Matthew Yglesias recently tweeted,
Zoning is a plot by Blackrock, which owns one third of the American housing supply, to prevent new construction from competing away their profits — don’t be a dupe for private equity, reform land use regulation today!
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 7, 2025
That’s a nice hypothesis, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. As noted in this article, “Who Owns the U.S. Housing Market,” some 68 percent of the 146 million homes in the U.S. are single-family homes, and less than 4 percent of single-family homes are owned by “institutional investors” who own at least 100 homes. Those same investors own about 40 percent of multifamily housing. That means all institutional investors combined, of which Blackrock is only one, own about 20 million homes, or about 14 percent of housing. Continue reading
