AFR Testifies on Private Equity’s Role in Housing Unaffordability Crisis скачать в хорошем качестве

AFR Testifies on Private Equity’s Role in Housing Unaffordability Crisis

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Americans for Financial Reform Associate Director of Housing Policy Caroline Nagy testified before the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs on the role of institutional investors including private equity firms on the growing housing unaffordability crisis. “Corporate investors have been buying up homes, apartment buildings, and manufactured housing communities,” said Nagy in her statement. “This surge of corporate ownership has reduced the availability of homes, increased housing prices and rents, imposed new junk fees, and raised eviction rates.” The testimony highlighted the difficulty families are facing affording housing, with half of all renters paying more than they can afford and homeownership increasingly out of reach for most people. It identifies the severe shortage of affordable housing stock, rising insurance and utility costs, land use policies that prohibit multifamily construction, and more that are driving housing affordability. “We also have a severe, national shortage of housing that people with the lowest incomes can afford,” Nagy testified. “And we are losing what remains of our affordable housing stock faster than we can replace it due to rising rents and stagnant incomes.” Trump administration policies have worsened the housing unaffordability crisis. The tariff hikes and immigration round-ups have raised construction costs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weakened their affordable housing goals and programs for lower-income buyers, and the rollbacks of homebuyer protections at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are exposing people to higher cost and predatory practices. “This tells Wall Street and other financial firms that they can violate antitrust, consumer protection and fair lending laws with impunity, making homebuying more risky, less fair, and more expensive,” Nagy noted. The testimony identified several legislative policies to confront housing unaffordability including the Homes Over Private Equity or HOPE for Homeownership Act to crack down on corporate private equity landlords, the End Junk Fees for Renters Act to prevent landlords from burying renters in undisclosed add-on fees, the Downpayment Towards Equity Act which would expand downpayment assistance for first-time, first-generation homebuyers, and improvements to the federal supervision and oversight of home insurance markets. Caroline Nagy’s written testimony is available here: https://ourfinancialsecurity.org/gove...