Politicians Do Nothing As Millions Are Priced Out Of Housing Market

Private equity firms are buying up huge swaths of land and homes all over the country, raising prices and making it completely unaffordable for average income earners to afford housing. Farron Cousins answers a question from a YouTube Community member about why Congress hasn't done a single thing to address this growing crisis.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

So this week folks, something a little different because I'm actually out of town. I am not paying attention to the news, or at least I'm not supposed to be playing, uh, paying attention to the news. I'm in fact on vacation and will be out for the following week. And because I was unable to predict what the news this week would be, I decided that I'm going to spend this entire week, actually the week before this entire week doing q and as with my YouTube community members. I put out a post about a week or so ago on that community tab, on the YouTube channel asking for questions. And so the responses to those questions, we'll fill out the videos for this coming week. So let's get started. We have a question from the dysfunctional biographer 33 14 who asks, will Congress do anything to protect ordinary American home buyers from being priced out by foreign buyers who don't live in the US and private equity firms?

Now, there actually has been some legislation introduced this year that unfortunately has gone nowhere. But what we're seeing right now, and I've actually done interviews, uh, uh, with people for the Ring of Fire podcast that I host on this particular issue, uh, if you're not familiar with it, ro f podcast.com, go check that out. But either way, we have not seen any movement whatsoever in terms of beyond proposing legislation to reign in the fact that we do have these private equity firms. We've got companies like BlackRock that are going out there and, and in some cases, like down here in Florida, they've literally bought entire communities, you know, 60, 70 homes at a time buying up in entire neighborhoods and then jacking up the prices of all the real estate, you know, two, three times what they pay for it. And because of that, Florida, and, and I speak about Florida, obviously it's where I am.

So it's what I, you know, know it's close to home, literally. Um, we have the highest home prices in the country in terms of how much they've risen in the last three years. Uh, we're certainly not the most expensive state to live in, but in terms of increase in prices, we are in fact number one in the country. And it's because we do have these private equity equity firms swooping in buying up huge swaths of land, creating neighborhoods where they control all the housing so they can price it however they want. And nothing's being done about it. And this is happening, by the way, all over the country. It, it's becoming a very real epidemic of people being, uh, priced out of the system. You know, you used to hear horror stories about how bad it was. You know, you couldn't get a one bedroom apartment in Manhattan that was more than 500 square feet if you didn't wanna pay more than five grand a month. But now we're seeing this happen all over the country

And it's happening at a time where real wages for American workers are effectively stagnant. I know we have actually seen a little bit of increase in real wages, real take home pay this past year, but it certainly has not kept up with the price of literally anything in this country. So we have an entire generation of people that are coming up entering the job force. They've been outta college for a couple years, but they still cannot find a home that they can afford. Now, think back, when did we last see something like this? Because it hasn't been that long ago. You know, when we were told that, oh, it's all those darn people buying the McMansions, the homes they can't afford. And then the market collapsed. Well, people aren't spending $800,000 on McMansions today. They're spending $800,000 on a regular old three bedroom, 2000 square foot home so that they can start a family.

These are people that have jobs, they're doing everything right, but the market is being manipulated by these private equity firms to price these people outta the market. We have a housing crisis here in the United States mirror image of what happened between 2006 and 2008. And the same thing is going to end up happening here, folks, where we end up with a market crash. Honestly, you look at social media, you see that that's a, what a lot of the younger people are hoping for. Like, hey, if we get a crash, maybe I can finally afford to buy a home. I'll be perfectly honest with you, the only reason I was able to afford a home is cuz I bought a house. My wife and I, we had just gotten married.