Us Will Ban Wall Street Investors From Buying Single-Family Homes
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The US government's proposed ban on Wall Street investors buying single-family homes has sparked a heated debate, with many commenters questioning the feasibility and sincerity of the plan. Some, like downrightmike, suspect it's just a ploy to solicit bribes, while others, like johnbellone, point out the potential constitutional hurdles, including a likely challenge from a conservative Supreme Court. As ceejayoz wryly notes, the actual title should read "Trump says US will ban Wall Street investors," highlighting the uncertainty surrounding the proposal's actual implementation. The discussion also touches on the thousands of homes already bought up by investors, raising questions about potential government seizure and just compensation.
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Manufacture a crisis only you can solve, for the right price.
Trump, notoriously, says all sorts of things.
I'm sure this'll come right after he finishes his healthcare plans in "two weeks".
Institutional investors only own about 0.5% of homes. If they're forced to stop buying, nothing will really change in a noticeable way. At best, small landlords and investors will scoop attractive properties up for slightly less.
Where they buy those homes matters though. In areas with lots of jobs/growth (often the areas experiencing the most housing price pain), that number is likely much higher.
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/03/1051941654/zillow-will-stop-b...
Which of those do you think is likely as a result of the proposed action, and why?
Come to think of it, I bet making homes less liquid would knock the divorce rate down more than anyone wants to believe it would, lol
Unfortunately by treating his every utterance as requiring attention he gets what he wants, the media gets clicks, bloggers get clicks, and people get to use it as part of an eternal argument over "what comes next".
People here at least should be more adept at recognizing and responding to patterns.
And which of his buddies does this benefit?
I'm trying to think if there will be ramifications to this...
- Obviously forced divestment of all Wall St owned single family homes could impact housing prices which is both the point, but of course... also hurts many families borrowing power and net worth
- I guess that crash could potentially have people paying lots of money for homes that aren't worth that much anymore, which sounds pretty negative
- Of course... wow, would it be nice to be able to afford something in the city I love (which I doubt will be impacted by this)
Of course, no clear plan here. Just Trump saying something, why wasn't the "Trump says" part kept in the headline here?
Like you said that also assumes it actually happens and isn't another incoherent ramble that is conveniently forgotten about or claimed he never said.
I mean if its legit I will cheer it on... but I remain skeptical.
I think the most likely explanation is pretty simple. Whenever people are unhappy with their economic situation, at the ballot box they take it out on whoever is currently in power, logic be damned. Politicians know this.
This is part of the crux, isn't it? It's a backbone of families' wealth and positioned as an investment. So there seems to be no winning: either choke off the young trying to buy or crack the nest egg of the old
See also: Bitcoin and the like (wild value fluctuations are the hallmark of a good currency)
Related article of interest: https://archinect.com/news/article/150496266/is-this-swiss-h...
The simple fact is, housing can either be affordable xor an investment[0].
Affordable means the prices are flat relative to inflation, which makes it a terrible investment. If it's a good investment, that means the price is going up faster than inflation, which quickly makes it unaffordable.
[0] I want to be clear that I'm referring to housing as an investment to mean buying a house purely for profit purposes, ie, to flip or to rent out. Buying a house to live in, rather than renting the house you live in, can be considered an "investment", but I mean to explicitly exclude that usage of "investment" in this comment.
A house bought for the purpose of renting out is a house that could have gone to someone who wanted to buy it. It creates upward pressure on housing prices.
I mean, I get it. There are some people that truly do want to rent a house because they know the living situation is temporary.
But we have a generation that was able to buy houses during an economic boom where you could buy a house with an entry-level job, and once that house was paid off, they started buying up houses with their extra money to rent out, and it was so lucrative that prices have skyrocketed and now people in their 20s can't buy houses without a decently lucrative job.
Obviously, there are many factors at work here, but buying or building houses with the intent to rent them out is certainly a contributor.
I just think about the fact that I bought my house in 2015 for about $340K, and it's now worth about $600K, an 80% climb in just 10 years, and I think that's absurd, not to mention a bad thing for society overall.
Often, mom-and-pop landlords are happy to be making more than the mortgage rather than MBAs trying to extract every possible marginal cent. It's less of a faceless spreadsheet relationship.
I guess time will tell if it's anything more than blowing smoke.
It will likely have close to zero impact on high-demand areas.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The U.S. president was due to sign unspecified executive orders later on Wednesday.
Anyways, I thought that issues with Americans being able to afford things like housing was all a hoax made up by Democrats?
Why craft policies to address a made up issue?
Very surprisingly progressive opinions from Trump.
I do completely agree though, the consumer surplus of housing should be captured by people. Not investors looking to profit.
It's extremely toxic to society when investors get to eat the utility of housing.
Trump does not possess many "locked-in" opinions. He can be persuaded to support anything if you are charismatic enough.
> Universities typically own housing as well.
I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.
I don't consider rich people trying to hide their identity to be "critical" at all. Maybe having their address public will be a way to force them to act with consideration of the community instead of just themselves for once while they hide in some anonymous mansion.
What part of "people at risk of doxing" made you jump to "rich people" rather than, for instance, "people in groups commonly attacked"?
> force them to act with consideration of the community
By doing what, precisely? "Have you tried not being (commonly attacked group here)?"
No thanks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532004
It costs relatively little to create an LLC. This is not an uncommon pattern for people in groups commonly targeted by hate-motivated doxing and similar attacks. This is not a "rich-person trick", and if you can afford a house, the cost of an LLC is a very tiny expense by comparison.
So your local cops, everyone on every local commission except the secretary, journalists, payday loan and tow company owners, etc.
EDIT: A quick web search shows that an estimated annual cost of $50-$400 for a registered agent in CA. So the cost is closer to $1k/yr.
Most states allow for this - I don't know about California, though.
That's what I mean: California may be different.
In my state, I don't need to register anything for the Nevada LLC.
> Not to mention you would need to pay an owner of record, probably a professional, to have their name on the LLC.
Whether that is public record depends on the legal requirements in your state. And in any case, costs for registered agent services are typically comparable to the costs of an LLC.
It creeped me out a bit and then I was angry when I realized it's the same way in the US, but maybe worse. In the US this is possible too, you just have to pay private data brokers and a bunch of middle men make a cheap buck. Employers sell your pay data, websites sell your address. Everyone makes a buck at your expense.
Otherwise everything you do, you have to first think about whether you are allowed to, like a slave.
I know multiple people who have gotten death threats because of technical comments they made online. Not the vague "I'm going to kill you" kind, the "here's a picture of your front door on Google Street View, and an unsolicited pizza, I could SWAT you at any arbitrary 3am, have fun being afraid" type.
How about you make an iron clad promise people will be safe? How about if someone dies because of your minor concerns, you go to jail for life?
Would you be so "oh well" then?
It’s not like that’s the only way to hide your identity, it’s just one currently available. Plus it’s a very trivial to look up who owns an LLC at least in my state. Not the best solution IMO
Either way I think you’re being a little uncharitable towards them. I don’t think they’re trivializing it, I think they’re asking a very legitimate question.
A better solution would be to stop putting people's addresses in public records, and eliminating data brokers that expose name/address correlations.
This is by definition not whataboutism. Whataboutism is when you distract from a thing with unrelated things (e.g. "but there are more important bad things going on in the world than this!"). It is not whataboutism to bring up legitimate related counterarguments for a policy.
The public, i.e. the people on this planet, have a right to know who is claiming to own which part of the grass and soil that we all share.
This is a really complicated and broad topic that I cant take the time to type out here. I do not stand on the side of "I have nothing to hide." I fully understand the risks of that position. People must keep some secrets to protect themselves from society. Especially as everything devolves into increasingly strict "purity" tests.
With that said, I don't think the right to obfuscate real estate transactions is the same as spicy personal beliefs/private conversations/etc. IMO there is nothing more public than real estate. I do not consider real estate transactions as protected speech nor one that can be legally hidden. We live in this world together.
I have a hard time believing lots of people care to do that - not many take steps for privacy - or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.
Privacy mechanisms aren't just what applies to your or my perspectives, there are millions of other situations. For example, most counties in Texas identify the full legal name(s), phone number(s), and mailing address(es) of every single property owner and their tax payment amount and status. That'd get really weird, real quick for celebrities if there weren't any concealment mechanism.
Privacy isn't a binary or continuous thing, but is possible to varying degrees and requires navigating government and business processes carefully.
Costs about 200$ at most places and can be done online.
There are generous protections in most states for your personal home that you lose if it's owned by an LLC. This includes things like a homestead exemption in bankruptcy protection.
In Florida, for example, there are better options to keep yourself anonymous. Florida has something called a land trust [1].
[1]: https://www.jimersonfirm.com/blog/2024/04/understanding-the-...
Trusts are in the same boat. If you're using the LLC as a pass-through, these restrictions won't apply to you unless an orange cat is charged with drafting.
But short-term it'll hurt availability. One of the most common ways to enshittify cities is buying an SFH, demolishing it, and plopping a 3-4 apartment complex in its place.
I don’t think cities should force density, but there’s no reason to go the other way either as long as growth is managed properly in terms of traffic, transit, and infrastructure.
Nope. The ONLY way to get cheaper housing is by reducing the city population.
> Supply and demand.
Sigh. No. You assume that the demand is fixed. It's not. By building new housing, you _increase_ the demand. And always faster than you can satisfy it.
I just love this example:
Forbes 2016 - "Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build", "The Great Urban Myth: 'Cities Can't Build Their Way To Affordable Housing'"
Reuters 2023 - "Surging Tokyo property prices squeeze out young professionals",
Japandaily 2025: "Housing Crisis: Families Struggle to Buy Homes in Tokyo" ( https://japandaily.jp/housing-crisis-families-struggle-to-bu... )
> Rentals in a dense complex are cheaper than standalone rentals or duplexes, townhomes are cheaper than SFH, etc.
Try to find a city where dense housing made it cheaper.
The problem with this is that you can’t forcibly reduce population. Halting growth in one area just displaces it. This can be a good trade if the area into which growth is displaced is underdeveloped with few other potential uses. But it can also create Atlanta or Houston style sprawl, or destroy natural areas that would be better to preserve.
Japan is an unusual example because most job opportunities are in a handful of areas. You can get impossibly cheap properties in the countryside but there are few jobs or young people. Properties in the city keep getting more expensive because building codes are constantly evolving to keep up with new developments in earthquake protection. There are older urban properties available for cheap outside of trendy areas, but the cost of renovation is often too high to be worth it. There’s also a cultural stigma around older properties.
We don't need to. The population growth in the Western world is mostly over, the US will likely peak at barely +10% to the current population numbers. Europe is likely already at or near the peak number.
And Tokyo managed to get a bubble within a country with a _falling_ population. Not just stagnant like in Europe, but actually numerically decreasing.
> Halting growth in one area just displaces it.
That's EXACTLY what we need. The US already has 1.1 houses per household, except that they are not where the demand is.
So the fix is to shift the demand, not try to satisfy it. Ironically, this is exactly the same method that urbanists propose to fight congestion: instead of just adding more lanes to busy roads, you shift people to other modes of transportation.
How can this be done? Exactly like we did it with pollution: tax negative externalities, incentivize clean technology. For cities: tax dense office space (cap-and-trade can also work), incentivize work-from-home, incentivize offices in less dense cities, etc.
This doesn't even have to be a huge policy shift.
If the combination of AI, declining returns on service and knowledge-based work, and national security priorities create a resurgence in manufacturing then factory towns may make a comeback.
During the pandemic, some research had shown that something like 70-80% of jobs can be remote.
The kicker is that remote work is less efficient. So in the long run and on average, companies with in-office jobs outperform fully remote companies. This is just like the situation with pollution: a company that spends money on waste recovery is less competitive than a company that can just dump toxic sludge into a nearby river.
And just like with pollution, centralized regulatory changes are needed so that all companies are affected similarly.
> The policies you suggest also seem difficult politically since most environmentalists seem to want more density, not less.
Yet they are misguided because they keep looking at the very tip of an iceberg. It's just one example out of many (see: nuclear power plants).
To give an example, light rail is more efficient than individual EVs. So it's great that Seattle is building light rail, right? It'll result in fewer "headline" CO2 emissions.
But then you realize that Seattle is going to spend $180B ("B", as in "billion") to build about 50 miles of tracks. It's more than the yearly GDP of 130 countries! All these resources could have been spent on something else, perhaps on building more renewable generation.
In the real world, though, a Georgist style LVT probably has about as much chance to be enacted as any of these other policies. Unfortunately I think we’re going to run the current system into the ground.
I have not run the numbers, but intuitively it seems that this tax will kill the SFH long before it starts affecting the dense office space.
> In the real world, though, a Georgist style LVT probably has about as much chance to be enacted as any of these other policies. Unfortunately I think we’re going to run the current system into the ground.
I think there is a real chance, there is this current of massive dissatisfaction. People _feel_ that something is just not right with the current situation. With the populists proposing the usual easy solutions: "it's all immigrants, ICE them out" or "it's all fault of the end stage capitalism, we need socialized grocery stores".
Well yes, but that's not at all something intrinsic to the process, it's just a dysfunction that Seattle is suffering — along with most of the rest of North America.
In 2002, Toronto paid less than $1b to build the 5.5km of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_Sheppard , which is fully underground subway running on a custom gauge for historical reasons.
Last year, we finished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_6_Finch_West , which is light rail running at-grade on standard gauge. It's not even twice as long but cost 3.6x as much. For light rail. And it's apparently running well below design speed and at least initially with terrible signal priority.
Currently we are building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_5_Eglinton, just over five times as long. It's light rail at a combination of underground, at grade and elevated; current projected total cost is $17.5b. So, three and a half times as much per unit distance, for what is supposed to be a considerably less expensive option.
Prices for other things have not gone so crazy in that time frame. But yeah, it isn't costing us anywhere near 3.6b USD/mile (about 3.1b CAD/km) for light rail. Yet.
Not just light rail, but even regular water and sewer. San Francisco spent half a decade repaving a few blocks (Van Ness bus rapid transit) because they had to slowly dig through unmapped ancient infrastructure.
Even in the case of Toronto, you're looking at amounts that can buy each incremental rider a new house. In case of Seattle, each household is going to pay around $150k for that rail.
It's simply ridiculous.
Are there cities where replacing denser housing with single-family homes made housing cheaper?
A really good example is Copenhagen, the world's most liveable city. Its current population is still _less_ than during the 1970's peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope... The driver for the decrease was suburban migration, as cars became more accessible.
The US _itself_ is a great example. The suburban development created cheap housing for the rapidly growing population in 60-s.
Obviously housing built outside the city will be cheaper than within it, and that might work for people who don't want to live in the city, but the hypothesis is that the prices within the city increase when more housing (denser housing) is added within the city, right?
After all, building more housing in the city isn't mutually exclusive with building housing outside the city.
I don't have all the information on Copenhagen yet. The stats from 1970-s are not available online, so I commissioned someone to get the data from the archives.
The available data basically shows that prices were stagnant during the 70-80-s and started rising in the 90-s.
> After all, building more housing in the city isn't mutually exclusive with building housing outside the city.
I think it is mutually exclusive, exactly because of the population growth (the lack thereof). Each dense apartment in a city core means one less house in a rural area somewhere.
Japan, that I gave as an example, has literally free houses that anyone can get for nothing but the government real estate transaction fees. Just 3-4 hours away from Tokyo.
But that's not true, is it? Most people in the US want to live in suburban SFHs, yet they are often forced to live in apartments. But that's not a viable option for them because the jobs are only available in dense cities.
> It kind of sounds like when you're talking about reducing the density of a city, you're actually referring to keeping the density of the city the same, and building SFHs in places that aren't the city
Correct.
> which actually increases the density of those non-city places
And technically increases the housing price there from zero to some value, just as predicted :)
> But that's not true, is it?
It certainly is: look at the price of housing in New York City, then look at the price of housing in Newark, New Jersey. Many people want to live in the former, but must settle for the latter, due to lack of affordable NYC housing. Then look at the price of housing in say, Cheyenne, Wyoming: Even cheaper, because people want to live there even less.
Or look at your own example: People want to live in Tokyo more than they want to live 3-4 hours outside of Tokyo, hence the pricing for the latter is lower.
> Most people in the US want to live in suburban SFHs, yet they are often forced to live in apartments.
Apartments outside the city, the worst of both worlds. And in my experience, most people in the US want lots of square footage, and only settle for suburbia because they are priced out of having it in the city.
The contrast to consider here, is that many people in the US want to live in the city, yet they are often forced to live outside the city, because housing within the city is too expensive. So how would increasing the price of in-city housing (by reducing the supply, by replacing denser housing with less-dense housing) allow them to realize their city-living desires?
> And technically increases the housing price there
Which is bad (the goal is to decrease the housing price), and still doesn't address the issue of people being priced out of living in the city, which is where they want to live.
It seems much more realistic to freeze growth than reverse it. Even then, growth in surrounding areas or other factors can quickly make the area more desirable and expensive as in SF.
This is the first time I see this bold claim, what evidence do you have to prove it?
The only price decreases happened only during the 2008 crisis and during the pandemic lockdowns, due to local population decreasing.
This is an easy thing for Trump to promise (after all, little family-owned real-estate developer operations like his would never be affected). But who owns the homes is not going to change the problem that Americans have underdeveloped housing supply by over a million homes.
the issue isn't just yield-seeking corps, it's opaque shell companies (llcs) using real estate as a store of value / money laundering vehicle. vancouver showed how this decouples prices from local wages completely. the us has this exact vulnerability—anonymous delaware/wyoming llcs buying in cash, specifically in supply-constrained cities like ny or miami.
this only works because of zoning. if nimbys didn't artificially cap supply, housing would be a depreciating consumer good (like in Japan) rather than a deflation-proof asset class. zoning is what turns a house into a safe deposit box for offshore capital.
if the corporate transparency act that Trump vetoed is successful then I expect to see the real estate become US's top source of GDP like it is for Canada.
The dynamics in the countries that don't have zoning is exactly the same. Price bubble and misery for everyone in dense cities.
There will be no affordable housing in cities, whatever you do, short of nuking everything from the orbit.
I also have no idea what statutory authority he has to enforce this. Surely it requires Congress or at least the FTC chair. And if there's enough vested opposition it's going to be challenged in court pretty quickly.
Outside of a few metro areas where institutional ownership is very high, I don't think this would change anything. As long as houses remain an attractive investment, non-institutional smaller investors will happily buy the properties for a few thousand dollars less than the institutions would.
Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor.
It’s more complex than just reducing tariffs and inviting cheap labor. It’s systemic red tape put in by the large builders to prevent anyone but them to be able to build. When they do build, it’s never to code. The code they themselves help write. Ryan Homes for example…
Having done some extensive remodeling and building work in recent years and going to great lengths to follow building codes, this just isn't it. The type of lumber you can use for most framing jobs isn't that special. Having walked through a number of new construction properties and seeing what passes code, I don't think relaxing lumber standards would be a good idea, nor buy us anything.
When lumber, cabinetry, and other building products have tariffs in the range of 10-50%, you can't tell me that tariffs are not the primary problem driving costs up right now. There just isn't a secret stash of lesser grade lumber lying around that would also be perfectly good for building homes.
This is why everyone on the internet screeches "well I put up a deck and it wasn't so hard". Try and do a new build of literally any structure and get back to me. Or worse, a construction type that is not the regional default for whatever it is you're doing.
Reality for new construction is way, way, way worse than homeowners think.
Unless you know a guy, in which case it's all open doors and green lights because that's how local politics always is.
LOL, in my city, which is the capital city of our state, the city planning committee and property developers are all friends. By which I don't mean "having a drink at a community event", I mean openly posting on social media about their families going on vacation together, "Loved our family spending the week at this airbnb with the X family! So many good times and memories!"
There was a vote about a measure to change up some tenant's rights in the city code (strengthening them).
It passed 12-1. One dissenter, a Mrs [can't remember] Greene.
Didn't think anything of it until someone pointed out "Oh, you mean [can't remember] Greene, wife of Jim Greene, owner and CEO of the second largest PM company in the County, Greene Property Management?"
"Someone should ask her whether she's representing her constituents or her husband and his clients."
It's so much easier than the renovation work I'm doing.
> Try and do a new build of literally any structure and get back to me. Or worse, a construction type that is not the regional default for whatever it is you're doing.
Please don't be so condescending. I'm talking about my experience with home building in a thread about building homes. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with whatever you were building, but we're talking about homes.
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