CAROL ROTH: Americans Should Not Have to Rent the American Dream.

In recent years, the balance sheets of young and old alike have been wrecked by inflation, debt and college loans. Home prices have also been driven up by undersupply, government regulation, and even corporate competition.

With that, more Americans are finding their dream isn’t attainable—it is only for rent.

Corporations have been given a huge advantage through government and central bank policy. With this unlevel playing field, these institutional investors drove up the prices in traditional asset classes. When they couldn’t find enough of a return on their investment from the usual sources, Wall Street-backed corporate investors decided to come into the single-family home market.

The New York Times Magazine reported that “from 2007 to 2011, 4.7 million households lost homes to foreclosure, and a million more to short sale. Private-equity firms developed new ways to secure credit, enabling them to leverage their equity and acquire an astonishing number of homes.”

It was an epic transfer of wealth.

Moreover, it consolidated power with big institutions and has impaired the ability of many Americans to gain wealth via home ownership.

While there was no meaningful institutional corporate investment in the housing market prior to 2010, at the end of 2022, more than one in every five homes was purchased from a corporate investor, according to CoreLogic.

Imagine for a moment an America without broad individual home ownership.

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