Bring Housing Back Within Reach

A home used to be the most reachable part of the American dream. For a growing number of families, it’s slipping away — not because we’ve run out of houses, but because of who increasingly owns them and why they own them. When homes become trading chips for distant investors, the people who actually want to live in a community get priced out of it.

What’s really driving prices up

This isn’t simple supply and demand. In market after market, large corporate buyers and out-of-town investors have bought up huge shares of the housing stock — in some places, a striking share of all rental homes — and they manage it like a financial portfolio, not a neighborhood. Some even use shared pricing software that nudges rents up across a whole area at once. The result is higher rents, fewer homes for sale to ordinary buyers, and units deliberately left empty because, to a speculator, an empty unit is just an asset appreciating.

Working families end up competing for their own neighborhoods against investors who never plan to set foot in them.

Make empty homes pay their way

The first fix targets the speculation directly. We support a modest quarterly fee on homes left sitting empty — homes that aren’t anyone’s actual residence for an entire quarter. The key is how easily it’s avoided: the moment a real resident moves in and signs even a short lease (a few months is enough), the fee goes away.

That simple design does a lot of work:

• It makes leaving homes empty for speculation expensive, which pushes more units onto the market and drives rents down.
• It puts the cost squarely on second homes, short-term rentals, and speculative vacancies — not on working families, who simply rent or live in their homes as normal.
• It can do all this while property taxes for ordinary homeowners stay stable, or even fall, because the speculators are finally carrying their share.

It rewards exactly what we want — homes being lived in — and discourages exactly what we don’t.

Keep homes and farmland in the community’s hands

The second fix is about ownership itself. For smaller residential buildings — the houses, duplexes, and modest apartment buildings where families actually live — ownership should be reserved for American citizens, permanent residents, and closely-held American companies, not sprawling distant corporations or foreign funds. The same protection should extend to farmland, so the ground that feeds us stays in American hands.

We’d draw the line thoughtfully: large apartment towers, which need serious capital to build, can keep broader ownership rules, and commercial and industrial property — where outside investment does less harm to families — stays as it is. The point isn’t to punish investment; it’s to make sure the homes and the farmland a community depends on are owned by people with a real stake in that community’s success.

Why it matters

Housing and food security are too important to be controlled by distant interests with no connection to the places they own. Bring homes back to the people who live in them, and the dream gets reachable again — not through heavy-handed mandates, but by changing who the system rewards.

The fuller case is in Righting the Ship.