This has come to the forefront in America since Covid and has become the reason why a lot of American’s (younger Millenials and Gen Z) can’t buy homes, beyond Gen Z being unable to find gainful employment (1/3 in unemployed). I think stating holes in their argument like “there are good landlords out there” or “what about this specific instance” is literally arguing against a rule with exceptions. That’s not what this post is talking about. They are talking about the “corporations” who are just some rich older person or couple that are buying one, two, or three extra properties and renting them out. Frankly that’s the biggest reason why housing costs have skyrocketed.
The US Federal Reserve is trying to curb this by keeping the Prime Lending Rate (PLR) high, but Trump is putting pressure on him because lowering the PLR would look good for him on paper because it would look like he did something immediate to alleviate the economic pressure we’re feeling in America, directly because of him and his policies. BUT, that would be catastrophic to us “poor” (people making less that $240K/year; 90% of Americans), and I think you can see why. Yeah, if American’s with large savings accounts (years ago the figure was (0% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, so just imagine how it is now) all of a sudden saw that the mortgage on a house dropped from . . . lets just take the average cost of a “starter home” @$210K . . . $1,762.34/month to where it was prior to the pandemic at (~3%) $1,347.87, the rich Americans that were already buying those extra houses would just buy more extra houses and charge YOU, a poor American, that ~$1500/month and still charge you for any maintenance they have to do (depending on how your state renter laws are set up).
But even with all that, we still have the issue of how much houses cost. And because of the aforementioned “extra houses,” we have seen a skyrocket in the cost of houses. I won’t do a deep dive on it, but I will sum it up and link to a podcast you can listen to: an average home “should” cost ~$120K in today’s money, but because of the MASSIVE bubble created, that home now costs ~$400K. Why? because of people buying extra homes, and those same people who don’t have jobs being able to make it to zoning meetings to tell the planners they only want “big” homes in their areas to increase the selling price of their own home. That then has a cascading effect: let’s say this happens somewhere in California like a suburb of San Fransico. That means that people no longer can afford to live there so they move to let’s say Dallas. Now Dallas has less supply and more demand and the sellers jack up their prices arbitrarily because they want more profit. Then the buyer rents it out and keeps increasing rent prices so they can keep making more money.
This is what the X Poster is complaining about. Not an immigrant charging reasonable rent prices or “good” landlords, because the truth is, those aren’t the type of people typically renting out houses to poor people who couldn’t afford to buy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bajyEFHK0M&t=1198s Here’s another video that’s kinda related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc



I like the idea of this. It think 100% of Americans in their right minds should agree with it…
My issue is how do we expect this to be adopted let alone be enforced? Like, this is cool, but is it going to do anything? Or are Dems just throwing this out there so they can keep saying, “See!? We’re still better than those guys!” While still taking it up the ass from the GOP?
And do I, a Lemmy user, have all the answers in how to change things? I don’t think I personally do. But we’ve seen Dems start to fight back and fold already. Just look at your health insurance premiums. Remember that lock-out? Look at this most recent “shutdown” that lasted like 24 hours.