While Congress remains shut down, the people have been left to fend for themselves, which is really nothing new; it’s been some time since the U.S. government actually solved issues Americans care about. Though the stock market continues to soar, many other economic signs continue to point towards a recession, and an increasing number of people are finding it harder and harder to pay their bills. One area in which they can’t cut back is housing, and that’s a fact that’s hitting Americans in their prime (namely millennials and Generation Z) particularly hard.
According to a new report, the U.S. housing market has reached its most unaffordable point in history. Around 58.6% of Gen Z is considered rent-burdened, and almost half of the millennial population still does not own homes. For obvious reasons, these generations are pretty irate at the current housing market and tired of being told that they merely need to cut back on avocado toast to get their foot on the first rung of the American dream.
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But while their frustration is justified, it’s equally annoying to watch many of them blame the wrong culprits for their plight: namely, companies such as BlackRock and other institutional investors. Big companies with shadowy work descriptions have always made for easy scapegoats (they just seem evil), and as home rental services such as Airbnb took off over the past decade, it just made sense to people that these big, evil companies would want a piece of the pie.
The narrative has become ubiquitous. BlackRock started buying up the housing supply on the cheap when interest rates hit historical lows and then proceeded to rent them back at astronomical rates —driving up rental prices while also diminishing the supply of homes for would-be first-time buyers and allowing other sellers to jack their rates up accordingly. One can see why it took off. It’s neat and tidy, there’s a clear bad guy, and there’s an easy solution: just ban the company from doing it.
The problem? None of it is true. Like, not even a little bit true. First and foremost, there seems to be immense confusion among the people about the difference between BlackRock, which is an asset manager, and Blackstone, which is a private equity firm. BlackRock does not purchase homes directly at all. The closest it gets to the housing market is investments in some companies that own residential properties, such as American Homes 4 Rent. This is a pretty standard practice for any asset manager as its job is to diversify its investment portfolio to shield its clients’ assets from risk, and it is ultimately very different than being in the business of buying, renting, or flipping homes.
Even if Americans are merely confusing BlackRock with Blackstone, though, they’re still wrong. After the financial crisis in 2008, Blackstone did purchase a significant number of houses in foreclosure, but even that unique moment in the market resulted in it owning less than 1% of total U.S. single-family homes. So still, hardly the bogeymen these companies have been painted to be.
According to a 2025 analysis from the American Enterprise Institute, all institutional investors combined owned just 1% of the total U.S. single-family housing stock as of June 2025.
So now that we’ve cleared that up, it would be great if Americans could actually organize around addressing the true bad guy behind the problem: the government itself. Housing prices have skyrocketed for a simple reason, but one that’s going to be complicated to undo — and more importantly, one that will require people put their partisan politics aside in order to work together on the solution.
It’s simple economics 101 to acknowledge the rule of supply and demand: When demand increases and supply does not, the price will go up. Those conditions have certainly been met in the U.S. for a few decades now as our population has boomed while at the same time federal, state, and local laws have prevented builders from creating the supply needed to house the growing populace. Add to that the fact that more Americans live alone today than ever before, and the centralization of the workforce into urban areas, and it was a recipe for disaster all along.
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Fortunately, in states such as Michigan, there are bipartisan coalitions coming together to push YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) type legislative packages. It’s this pro-growth sentiment and camaraderie that we need to reform years of zealous zoning laws, historical overlays, and other regulations that simply make it too expensive to build housing.
While it’s unlikely the imagined big business bogeymen will stand in the way of such progress, there will certainly be opposition: namely nosy neighbors who want to control the property of others, regulators who profit off of the status quo, and people who quite frankly care more about aesthetics than they do others being able to access housing. These are the true bad guys in the scenario who must be stopped.
Hannah Cox (@HannahDCox) is the president and co-founder of BASEDPolitics and a fellow for the White Coat Waste Project.
