Who Really Owns America?

And Does It Matter?

Everybody hates Wall Street. From Shylock to Scrooge to Gordon Gekko, the archetype of the rapacious, unscrupulous banker has long been a cultural constant. The trope reinforces an us/them binary: Wall Street versus Main Street, high finance versus the common man—and, well, reality doesn’t always help to dispel the caricature. Nevertheless, the cultural bias matters, because it primes us to misread what financial actors are actually doing in today’s housing market. So it’s not entirely surprising that a growing chorus has pointed to institutional investors, particularly private equity (PE), as complicit in the single-family housing shortage. Joining the chorus in a new key, Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic acknowledges that while PE didn’t cause the crisis, it is definitely “changing housing.” Still, she asks, “Wouldn’t you like to have someone to blame?”

After all, blaming private equity “makes intuitive sense.” But intuition is not information, and Lowrey does her readers a disservice by telling a shallow story relying on deep anti-finance biases more than data.

Lowrey focuses on a recent report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions, called “Who Owns America?” (WHOA). Drawing on original research as well as a survey of the literature, WHOA finds that corporate landlords now own upwards of 20% of properties in some communities. The authors caution that “there is nothing inherently bad about investor ownership,” noting that a “responsible, responsive corporate owner is preferable to a negligent individual landlord.” The problem is that some research finds that corporate owners are more likely to file evictions and raise rents than non-corporate owners. What especially troubles Lowrey is that the areas of investor concentration are not the expensive coastal cities most cited for their housing shortages, but instead neighborhoods in the South and Rust Belt, “where large shares of families can’t afford a mortgage.” There, investors are “pushing thousands of Black and Latino families off the property ladder” by gobbling up starter homes, leaving them “stuck paying rent.”

And while these are concerning claims, there’s a slight problem with Lowrey’s framing: the WHOA report is not specifically about private equity, but all corporate landlords as such.

WHOA does not isolate institutional investors at all, counting any non-individual owner as “corporate.” Corporate ownership might include mom-and-pop LLCs holding individual units, multifamily giants like Greystar and AvalonBay, nonprofits, housing trusts, churches, universities—any property not held in an individual’s name. The study measures total residential land area, not single-family homes, including sprawling multifamily complexes and any other type of non-owner-occupied residential property. While this gives us some broad measures about the scope of ownership in the rental market, treating it as an indictment of one relatively small player is simply a category error.

The mismatch between what the report measures and what Lowrey claims it shows is a perfect example of how anti-finance narratives fill in the gaps when the data doesn’t.

If we want to understand what impact institutional investors like PE are having on single-family housing markets, and starter homes in particular, it helps to actually look at the history and the research about them. Which means we first need to revisit their origin story during the Great Recession.

Large-scale corporate landlords have been involved in housing markets for generations, and corporate ownership is the norm for multifamily developments everywhere. Institutional investor participation in single-family housing markets is a more recent phenomenon, going back to the Great Recession. In the run-up to the crash, policymakers and lenders engineered a credit system built on excess and characterized by loose underwriting, speculative borrowing, securitization that obscured risk, and the assumption that major banks would be rescued if things went wrong (“too big to fail”). When the crash came, millions lost their homes and banks were left with distressed inventories in the hundreds of thousands. Institutional investors stepped into that vacuum. They bought foreclosed properties that banks could not manage, stabilized neighborhoods at risk of blight, and returned large numbers of homes to the market as rentals for households suddenly locked out of mortgage finance.

While this was certainly opportunistic, it wasn’t obviously predatory: investors served a vital, market-clearing function at a time when many banks and individuals had no other options.

In the years after the financial crisis, we overcorrected and massively underbuilt housing in America, causing a shortage of single-family homes estimated in the low millions—Lowrey cites a 4-million-unit deficit. At the same time, institutional investors became much larger players in the single-family housing market. But the research tells a far more nuanced story than the popular narrative. What it shows is that institutional investors tend to help renters, disadvantage prospective buyers, and behave exactly as we’d expect in a market defined by scarcity.

Joshua Coven finds that institutional investors lower rents, improve neighborhood access for renters, and raise incumbent owners’ home values—while reducing opportunities for new buyers.¹ Felipe Barbieri and Gregory Dobbels reach similar conclusions through a different lens: institutional buyers can exert pricing power, but they also add to the rental stock, which pushes rents down.² Both studies show similar tradeoffs: renters and homesellers gain; would-be first-time buyers lose. Meanwhile, research from Caitlin Gorback, Franklin Qian, and Zipei Zhu shows that institutional investors bought 56-to-61% of their homes from other landlords and the rest from owner-occupants—meaning they are not primarily displacing first-time buyers so much as changing the allocation of investor ownership in the rental market.³

But the extent of investor involvement is also blown out of proportion to reality.

As Lowrey herself concedes, individual and mom-and-pop investors still vastly outnumber institutional and corporate owners in the single-family rental market. Coven reports that institutional investors have purchased up to “8.5% of the housing stock in certain ZIP codes in the suburbs of some US cities, including Atlanta, Phoenix, and Tampa” since 2012. Gorback et al. find that while investor activity in single-family housing grew after 2010, the overall share of single-family homes owned by any kind of investor remained limited—rising to a peak of 12.4% in 2015 before falling below 11.7% by 2022. Only a small portion of these investor-owned homes are held by institutions. Other studies have found that institutional investor ownership of single-family rentals—which excludes owner-occupied units—is about 3% nationally. The Urban Institute puts that figure at 3.8%, which represents 574,000 units out of a total supply of 15.1 million single-family rental homes—in a total market of 85 million single-family homes.

In other words, institutional investors own 0.675% of all single-family homes in America.

Although institutional ownership is small overall, investor activity is concentrated in certain markets, which makes it more visible. Gorback et al. find that institutional buyers tend to pursue entry-level, mid-size homes in neighborhoods with healthy job growth, low vacancies, and rising prices—places that already attract demand. These areas often have higher minority populations, not because investors are targeting vulnerable communities, but because those communities live in the very neighborhoods experiencing the most appreciation. In other words, investors are following growth, not driving decline. The effect is a more competitive bidding environment in those specific markets, but the underlying dynamic is unchanged: too many households chasing too few starter homes. The competition is a function of scarcity, not investor strategy.

So what’s to be done?

Predictably, these patterns have prompted calls to ban or restrict institutional investors in single-family housing markets. In Congress, bills have been filed called the “American Neighborhoods Protection Act” and “End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act.” Several state legislatures have proposed similar legislation to cap institutional ownership, to tax investors differently, or to ban them from purchasing starter homes altogether. The Lincoln Institute report nods to these ideas, and Lowrey quotes experts who acknowledge their political appeal. Nevertheless, those experts recognize the difficulty of implementation, in part because it’s hard to define who qualifies as an institutional investor. The research also consistently warns that such policies would have significant unintended consequences. Barbieri & Dobbels find that reducing institutional participation would shrink rental supply and push rents up. Gorback et al. show that institutional buyers often replace other landlords, meaning restrictions would primarily affect the rental market while doing little to increase homeownership. Coven likewise suggests that blocking institutional investors could reduce neighborhood access for lower-income renters. In other words, politically satisfying bans or restrictions could worsen exactly the outcomes critics claim to worry about.

Restricting institutional investors does not create new homes; it simply reshuffles the existing scarcity.

The real problem is not institutional ownership but the simple arithmetic of too few homes. Scarcity amplifies the market power of the most well-funded bidders, whether they’re private equity investors or individual cash buyers. The investors themselves are not shy about this. As Coven points out, the IPO filing for Invitation Homes, one of the largest institutional investors, stated that it selected markets with expected population and employment growth, and “constrained new supply, to target rent and price growth.”

Institutional investors are not creating scarcity; scarcity is creating the opportunity for institutional investors.

Ironically, the answer to the question “Who Owns America?” is: predominantly individual Americans, not institutional investors. But that’s the wrong question. While it would be wonderful if everyone who wants to own a home could, what matters far more amid a national housing shortage is whether we are building enough homes for everyone who needs a place to live. We shouldn’t care too much if it’s Blackstone, Cornerstone Church, or “Stone Cold” Steve Austin who’s providing it. The problem is that we’ve made it too hard in too many places for anyone to provide housing—and therefore too hard for people to access it as renters or buyers.

The real question is “How can we build enough housing in America?” Blaming private equity won’t help us answer that.

1. Coven, Joshua. The Impact of Institutional Investors on Homeownership and Neighborhood Access (2025).

2. Barbieri, Felipe, and Gregory Dobbels. Market Power and the Welfare Effects of Institutional Landlords (2025).

3. Gorback, Caitlin, Franklin Qian, and Zipei Zhu. Impact of Institutional Owners on Housing Markets (2024).