Claiming to deliver on President Donald Trump’s promise to stop corporate landlords from buying up single-family homes and fueling the housing crisis, an industry-backed Republican senator is circulating legislation that could actually block states from regulating the institutional investors purchasing hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide.
At the same time, the purported federal “ban” would carve out exemptions for many of the country’s largest institutional homebuyers.
If passed, such legislation could derail ongoing efforts in at least eighteen states to limit large corporations from buying up residential properties and using them as investment vehicles. The phenomenon has been shown to lead to higher numbers of evictions, neglected property maintenance, and rising rents and may limit families’ ability to access the housing market.
Last month, Trump announced he would bar major investors from buying up single-family homes, issuing an executive order directing the government to block the purchases. And in his State of the Union address yesterday, the president demanded Congress make the ban law, noting, “We want homes for people, not for corporations.”
The office of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) is circulating draft legislation that would ostensibly do just that. The bill would prohibit institutional investors from owning more than one hundred single-family homes.
But one draft of the legislation reviewed by the Lever contains a clause that would bar any state or locality from imposing its own restrictions on investors buying up homes. Another draft would only preempt weaker state-level regulations on the matter.
The tactic to preempt state action on corporate landlords bears resemblance to lawmakers’ recent efforts — at the behest of tech industry lobbyists — to introduce a ten-year ban on all state and local regulations of artificial intelligence on matters like privacy, safety protocols, and discrimination. Those efforts have so far…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
