corporate landlords. Since houses tend to rise in value over time, homeownership has been a primary way that middle-class families build wealth. But now private equity was outbidding aspiring homeowners, making it more expensive to buy a home and pocketing the appreciation in home values.

Even some of Erb’s friends told him they thought he was making homes unaffordable. “Nothing that has stuck with me or made me second-guess what I’m doing,” he says. He wasn’t responsible for the decade of underinvestment; he felt they were giving young couples the option to live in a house without breaking their bank account. “But, yeah, very emotional conversations.”

Now that these institutional investors have been buying and renting out houses for more than a decade, researchers have had time to study their impact.

These investors can and do make homeownership harder to attain, just as their critics claim.