xfreedHomelessness
IninewCrowWhat about the shareholders? … if we deal with homelessness, it will affect the shareholders!
Won’t someone think of the shareholders?!?
Okay, this bullshit. It’s not shareholders who would be negatively affected by this, and it’s not shareholders who are actively working against doing something about the problem. Shareholders are just an easy acceptable target to point your fingers at, whether it makes sense or not.
What needs to be done to tackle the homelessness problem (not the only thing, but probably the most important one) is to zone much, much more land inside or directly next to cities for affordable mid-rise multi-family homes. Guess who is opposed to that and has the power to do something about it? Existing property owners. Specifically owners of detached single family homes. Because doing that would negatively affect their property values. Personally, I think that shouldn’t matter, because what good is living in home that is worth absurd amounts of money on paper going to do you if society is falling apart because of it? But home owners are always massively concerned about their property values and will torpedo anything that might threaten it. Of course, pointing your fingers at home owners is much dicier than pointing them at shareholders, because even in a bubble like this one, you are bound to point at some people here who will feel personally attacked by that…
“Shareholders”, on the other hand, aside from those that are also home owners at the same time, don’t really have much reason to care one way or another about effective projects to reduce homelessness.
Have you heard of REITs? Rent-seeking capitalists have been working together for decades to speculate on housing. Wealthy people have billions and billions of dollars invested in the status quo, and they are quite interested in maintaining their position of power.
REITs typically own commercial real estate not SFH. The big key is that the government props up real estate companies with low interest rates.
Commercial real estate includes anything over 4-unit complexes. It really is irrelevant if a individual or a reit owns large apartment complexes.
From the article:
Residential REITs can hold virtually any collection of residential rental property, from hundreds of single-family homes to mobile home parks, boutique apartment buildings, or huge multifamily complexes.
Sorry, but its just accurate, its too difficult for a reit to buy SFH because its a bunch of transactions, and they just are not profitable and it becomes a play on interest rates and speculation. Rent on a SFH is much much lower per invested capital to multi families. That is why REITs mainly just do commercial.
The issue with SFH is just how hard and costly it is to build, not competitions with REITs or investors.
And the percent that I found is they own 1% of SFH rentals. So like I said, REITs mainly just do commercial.
Thanks for being patient with me, and I guess it’s just semantics. But personally, when I hear something like “REITs typically don’t own SFH”, I infer it to mean that such REITs are pretty hard to find or something, not just relatively uncommon. But I understand you now.
There might be REITs that do exclusively SFH, I dont know, but I think that rental market is dominated by smaller landlords.