Housing affordability has been a pressing issue in America. While many people point to supply shortages, rising material costs and stagnant wages as drivers behind the crisis, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes there's another culprit — corporations.
"The real reason that housing has outpaced anything else is because there are three giant corporations: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street," Kennedy said at a recent event in Los Angeles.
He said that these three companies already own 88% of the S&P 500, and now they are coming after single-family homes in America.
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This makes things a lot more challenging for people trying to buy a home.
"We all hear these stories of somebody, a friend or ourselves who tried to buy a home, was about to put the money down, sign the contract, go into escrow, and at the last minute, somebody comes in with a cash offer and takes it off the table. And you're saying who is this with the cash offer? And so you look into it and it's an LLC with an ambiguous name. And if you pull the strings and follow the breadcrumbs that leads you to BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard," Kennedy said.
Corporations can secure financing for real estate at costs 30% less than the richest people in the country, Kennedy said. This gives them a significant advantage over typical American homebuyers.
"So they can outbid you, and they can outbid your children. Our families are now competing against these companies, which are trying to buy every single-family home," he said.
Will Corporations Become ‘Everybody's Landlord'?
In a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, earlier this month, Kennedy projected that by 2030, giant corporations are on track to own 60% of single-family homes in America.
"So BlackRock wants to be everybody's landlord and everybody's neighbor, but I'm not going to let that happen," he said.
Should he be elected president, Kennedy said he would introduce a federal program that backs mortgages at 3%, financed by tax-free bonds. The mortgages would be available exclusively to individuals, excluding corporations.
"This will drop mortgage payments by more than $1,000 a month for a medium-priced home and allow your children to out-compete BlackRock in the market," he said.
Kennedy added that he would also change the tax code to discourage corporations from owning single-family homes.
Annual Income Needed For A Median-Priced US Home
The Federal Reserve has implemented significant interest rate hikes over the past year and a half to combat rampant inflation. While high interest rates can cool the housing market, they also lead to bigger mortgage payments.
According to The State of the Nation's Housing 2023 report from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, the annual income needed to afford payments on a median-priced home in the U.S. is now $117,100, up nearly $20,000 from last year.
And that means millions of households are now priced out of the market.
"The number of renter households able to afford these higher payments shrunk by 32%, from 7.5 million to 5.1 million, a loss of 2.4 million potential homebuyers," the Harvard researchers said.
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