As inflation continues to soar in America, few things have become more precious than hard assets like property. And with the stock market as unsteady as our political leadership, big dollars from Wall Street are pouring into real estate, snapping up both multi-family and single-family homes.
Rents are on a wild binge, up near 20% in the past year, while home prices have hit a record high. As people can no longer afford to buy homes, they have been forced into the rental market, driving up prices towards absurd levels in fashionable cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Like a pestilence of its own, high rents are spreading to the realm of the “wannabe” places where the “creative class” types are moving to: cities like Miami, Austin, Nashville, and Las Vegas as well as more prosaic places such as Tampa and Memphis.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
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