There exists an instinct in Americans now to blame business for a multitude of problems it did not cause. That instinct defines the modern left. Our job is to make sure it doesn't come to define the right as well.
That instinct however, is already creeping in. Ask most conservatives what's driving up housing prices, and a growing number will point not to zoning laws or permitting delays, but to investment firms like BlackRock, quietly buying up neighborhoods and pricing out families. Others point to short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo, accused of hollowing out residential communities one listing at a time. Whether intended or not, this narrative lends real credibility to a socialist worldview built entirely on the premise of the "evil corporation," a villain making life unaffordable by virtue of its simple existence.
It doesn't just borrow the left's rhetoric. It hands the left's solutions a foothold on the right, encouraging exactly the kind of anti-growth policy that hamstrings the American economy one step at a time, away from the free market and toward the state.
The trouble is, the numbers don't support the story. Large Wall Street investment firms account for roughly 0.4 percent of total homeownership in the United States, and well under one percent of new home purchases. They are a rounding error, not a crisis. And while institutional buyers add some marginal pressure to demand in certain markets, the real driver of unaffordability remains what it has always been: a chronic shortage of supply. Tellingly, no one complains about institutional buyers in cities like Dallas, where housing stock is plentiful and prices have stayed comparatively sane. The pattern isn't institutional ownership. It's scarcity, and scarcity is a far less satisfying villain than BlackRock.
Corporate landlords buying up all the housing to drive up prices is not real, it’s a made up story. https://t.co/kHbCtvoFvi pic.twitter.com/kNTWb4Cnqd
— ApoStructura (@ApoStructura) July 8, 2026
None of that has stopped the appetite to blame business anyway, and it is bipartisan, and overwhelming. According to a Harvard Harris poll conducted earlier this year, 59 percent of Democrats support banning institutional buyers from purchasing single-family homes, alongside 77 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of independents. On this particular question, Republican voters are more eager to ban private investment than Democrats are, which should trouble anyone who still thinks of the GOP as the party of free markets.
The instinct doesn't stop at institutional buyers either. Roughly half of Americans also want to ban short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods, singling out platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo, and in some cases landlords generally, as the cause of the housing crunch. And yet study after study shows that short-term rentals provide no meaningful pressure on housing prices. Conservatives have shown less enthusiasm for this particular ban than the one on institutional buyers, but it springs from the exact same reflex: find a business to demonize, and the actual problem, decades of restrictive zoning, permitting delays, and artificially constrained supply, conveniently disappears from the conversation.
I used to blame #immigration for the increased price of houses but it's not that. While imm accounts for SOME of the increase, the drastic increase you've seen is caused by two things:
— A.J. Delgado (@AJDelgado13) March 22, 2025
(a) private equity buying a huge chunk of single family homes, to rent them out;
(b) AIRBNB
The instinct is one conservatives must strive to temper, because it hides the real issue, which always has and always will be government.
The impulse seeks to blame anyone and everyone for rising housing prices except what actually deserves it: decades of restrictive zoning, permitting processes that can add years and tens of thousands of dollars to a single project, and a regulatory apparatus in nearly every major city that treats new supply as a threat. BlackRock didn't do that. Airbnb didn't do that. City councils and state legislatures did, and they've been doing it for so long that blaming a hedge fund or a rental app has started to feel more satisfying than blaming the people actually responsible.
The confusion is not harmless. Every hour spent demonizing institutional buyers or short-term rentals is an hour not spent pressuring government to fix the zoning codes and permitting bottlenecks that are the actual cause of the crisis. Every ban conservatives cheer for is one more precedent that allows the government to decide who is and isn't allowed to own property, rent it out, or invest in it.
That is not a conservative solution, nor a free market one. It is a socialist one, and it will not build a single new home. If Republicans want to solve this crisis instead of just finding someone to blame for it, they need to attack the root of the problem instead of seeking to ban business. The fix was never going to come from a ban. It was always going to come from getting government out of the way.