As Homelessness Hits Record Highs, Corporate Landlords Like Blackstone Double Rents and Rake in Billions While Working Americans Pay the Price
Life in America is pretty unaffordable these days. Car insurance rates and gas prices have accelerated at unfathomable speeds. Groceries are through the roof. Higher education and healthcare cost an arm and a leg. It appears the only thing getting marked up higher than the price of eggs is housing. The rental market markup is already through the roof. Yet, it keeps on rising.
And who is to blame for the toll this is taking?
To hear people in positions of power tell it, we should all be wagging our fingers at the poverty-stricken American workers pushing their laundry carts over to tent city after enduring long, rigorous night shifts at the local warehouse or power plant. Surely, it must be the widowed mother in line with Snap benefits causing the economic collapse. Let us look to the struggling seniors trying to get by on measly social security checks for the answer. We might expect to find one in their penny-pinched pockets and the empty bottles that once held their prescription medications.
But whatever you do, please do not look up. Do not shift your gaze to the very illusive billionaire class as they buy up all the housing stock and double the price of poor people’s rental units. They couldn’t be perpetuating the problem. They couldn’t possibly be holding a life-sustaining product like housing in captivity to exploit everyday people.
The fact-checkers say it isn’t so. The mainstream media calls for a recount of public opinion. The “reliable sources” rebut such claims, and all of them are owned by the usual suspects, the Joe Lonsdales and the Stephen Schwarzmans, and the Elon Musks of the world weigh in. And as we stand, never peering upward but always pointing fingers at our neighbors, the wealth of the new billionaires is the only thing growing with the rent.
Coincidences are rare and fleeting and unlikely to benefit the same people over and over again. But we are supposed to continue to buy this lie that housing is not the leading cause of homelessness. Study after study proves it is. Unironically, amid a housing, homeless, and affordability crisis, corporate landlords are doubling rents… again. At this point, can we even be surprised?
In 2024, Corporate Landlord Blackstone More than Doubled Rents, Amassing Another Billion Dollar Fortune
Corporate landlord Blackstone is one of the largest private equity firms keeping the rental market in a chokehold. In 2024, amid a crushing affordability crisis that shot homelessness up 18% to a record high, forcing more than 770,000 Americans to appear visibly homeless on one of the coldest nights of the year, and millions to endure homelessness annually, Blackstone moved to raise the rent by double. Yes, double.
According to MoneyWise, Blackstone raised the rent by an astonishing 79% in one San Diego building, and this is after being named by the Feds in an artificial rent inflation scam that devastated the entire country.
At this point, you might be wondering what consequences Steve Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone Inc., might face for rent gauging, scamming, and exploiting working poor people. If you guessed he earned another billion dollars in the same year he doubled all those rents, you are correct.
Bloomberg states, “Schwarzman collected just over $1 billion in pay and dividends in 2024, putting the spotlight on the billionaire’s wealth just as Washington takes aim at how private equity profits are taxed.”
For anyone keeping count, taking advantage of the poor position of American renters brought Schwarzman’s net worth up to a whopping $51.3 billion. Meanwhile, the national minimum hourly wage sits firmly at $7.25 an hour. Incidentally, that’s what it has been since 2009!
No handcuffs for the man who is exploiting the housing market. The prison cells are strictly for America’s unhoused population. The saga continues as billionaires buy up housing stock and then enact “aggressive evictions” against tenants who cannot afford to pay up.
Eric Tars’ Predictive Tweet Has Aged with an Insane Level of Accuracy
Between 2021 and 2024, Blackstone began aggressively adding hundreds of thousands of housing units to its robust portfolio, and homeless advocates saw something sinister afoot.
The National Homelessness Law Center’s Senior Policy Director Eric Tars warned of this in a somewhat predictive tweet on X, where he said, “Blackstone buying these homes doesn’t help ANYONE except for Blackstone investors. Renters and would-be-homeowners both lose.”
He later elaborated on that comment in an exclusive discussion with Invisible People reporters, where he referred to the “hyper-financialization of housing hedge funds” as a key corrosion of affordability for low and middle-income earners.
Now, we are witnessing this play out in real time as billionaire wealth grows at a rate of $5.7 billion each day while rental rates drastically outpace the national median wage.
The Wealth Gap and the Push to Put Poor People in Prison
As the wealth gap grows and housing increasingly seems like a luxury only afforded to those at the highest end of the scale, the push for homeless criminalization is also being led by billionaires. If you follow the investment portfolios, this might not come as much of a surprise.
The blueprint for capitalizing on human suffering runs deep for billion-dollar corporations like Blackstone, which is tied to CoreCivic, a company that owns and operates for-profit prisons. CoreCivic has a notable reputation for lobbying for harsher sentences, especially against impoverished people, as a way of drawing capital from the prison industrial complex.
Legislation like what we see being promoted by billionaire Joe Lonsdale as part of the Cicero Institute’s homeless criminalization strategy is emblematic of this type of harsher sentencing. Herein, it is easy to follow the money and find the billionaire class behind an unfathomable amount of corruption, all of which serves to make them richer and more powerful.
The National Homelessness Law Center’s Jesse Rabinowitz made a poignant point about this in an exclusive webinar attended by Invisible People reporters. During that gathering, which was hosted by VocalTexas and live streamed as a Town Hall to “Fight Back Against Billionaires”, Rabinowitz stated: “Most people living in this country are far closer to living outside than they are to being a billionaire like Joe Lonsdale and his friends.”
Talk to Your Legislators About Representing YOU for a Change
Local legislators continue to act in corporate interest, placing profits over people. This is evidenced in the number of anti-homeless laws they’ve drafted (hundreds) compared to the number of laws they’ve created to make housing a human right (zero).
All we need is one law to make the money move in a direction more conducive to the 98% of folks in the American economy. It’s the one that supports housing as a human right. Tell your legislators.
