Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable – BIG
“The principle of American political economy before the 1980s was fairly simple: We wanted broadly dispersed property ownership, because if everyone had a stake in this society then everyone would want to preserve it…
“Today, that philosophy is all but forgotten in high places. Our policies are structured so that the home is less a place to live than a cash-flowing asset for Wall Street to print and sell mortgage-backed securities off of — and homebuilding is not a vocation to produce homes for local families so much as a means of generating a high return on equity for distant capital allocators. We shouldn’t be surprised that these policies have led us to a world with less and more expensive housing. From the perspective of the financiers we’ve put in charge of homebuilding, that’s the whole point of the enterprise.”