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The Cost of Housing

Why housing keeps getting less affordable, how many of the nation's homes are actually sitting vacant and why, which corporations own a meaningful slice of the single-family rental market and where, what Congress and the White House just did about it, and how short-term rentals like Airbnb are pulling year-round housing out of small towns — pricing out low-wage workers and, in at least one documented case, emptying a school.

Last updated September 29, 2026

Terms

Institutional investor
A company, not an individual, that owns single-family homes as an investment portfolio rather than a residence. Congress's new law defines it as any entity owning 350 or more single-family homes; the Trump administration's Treasury Department has separately proposed a much lower 100-home threshold for its own purposes.
Short-term rental (STR)
A home or unit rented out for stays under 30 days, typically through a platform like Airbnb or Vrbo — as opposed to a long-term rental, leased for months or years to someone who lives there full time.
Cost-burdened household
A household spending more than 30% of its income on housing; "severely cost-burdened" means more than 50%.

How bad it's gotten

Median new-home price, Feb. 2026
$413,595
Households priced out at that price and a 6% mortgage rate
88.2M
U.S. households unable to afford a median-priced new home
65%
Rental units under $1,000/month lost since 2019
~7M

National Association of Home Builders; Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies; see sources.

Median new-home price vs. median household income, 1975–2025
Median new-home price vs. median household income, 1975 to 2025Median new-home sale price and median household income, in actual dollars on one shared axis, 1975 through 2025. Median new-home price grew from $38,100 to $423,100, while median household income grew from $11,800 to $87,460. A home cost 3.2 times the median household's annual income in 1975, peaked at 5.5 times in 2022, and stood at 4.8 times in 2025.$0$110k$220k$330k$440k$550k197519801985199019952000200520102015202020222025$423,100$87,460

Same dollar axis for both lines — a home cost 3.2× the median household's annual income in 1975, peaked at 5.5× in 2022, and stood at 4.8× in 2025. Census/HUD (new-home price, FRED series MSPUS) and Census CPS ASEC (household income), nominal dollars.


More than half of U.S. households earn under $80,000 a year, and nearly two-thirds earn under $106,000 — both short of what it now takes to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced home. Among renters earning under $30,000 a year, 83% are cost-burdened, and most of those are severely cost-burdened. None of this is attributable to any single cause — construction costs, zoning limits, high interest rates, and years of underbuilding all factor in — but two specific, documented pressures on the supply of homes available to live in year-round are getting new political and regulatory attention: corporate single-family landlords, and short-term rental conversion.

How many homes are sitting empty

Vacant homes nationwide
14.5M
Share of the total housing stock
~10.1%

U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, via LendingTree analysis.


The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development listed 745,652 individuals were homeless on a single night in January 2025. Homelessness is also a hot topic that many cities are currently struggling with. The estimated number of people experiencing homelessness is critical here since the data shows we have the capability to develop solutions for these problems.

The following is a breakdown of the different types of vacant houses:

Seasonal/recreational use4.7M (32.4%)
Actively for rent2.6M (17.9%)
Actively for sale0.8M (5.5%)
Other (between tenants, held off-market, etc.)6.4M (44.1%)

Share of the 14.5 million vacant homes nationwide, by reason — U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, via LendingTree analysis.


"Vacant" is a broader category than "sitting empty and hoarded" — the Census Bureau counts a home as vacant if no one is living in it on a given day, which includes homes between tenants, newly built and not yet sold, or genuinely seasonal. Of the 14.5 million vacant homes nationally, about a third (4.7 million) are seasonal or recreational — vacation homes, essentially — and another 2.6 million are actively for rent and under 800,000 are actively listed for sale: ordinary turnover a functioning market needs. Maine has the highest vacancy rate of any state, 20.6%, almost entirely driven by seasonal homes — the same dynamic behind the Southwest Harbor case study below.

Vacancy isn't evenly distributed by owner, though. A separate analysis by ATTOM Data Solutions, using stricter, address-level vacancy tracking through the third quarter of 2026, found that homes owned by institutional investors sat vacant at a 3.5% rate — more than double the 1.3% rate across all residential properties in that same dataset. Investors still own a small share of all homes nationally, but the homes they do own are disproportionately likely to be sitting empty rather than occupied.

Who actually owns the single-family rental market

Nationally, the numbers are smaller than the popular narrative suggests: corporate landlords holding 1,000 or more homes own roughly 600,000 of the nation's more than 86 million single-family homes — under 1% nationwide. But that national figure hides sharp local concentration. In Atlanta, large operators hold 13.3% of their total national portfolios, and in some individual ZIP codes — like DeKalb County's 30088 — institutional investors own roughly 13% of single-family properties, about 18 times the national institutional-ownership rate. In Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), 6.9% of residential parcels are owned by out-of-state companies, nearly three times the national average and close to a quarter of the city's rental inventory. Sunbelt metros — Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Miami, Charlotte — account for the large majority of institutional single-family holdings.

Invitation Homes
The largest single-family landlord in the country: roughly 94,000 homes owned or co-owned as of early 2026, spun off from Blackstone in 2017 and now an independently traded public company.
Progress Residential
About 83,500 single-family homes, backed by Pretium Partners and other institutional investors.
Blackstone
Roughly 62,000 U.S. single-family homes once its acquisition of Tricon Residential closes, making it the country's third-largest single-family portfolio.

Even the industry's defenders don't dispute that concentration like Southwest Harbor's or DeKalb County's is real; the dispute is over whether it's the cause of the affordability crisis or a symptom of it — investors buying in the same places already short on supply and long on renter demand. Congress didn't fully resolve that argument, but it did act.

What Washington just did about it

Jan. 20, 2026
President Trump signs an executive order, "Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers," directing federal agencies to stop supporting large institutional investors' bulk home purchases through federally backed mortgage programs, and ordering DOJ and the FTC to review large investors' local acquisitions for anticompetitive effects.
Feb. 9, 2026
The House passes the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, 390–9.
Mar. 12, 2026
The Senate passes its version, 89–10.
Jul. 10, 2026
A reconciled version becomes law without the president's signature. It bars any entity owning 350 or more single-family homes from buying additional ones, but doesn't require selling homes already owned — the first time Congress has restricted corporate single-family ownership by statute, passed with close to unanimous support in both chambers.
Jul. 13, 2026
Reps. Adam Smith, Ro Khanna, Nikema Williams, and Linda Sánchez introduce the Protecting American Homes from Hedge Funds Act, a more aggressive bill that would force institutional investors to sell off existing single-family holdings over 10 years. It remains in committee.

Several states have moved in parallel — Michigan's House passed its own bill limiting large investor home purchases in June 2026 — making this one of relatively few housing questions where federal, state, Republican, and Democratic action have all pointed the same direction at once.

How short-term rentals pull housing out of a town

A home converted to a short-term rental stops being a place someone lives year-round and becomes, functionally, a small hotel — removing one unit of long-term housing supply from a local market that, in a tourist or resort town, is often already the tightest in the state. The effect on rents is measurable: an academic study of Berlin found Airbnb-type listings raised nearby rents by 1.3–2.7%. And the reverse is demonstrable too — after New York City's Local Law 18 took effect in September 2023 requiring STR hosts to register and be present during a guest's stay, listings for stays under 30 days fell 83% in a year, from about 21,900 to 3,700.

Around Lake Tahoe, a regional housing study found a shrinking year-round workforce and employers struggling to hire and retain staff, with applicants regularly declining jobs once they learn what housing costs or that they'd need to commute in from Reno or Carson City; the study estimated the region needs 1,200 new housing units by 2026, at least 65% of them affordable, and specifically recommended limiting short-term rentals as part of the fix. Hawaii has moved on the same logic: Honolulu's Bill 47, restricting short-term rentals, took effect July 1, 2026, after years of local workers in tourism, education, and healthcare reporting they couldn't afford to live in the communities where they worked.

Case study: Southwest Harbor, Maine

Southwest Harbor, a town of about 1,900 people on Mount Desert Island, has 360 registered short-term rentals — the highest concentration per resident on the island, ahead of Bar Harbor's 645 STRs across a population of 5,500. A 2022 report named it one of the nation's top 10 STR markets, which drew out-of-state investors to buy up what had been year-round homes; local hotels have separately converted residential housing to seasonal-worker lodging.

Pemetic School, the town's elementary school, has fallen to 108 students — for the first time smaller than neighboring Tremont's school, and now the smallest on the island. Select board member Natasha Johnson linked the drop directly to affordability, saying the "demographics of the people living within these towns are changing regarding how much people can afford to live where." Southwest Harbor is also the only town on Mount Desert Island without an affordable-housing strategy; Bar Harbor, Tremont, and Mount Desert have all since adopted short-term rental regulations aimed at preserving year-round housing stock.

The bigger picture on school enrollment

Southwest Harbor is a clear, documented, local case — it isn't the explanation for the national wave of school closures. Enrollment fell in 40 states between 2019 and 2024, and districts nationwide are consolidating as a result: Austin's school district approved closing or consolidating 10 schools for the 2026–27 year, affecting nearly 3,800 students. Where districts have explained the trend, they typically cite several factors together — Houston ISD, for instance, has pointed to declining birth rates, families displaced by natural disasters, the expansion of charter schools, and a shortage of affordable housing, in the same breath. Housing cost is a real, named factor in that national conversation; short-term rentals specifically are a documented driver of it in tourist towns like Southwest Harbor, not a claim we're extending to every closing school in the country.

Nonpartisan, plainly

Two things stand out here as genuinely unusual in this political moment. First, the numbers: nationally, corporate landlords own a small share of single-family homes, but in the specific places reporters and researchers have looked closely — a handful of Atlanta ZIP codes, Charlotte, tourist towns like Southwest Harbor — the concentration is large enough to show up in rents, home prices, and now a shrinking elementary school. Second, the politics: a bill capping institutional ownership of single-family homes passed the House 390–9 and the Senate 89–10, and a Republican president signed an executive order aimed at the same investors a Democratic-sponsored, more aggressive bill now also targets. However you view the right fix — a 350-home cap, a full 10-year divestment, local short-term rental limits, or none of the above — the underlying facts about where the housing has gone are not seriously disputed by anyone we found on the record.

Talking points

These are the questions we think you should ask those who are running for office and will represent you. We don't give our opinion on the answer, but we DO think you should be talking about them.

  1. Should the new 350-home cap on institutional investors be lowered, or should Congress require full divestment over time?
  2. Should local governments be allowed to cap the number of short-term rentals permitted per town or should there be a federal law?
  3. Should a home left vacant for more than a set number of months face a local vacancy tax?
  4. Should short-term rental hosts be required to register with the same local authority that tracks affordable-housing stock?

Read more

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