RFK Jr. blasts big corporations pricing Americans out of home ownership.

 

RFK Jr. Benzinga

Democratic presidential candidate RFK Jr. blasts big corporations pricing Americans out of home ownership. Benzinga. RFK Jr. says that three giant corporations, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are coming after single family homes. Those corporations are able to outbid family buyers and can secure loans at a dramatically lower cost. Kennedy projects by 2030 the big corporations will control 60% of all single family homes in America. Kennedy said he would offer loans at a much lower rate and would make those cheap loans exclusively to individuals. The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates to try and reduce inflation but has made the yearly income necessary to purchase a median priced home is now $117,100. 

My Comment:

RFK Jr. is missing the elephant in the room and that is uncontrolled immigration, which is also causing real estate to skyrocket. To be fair, most of those illegal immigrants aren't buying homes, but they are driving up housing costs in general. If these people were getting deported prices would come down quite a bit. 

But the actions of these corporations is a major problem as well. They can absolutely outbid anyone that is trying to buy a house, often by offering tens of thousands of dollars over asking price. People simply can't compete with that, even if they are wealthy themselves. And middle class people? Forget it.

Nobody seems to be willing to do anything about this either. RFK Jr. is the only candidate I hear talking about it in either party, and he has basically no chance of winning in 2024. You would think Republicans, who hate BlackRock, would be pushing back against this but they are not. I think that's a mistake because the middle class and even upper middle class voters they need to win in 2024 are deeply concerned about this issue. 

But I also don't know what could be done about this, short of banning big corporations from buying single family homes, and that sounds like it would be hugely disruptive and possibly illegal. Breaking up these big investment firms might be a solution but again, can it even be done? And is there anyone willing to do it? 

I don't know if RFK's idea of giving people low interest loans would help things. Even if the cost of loans was a lot cheaper it still wouldn't do anything to stop these big firms from offering tens of thousands of dollars above asking price. It might help with the absurdly high loan prices right now but that's not the real problem. 

This issue is petty close to me, I have been looking for a home for the past couple of years but I just can't keep up with rising interest rates. Home prices here in Northeast Wisconsin are comparatively low but with interest rates going up my savings goal keeps getting higher and higher. And I am not even at the point where I'm actively putting offers on homes. It really feels like I am going to be stuck in an apartment forever...