Housing prices have locked millions of working- and middle-class families out of the market. Congress, prodded by President Trump, has finally started to respond. The opening move is the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — and corporate America, along with its think-tank megaphones, is already howling.
In January, on the one-year anniversary of his return to the White House, Trump signed an executive order directing his Cabinet to lay out rules that would ban large financial firms from buying up massive chunks of single-family housing.
Some Republicans are treating the legislation as if it’s ‘Liz Warren’s bill.’ It isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of policy populist conservatives have wanted for years.
It was a smart move. Private equity has targeted entry-level homes in fast-growing markets, paying cash and converting starter neighborhoods into permanent rental pools. The D.C. commentariat loves to point out that institutional ownership is “small” nationally. That argument obscures the real numbers. The harm is local, concentrated, and immediate — exactly where young families are trying to buy.
Wall Street’s favorite targets sit in the Sun Belt: Atlanta, where a 2024 Government Accountability Office study put the share of single-family rental homes owned by investors at 25%; Jacksonville and Tampa, where the shares stood at 21% and 15%; Charlotte at 18%; and Phoenix at 14%. Other major targets include Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville, Orlando, and Raleigh, North Carolina.
Trump put a human face on the policy during his State of the Union address.
“With us tonight is Rachel Wiggins, a mom of two from Houston,” he said. “She placed bids on 20 homes and lost all of those bids to gigantic investment firms that bypassed inspection, paid all cash, and turned all those houses into rentals, stealing away her American dream.”
Then he made the point that matters: Executive orders don’t last.
“Now I’m asking Congress to make that ban permanent, because homes for people — really, that’s what we want. We want homes for people, not for corporations.”
That line is the essence of the fight. Most executive orders are glorified press releases. Sure, agencies can move the levers of government. But regulations can be reversed as quickly as they’re written. Congress makes law. In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, Republicans should lock in what works and build from there.
Three weeks after the address, the Senate passed its version of the bill, 89-9-1. It’s a compromise package, as any major bill must be without a filibuster-proof majority. Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) negotiated it. Now it’s in the House, where senators warn that gutting the compromise could kill the whole effort for the year.
The backlash from the think-tank world came quickly. The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto complained the bill “would turn what has been a legal and permissible activity … into a suspect activity heavily regulated by the U.S. Treasury.” American Compass founder and chief economist Oren Cass had the correct response: That’s not a rebuttal so much as a basic definition of public policy.
“The observation that Congress has identified an activity that has been permissible and is proposing to give an agency authority to regulate it is not an argument against the proposal,” Cass wrote on X.com.
“Sometimes public policy is good.”
The ever-irrelevant Cato Institute went farther, insisting it makes no sense for “corporations” to buy homes “to the detriment of other people.” The quotation marks do most of the work there. Corporate money doesn’t buy up neighborhoods out of charity.
“The interests of the American family and corporations diverge when it comes to housing prices,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told the Brief. “Their interest is to increase the housing costs so they can make more money, period. And if that’s not it, they’re not a very good corporation.” (Disclosure: I serve on the APP’s board of directors.)
House Republicans have their own skeptics. Some are treating the legislation as if it’s “Liz Warren’s bill.” It isn’t. It’s the first tiny step Congress has taken in years to confront inflated home prices and the corporate churn making starter homes harder to buy. It’s exactly the kind of policy populist conservatives have wanted for years.
Some conservatives also argue that Washington shouldn’t interfere. But Washington already interfered — it built the corporate legal structure that shields institutional players in ways ordinary families and small businesses cannot possibly match. Pretending the market is “pure” now is a choice, not a principle.
Large investors do play a role in housing finance and construction. Nobody denies that. But families form the foundation of stable towns, neighborhoods — and nations. A first home is how families build wealth, put down roots, and get ahead.
“Let me put this in a way Republicans can understand,” Schilling said with a grin. “We need a preemptive strike against the corporations that are jacking up our housing prices.”
Corporate ownership of single-family homes isn’t a passing blip. It’s a growing problem — and one Congress can start clipping now if House Republicans will back the president and pass the Senate’s proposal.
“My administration,” Trump declared in February, “will take decisive action to stop Wall Street from treating America’s neighborhoods like a trading floor and empower American families to own their homes.”
One bill won’t fix the housing market problem. But Congress can take a first step — and prove it still knows the difference between market orthodoxy and the American dream.
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