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Housing is a Human Right — Unless You’re a Landlord

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Summary

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Homes have been turned into a profit engine. Private equity, mega-landlords, and short-term rental platforms have financialised shelter, driving rents up, hollowing out communities, and pushing families towards precarious living or homelessness. Since the 2008 crash, institutional investors have hoovered up single-family houses and apartment blocks, while software now “coordinates” rent rises across cities. At the same time, entire neighbourhoods have been converted into tourist accommodation. Policy-makers have mostly watched it happen. This piece names the model, shows how it works, and sets out what it will take to make housing a right in practice rather than a slogan.

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Wall Street’s landlord era

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After the mortgage bubble burst, the same industry that detonated the economy discovered a new trade: renting your former house back to you. Foreclosed homes were bulk-bought at discount, converted to rentals, and bundled into new securities. The business matured fast. Today, a handful of firms manage vast portfolios: suburban houses, downtown towers, student dorms, and manufactured-home parks. Some analysts now project that institutions could control close to 40% of single-family rentals by 2030—a scale that lets finance set the terms for everyone else. multifamilydive.com

And the model is simple. Treat housing like any other leveraged asset: raise revenue, cut cost, churn faster. That means rent hikes and “amenity fees”, lean staffing, deferred repairs, and aggressive “non-renewals” to cycle out long-time tenants on lower rents. It’s not a glitch when the lift breaks, the bins overflow, or the boiler goes cold for weeks; it’s margin.

Crucially, the new landlord power is co-ordinated. Investigations have shown that big managers feed data into revenue-management software that recommends rent increases in step across markets—a de-facto cartel enforced by code. Lawsuits and federal scrutiny followed as evidence mounted that price-setting algorithms helped landlords move in lock-step rather than compete. ProPublica+1

You feel it even if you never meet a “private equity” owner. When a large portfolio lifts asking rents by 5–10% in a district, “market rate” rises for everyone. Agents update their comparables, smaller landlords increase demands, and the baseline shifts. That is how a technical tweak in a spreadsheet becomes the difference between keeping a flat and an eviction notice.

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Evictions as a feature, not a failure

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In the finance-landlord playbook, eviction is not an embarrassment—it’s a lever. Automation makes it easy: software generates filings the day a payment is late, stacking late fees and legal charges onto already-stressed households. Research has shown that large corporate owners file at higher rates than small ones; in some metro areas, filings touch a fifth of households in a single year. The churn is the point: push out older tenants, refresh at a higher rent, revalue the asset, refinance or flip. National Low Income Housing CoalitionSSRN

Manufactured-home communities—once among the last truly affordable options—were a sitting duck. Residents may own their home but rent the plot; moving the unit is often impossible or ruinously expensive. When private equity rolls in, lot fees and utilities spike, rules tighten, and long-standing neighbours are forced out one by one. It is “value-add investing” with human lives as the input.

The cumulative effect is visible in every city that has seen a wave of acquisitions: higher average rents, steeper renewal jumps, and a quicker route from arrears to court. Put bluntly, the asset performs when the human doesn’t.

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Airbnb-isation. When neighbourhoods become hotels

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All this would be bad enough without a parallel market siphoning homes into tourism. What began as spare-room sharing became a professionalised industry of “entire unit” listings. In many hot spots, 10–20% of local stock is now in short-term rental circulation part of the year, and sometimes year-round. The economics are obvious: nightly rates outgun monthly rents, so owners pivot to tourists.

The impact is measurable. A leading study found that a 1% rise in Airbnb listings is associated with a 0.018% rise in local rents and a 0.26% rise in house prices; scaled over the explosive growth of listings, that translates into material rent pressure. Harvard Business Review Marketing Department

Cities have started to push back. New York City’s 2023 registration law wiped out a huge share of listings virtually overnight; Barcelona is moving to ban tourist apartment rentals by 2028. But enforcement is uneven, loopholes abound, and the model spreads to new markets as fast as it is curbed in old ones. Bloomberg The Guardian

What’s left behind is a neighbourhood that looks the same on a postcard but feels like a hotel: key-safes on every door, rolling suitcases at 2 a.m., bins overflowing on Monday, no PTA, no neighbour who’ll take a parcel. And the few remaining flats for locals are bid up because the rest are reserved for weekends.

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Homelessness in an age of plenty

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It should be impossible to have mass homelessness in a country with millions of vacant homes. Yet here we are. The U.S., for example, faces a documented shortage of 7.3 million rental homes affordable and available to its lowest-income households, while luxury towers sit dark and speculative stock is drip-fed to market. National Low Income Housing Coalition

Homelessness is often framed as a pathology problem; it is overwhelmingly an affordability problem. When rents spike faster than wages, precarious families fall first: single parents juggling shifts, carers on fixed incomes, new graduates in service jobs. A missed paycheque becomes arrears; arrears become an automated filing; the filing becomes a negative mark that locks you out of the next place. Round and round.

Look at how manufactured-home residents describe the slide: years of stability, then a sudden private-equity acquisition, then fee creep, then a formal rent jump, then the whispered advice to “move before they file”. Community groups document the same pattern across the Midwest and Sunbelt—stories that rarely make national news because the units don’t look like the skyline. Iowa Public RadioKGAN

The brutal paradox is that this is not a story of scarcity alone. It is a story of allocation—who gets to use existing homes, on what terms, and in whose interest they are kept empty.

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How policy helped build the crisis

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If markets are doing what markets do, governments have done what they too often do: deregulate when they should protect, subsidise the top while rationing the bottom, and confuse “housing supply” in the abstract with “homes people can afford to live in”.

After 2008, U.S. policy actively facilitated the bulk sale of foreclosed homes to investors rather than keeping people in place or prioritising non-profits. In the U.K., a decades-long attack on council housing met a wave of overseas investment in new-build stock that was never priced for nurses and teachers. Berlin sold off public housing in the 2000s and has spent the 2020s trying to unwind that disaster; in 2021, 56% of Berliners voted for a referendum to expropriate large corporate landlords, an extraordinary sign of how fed up renters are. OIDP

For all the “supply, supply, supply” talk, the private market is not in the habit of building deeply affordable homes at scale, because the numbers don’t pencil out without subsidy. That’s why the U.S. keeps producing luxury rentals and build-to-rent suburbs while the shortage for the lowest-income households grows. The best national accounting shows the gap clearly—and it has been getting worse. National Low Income Housing Coalition

Then there are the algorithms. Even where rent control is weak or absent, competition law is supposed to protect the public from collusion. When code and data sharing stand in for a smoke-filled room, regulators must step in. Lawsuits and a federal antitrust push around RealPage’s rent-setting tools are a start—but only a start. ProPublica+1

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What works: proof, not vibes

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There is no single silver bullet. There is, however, a bundle of policies with evidence behind them:

Vacancy taxes. Vancouver’s Empty Homes Tax reduced the number of long-term vacant properties by more than half within a few years and returned units to the rental pool while funding social housing. It did not cure affordability, but it did change behaviour. vancouver.caC.D. Howe Institute

Short-term rental rules that actually bite. New York’s registration regime and Barcelona’s planned ban on tourist flats are examples of shifting default use back to locals. These measures must be enforced, not merely announced. BloombergThe Guardian

Tenant purchase rights and co-ops. Washington, D.C.’s TOPA gives tenants a first shot at buying their buildings—often with public backing—before they are flipped to the next investor. That keeps homes in community hands and stabilises rents over the long term. code.dccouncil.govota.dc.govD.C. Policy Center

Mass public and social housing. Finland’s Housing First strategy is not a TED Talk, it’s a programme: build and acquire housing, get people indoors first, wrap support around them. Chronic homelessness plummeted. Treat housing like infrastructure and you get infrastructure results. PathfindersFeantsa Research

Stronger renter protections. Just-cause eviction rules, limits on exploitative fees, and access to legal counsel cut down on unnecessary displacement. In a tight market, basic due process is a lifeline, not red tape. homelesslaw.org

Targeted supply. Zoning reform that speeds affordable and social housing where jobs and transport already are. Incentives and public land should follow need, not speculation.

Competition enforcement. Ban or strictly regulate rent-setting algorithms and data-sharing consortia. If landlords want to raise prices, they can do it the old-fashioned way—by competing and being transparent about it.

Limits on institutional hoarding. The public interest is not served by letting a handful of funds amass city-sized portfolios of the most essential good in society. Taxes on short-hold “flips”, restrictions on bulk buying of existing stock, and disclosure requirements are a democratic response to a market failure.

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The right that isn’t

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Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living. That is not a radical statement. It is a statement that, if taken seriously, would end the practice of treating homes as an extractive asset first and shelter second. United NationsOHCHR

At minimum, it means designing policy for outcomes—not outputs. An “extra 5,000 units” that are unaffordable to the median renter is a press release, not a solution. A slick new tower kept deliberately empty is an accounting trick, not “supply”.

If we can coordinate rents with software, we can coordinate fairness with law. If we can automate filings to throw families out, we can automate enforcement to keep landlords honest. And if we can move billions overnight to rescue financial assets, we can build social housing.

The status quo is a choice. The alternative is a choice, too.

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Conclusion: homes for people, not portfolios

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Financialisation turned housing from a place to live into a place to extract. It does what it was built to do: convert human need into quarterly returns. But cities do not have to be run for spreadsheets. The tools exist—vacancy taxes, STR enforcement, tenant purchase rights, mass social housing, renter protections, competition law—to unwind the most destructive features of the current model.

We can do the adult thing and accept that some parts of life are too essential to be left to algorithmic cartels and vulture spreadsheets. Or we can keep congratulating ourselves on “vibrant” housing markets while teachers couch-surf and pensioners choose between rent and heat.

Housing is a human right. Time to legislate as if we mean it.

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