A note before today’s column.
Yesterday’s shooting in Minneapolis is another sign of this administration’s escalating authoritarianism. Not only did an ICE agent kill a woman at point-blank range, but senior officials immediately sprung into action to justify the killing of an American citizen.
Renee Nicole Good was 37 years old. She is survived by her 6-year-old child.
I wish I had something profound to say about this. Some advice or course of action that could make this right. But there really isn’t anything that can make this right. A woman is dead and her killer is free.
It can feel weird to talk about anything else other than the biggest story of the day, but the mission of The Argument is to engage in the most important debates that will define the policy and political direction of the alternative to Trump. And just a couple hours after Good was shot, Trump was posting online about his newest housing proposals.
How I imagine Trump will reveal his anti-Blackstone strategy at Davos. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
People forget, but J.D. Vance was a key architect of the populist myth that BlackRock is the primary villain in the housing crisis.
On June 9, 2021, the then-candidate for Ohio Senate approvingly retweeted a right-wing anonymous Twitter account that went viral for the claim that “Blackrock is buying every single family house they can find, paying 20-50% above asking price and outbidding normal home buyers.”
Vance’s addition was to blame “The Left” for ignoring this problem because BlackRock was pro-DEI: “Woke capitalism: culture war against your values with one hand, robbing you blind with the other,” he tweeted.
The BlackRock myth1 spread quickly, culminating in yesterday’s announcement by President Donald Trump that he will be “taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.”2 Like Vance, Trump blamed corporate ownership of housing for undermining young people’s ability to own a home.
The MAGA right are not the only group interested in this story. Left-leaning commentators and Democratic leadership also exhibited a bizarre fixation on institutional investors as a root cause of housing unaffordability. Not only is this false, but recent research indicates that institutional investors entering the housing market actually increase rental options and affordability (more on this later).
