President Donald Trump and Senate Democrats have finally found something they can agree on: banning institutional investors from buying single-family rentals. But it won’t be the cure-all to the housing affordability crisis they think it will be.
“We want homes for people, not for corporations,” Trump said during the State of the Union address in February, touting his plan to cap institutional ownership to 100 single-family homes.
On Thursday, the Senate voted 89-10 to pass a bill containing number of measures to make housing more affordable, including banning any investor that owns at least 350 homes from buying more.
The proposed bans come as the U.S. housing market is facing a shortage of 4.7 million units, an all-time high according to Zillow, and the median age of the average first-time homebuyer in the United States has shot up to 40 years old.
The affordability crisis is real, but economists say both proposals won’t break fundamental barriers to homeownership and may backfire for the low-income Americans the bills aim to help.
