Affordable Housing

Massachusetts faces one of the most severe housing affordability crises in the nation. The median home price in the Commonwealth has soared to $625,000, placing homeownership far out of reach for working families.¹ In the 4th Congressional District—spanning Newton, Brookline, Fall River, Taunton, Attleboro, and surrounding communities—the crisis takes different forms but affects residents across all income levels.

In Newton, the median home price has reached $1.57 million.² In Brookline, it’s $1.2 million.² Even in traditionally more affordable communities like Fall River ($521,000), Taunton ($555,000), and Attleboro ($500,000), housing costs have become unsustainable for working families.² Renters face similarly dire circumstances: the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Boston metro area is $2,415 per month, requiring an annual income of $96,600 to afford—nearly double the median renter income.³

This crisis is not an accident. It is the result of decades of policy choices that have allowed Wall Street to treat housing as a commodity for speculation rather than protecting it as a fundamental human right.

Wall Street’s Role in the Housing Crisis

Following the 2008 financial crisis, corporate investors seized the opportunity to buy up single-family homes at low prices. What began as opportunistic purchases has become a systematic financialization of American housing. Private equity firms, hedge funds, and institutional investors now control hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, extracting wealth from communities while driving up prices and rents.

In Massachusetts alone, corporate investors purchased 6,600 single-family homes in 2021, or 9% of all sales.⁴ These purchases disproportionately target working-class communities and communities of color, where investors can buy properties, raise rents, and flip homes for profit. The impact extends beyond direct purchases: when investors buy up available housing stock, they reduce supply for families trying to buy their first home, driving up prices across entire markets.

These Wall Street landlords operate differently than traditional landlords. They use algorithms to maximize rent increases, employ aggressive eviction tactics, and defer maintenance to boost profits. They bundle these properties into complex financial instruments—similar to the mortgage-backed securities that triggered the 2008 crisis—allowing speculation on housing to occur multiple times over.

Our Federal Housing Agenda

Ending Wall Street’s grip on housing takes more than a single bill. It takes a federal program that treats a home as a place to live, not an asset to trade. That program rests on four pillars, and a ban on hedge fund ownership is its foundation.

Ban Wall Street from the single-family market. The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Adam Smith, would prohibit hedge funds and private equity firms from buying single-family homes and back that ban with a 50% excise tax on any home a large investor buys after the law takes effect.⁵ Firms that already own single-family homes would have to sell their holdings over 10 years, at least 10% each year, with priority given to current tenants, nonprofits, and local governments.⁵ The bill would strip the tax advantages that let institutional investors outbid families, and during the sell-off period it would impose strict maintenance standards, limit rent increases, and give tenants the right of first refusal to buy their homes.⁵ This takes Wall Street out of the single-family market and returns those homes to the families who live in them.

Build social housing at scale. Curbing speculation is not enough if we do not also build. The Homes Act, introduced by Senator Tina Smith and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would create a national Housing Development Authority to finance, build, and operate permanently affordable homes, funded at $30 billion a year and able to build or preserve as many as 1.3 million units with rent capped at 25% of a household’s income.⁶ Alongside new construction, the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act would repeal the Faircloth Amendment, the 1998 provision that effectively bars the federal government from adding any net new public housing, and invest in rehabilitating and decarbonizing the homes we already have.⁷ This is not means-tested poverty housing. It is high-quality, mixed-income housing of the kind that holds down rents across a whole city. In Vienna, where more than 60% of residents live in social or subsidized housing, that public supply keeps private rents in check through direct competition.⁸

Protect tenants nationwide. Federal law leaves renters with almost no baseline protections, and that should change. The Eviction Right to Counsel Act, led by Senator Cory Booker and Representatives Summer Lee and LaMonica McIver, would fund a right to legal representation for tenants facing eviction and reward states that adopt just cause eviction standards, longer notice periods, and eviction diversion programs.⁹ Congress should pair that with a federal limit on corporate rent gouging, building on the 2024 proposal to deny tax breaks to large landlords who raise rents by more than 5% a year.¹⁰ Housing is too important to leave every tenant protection to the state a family happens to live in.

Reform exclusionary zoning. Local rules that ban apartments and duplexes drive up costs and keep communities segregated. The bipartisan Yes In My Backyard Act would require localities that receive federal community development funds to report the exclusionary land-use rules they keep on the books, bringing those barriers into the open.¹¹ We should go further and tie federal housing and transportation dollars to real reform, so the communities that ask for federal help are also making room for the homes their residents need.

Together these four pillars form one agenda with a single purpose: to take housing back from speculators and make it something a working family can afford again.

Why This Matters

The housing crisis is an economic crisis, a racial justice crisis, and a crisis of human dignity. When families spend 50%, 60%, or 70% of their income on rent, they cannot save for the future, invest in education, or weather financial emergencies. When young people cannot afford to live in the communities where they grew up, we lose the social fabric that holds neighborhoods together. When homeownership—historically the primary mechanism for building intergenerational wealth—becomes unattainable for working families, we entrench inequality for generations.

Wall Street’s colonization of the housing market has accelerated all of these dynamics. Reversing it requires federal action that puts people before profits. The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act is a crucial first step. Massachusetts needs a representative who will fight for it—and for the broader transformation our housing system demands.

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