Since the pandemic began, home prices and rents have drastically risen. And a new analysis from the Shelby County Property Assessors Office found out-of-town investors are scooping up thousands of properties.
“It’s the Hunger Games of housing. How did we get to a place like this where you can’t provide people with the basics of shelter?” said Roshun Austin, and Affordable Housing Advocate.
This article is just more proof that houses aren’t homes anymore…they’re assets, commodities to buy and sell. The scarcity is the point. When people vote against development or zoning changes, they’re trying to control the supply and hold on to the wealth they think they deserve or worse, feel that they earned. Imagine a world where some have to pay more and more for the privilege of living and where others demand to be paid for the use of those resources that they were lucky enough to buy.
Bailey said a recent analysis of homes sales found in the past two years, 7,000 single family homes in Shelby County have been purchased by out-of-town investors and turned into rentals.
That’s 7,000 families who will not be able to invest in the community they call home, all so some out-of-town investor can siphon off their locally-earned wages each month. Renting a single family home might be necessary — a military or other deployment with the intent to return — but homes that have been rentals for two or more generations are commercial property and should be treated as such.
If nothing else, local taxpayers should be annoyed that local wages, many of them paid out of local taxes, are being pulled out of the local economy each month. That’s educators and first responders, librarians and public health workers, none of whom make market wages and few of whom will truly call where they live home if they can never buy in. Why does New York need Shelby County’s tax dollars more than Shelby County does?
But as a first step, long-term rentals of single family homes should be illegal: if people are so adamant that homes and neighborhoods are for families, then they can’t at the same time be assets, with rotating tenants. Anti-density/development types love to talk about neighborhood character but they don’t mean anything by that, other than thinly-disguised racism. They’re just pulling up the ladder behind them, making sure no one else has the same opportunity to build wealth from artificial scarcity (land is truly scarce but how we develop and use it is where the artificiality comes from). There is a caste system, as Isabel Wilkerson pointed out.
Hard to imagine this ever changing. Without a social safety net that obviates the need to accumulate the wealth in land for a secure retirement, no one will give that up.