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As CBS News Atlanta previously reported, more than one in four single-family rental homes in metro Atlanta are owned by large corporate investors — more than 72,000 homes — giving the region one of the highest concentrations of institutional ownership anywhere in the United States.

Housing advocates have argued that those companies can outbid families with cash offers, reducing the number of homes available to first-time buyers while contributing to higher home prices and rents.

Warnock has repeatedly cited those trends in pushing the legislation, saying corporate investors have increasingly treated homes as financial assets instead of places for families to live.

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That’s genuinely fantastic news.

The skeptic, pessimistic part of me now wants to know how BlackRock et al will get around this with creative corporate and financial shell games, because I’m absolutely sure they will try to do just that.

[-] Legonatic@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

An important distinction here is that BlackRock is not a PE firm. They are an asset management company. Now, that's not to say they're not in the business of buying up homes, just that they're not PE. Blackstone is the PE firm which has been buying up single family homes. They're different companies. Both evil though.

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 88 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Blackrock splits into redrock, orangerock, yellowrock, etc.

All owned by rainbowrock (a blackrock® company).

Because it's not a ban on private equity purchasing homes, it's a limit of 350 going forward. Because as if that limit isn't absurdly high (it should be more like 3) it's also unlikely to hold up in court. They should have levied increasing taxes.

Frankly the limit should be 0 for private equity. The only exception should be for mortgage lenders (for obvious reasons) who should also not be ownable by PE or VC.

It should not be legal for corporations to own a residential property outside of the context of a mortgage. Any corporation (here, including banks) owning a residence for the purpose of rental income should be flat out illegal as well.

[-] bizarroland@lemmy.world 40 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If it were me, I would have just passed a federal tax on property where whatever the local city, state, and county taxes are, there's also a federal levy of property taxes of the exact same amount multiplied by the number of properties each taxpaying owner owns - 1.

So if you own one home, you pay no additional taxes.

If you and your spouse own two homes, you pay no additional taxes.

But if you own five 1 million dollar properties as a single person and the property taxes on each of those properties is $5,000, then instead of paying a total of $25,000 in property taxes as a single homeowner, you would pay

$5,000 * 4 * 4 + $5,000, or $85,000/yr.

That $60,000 a year difference for being a multiple homeowner would go into a fund specifically to provide grants and assistance for low-income renters and first-time homebuyers.

This would make it so that owning multiple homes becomes a sign of affluence.

And it would put a steep price curve on going over the limit of even moderately reasonable amounts of homes to own as a person.

Adding one additional $1 million home with a $5,000 property tax annual on it would actually add another $45,000/yr to the taxes that you would pay compared to someone who only owns that single home, and doing it this way, make sure that the scale of increasing taxes that you would pay on home ownership would become exponentially prohibitive.

It would also ensure that at a very reasonable point, no matter how much you charged for rent, for any property you own, once you own more than four, it becomes impossible to actually profit off of multiple home ownership, because very quickly, no renter in the universe would pay what you need to earn in order to cover the taxes off of owning that property.

This is part of my pitch to become president in 2032 when I become eligible.

[-] bizarroland@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

Oh, slight correction. Add the original taxes to the numbers I generated because the federal taxes are separate from the city, state, and local taxes.

So in the first example, $85,000 plus $25,000 equals $110,000 a year to own five $1 million properties at $5,000 a year property taxes.

And in the second example, $130,000 plus $30,000 equals $160,000 a year to own the sixth one.

[-] Zannsolo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

A starter home where I live is almost 1 mil. The prices would go down if any real legislation passed but a 1 mil home isn't the end all be all.

[-] Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

You mean it's legal for mortgagerock?

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

How do you differentiate between private equity and regular corporate ownership though? Because building and operating apartment buildings takes a lot more money than the average individual has.

[-] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah, so to me, that sounds like a great argument for public funding of housing.

We don’t have to make them like old Soviet-bloc mega apartment complexes (I admit I am fond of some of the exterior aesthetics and building arrangements the Soviets tended to do, but the insides were more or less concrete shoeboxes (“to each according to their needs”, ostensibly, but imo in practice it was often far too minimal, and often not even truly meeting a given family’s needs)).

And we don’t need and shouldn’t expect them to be massive profit generators (much like we don’t need and shouldn’t expect mass transit to be a massive profit generator). We could build quite comfortable public housing, pair it with substantially improved public physical and mental healthcare, and not only effectively solve homelessness overnight, but simultaneously make a long-term investment in the viability of American society (including but not limited to birth rates, happiness indices, GDP (more people doing well = more people able to contribute to the pool = gdp go up), education, residential ownership, diminishing crime… we can go on).

Oops, I slipped into “we should be more socialist” mode lol

[-] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago

Oops, I slipped into “we should be more socialist” mode lol

I dunno this plan sounds like it opens up a whole lot more Individual Freedoms ©️™️ 🦅 🇺🇸 for more individual people!. . . As a group demographic comprised of individuals, of course. 😉

(Y'know, for your upcoming campaign. Rooting for you!)

[-] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's actually not bad, prevents shell games, but still allows them to keep properties they already own and allows up to 350 new properties larger than single family.

A potential hack would be offering loans to businesses to buy 350, and if theyvreally want to push the limits they can try to buy the smaller companies which just so happens to transfer their properties.

[-] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 66 points 1 day ago

They'll buy up property management companies who will then buy the houses to rent out.

[-] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 4 points 1 day ago

The law actually does prevent shell games as written, but they can still buy larger homes and complexes and up to 350 at that.

Perhaps now we will see those Scifi Megastructures that eventually fall into anarchy and become ungovernable black markets lmao.

[-] Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago

Change in the definition of what a single family home is in 3, 2, 1....

[-] SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago

If there is no enforcement then why bother to write laws down?

I see an awful lot of non-enforcement of laws that are already on the books.

[-] greenskye@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

Apparently PE was already getting out of the market? A how money works video said that they represented ~25% of recent home sales despite having ~7% of homes.

[-] Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

Yeah, what's the gaping truck-sized loophole no one's reporting on yet?

[-] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 points 19 hours ago

They're not going to explain that right away. They wouldn't want the poors to take adavantage of it.

Maybe there is a housing crash coming and the will of the people no longer conflicts with special interest groups.

If they don't plan to buy anyway, they will throw a bine so the public can make bad investments at will.

[-] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 0 points 1 day ago

Probably simply that affiliated companies don't count towards that total number. So they can make an infinite number of subsidiaries as long as they're individually under 350 properties each.

[-] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 1 points 1 day ago

Uh, no, not subsidiaries. Partnerships maybe but not even contractors. Most they could do is offer loans.

this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
1048 points (99.4% liked)

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