Two indicators for lowering the rent

What It Covers

Planet Money examines two housing affordability levers: whether restricting corporate landlords actually reduces costs, and how the near-elimination of single room occupancy buildings since the 1970s removed roughly one million ultra-affordable housing units from American cities.

Key Questions Answered

• •Corporate landlord scale: Institutional investors account for under 1% of national home purchases, making them a minor factor in housing costs. The dominant drivers of high prices remain low construction supply and low interest rates — not corporate ownership, per University of Colorado Boulder research.
• •Build-to-rent tradeoff: Roughly 1 in 12 new homes built in 2024 were purpose-built rentals. Legislation restricting institutional investors risks halting this construction pipeline entirely, potentially reducing housing supply rather than improving affordability — the opposite of the bill's stated intent.
• •Corporate landlord crime correlation: Research by Steven Billings finds neighborhoods with higher concentrations of institutional landlords show a 2% rise in property crime, 4% rise in violent crime, and 7% rise in drug crime compared to owner-occupied neighborhoods, suggesting real community-level costs beyond rent prices.
• •SRO housing math: If single room occupancy construction had kept pace with broader US housing growth and the 1970s million-unit elimination had not occurred, approximately 2.5 million additional rooms would exist today — a figure exceeding the current total homeless population, per recent research.