Are Planners Partly to Blame for Gentrification?

The world’s real estate is worth an estimated $217 trillion, making up more than 60 percent of global assets. Even though three-quarters of that amount is tied up in housing, it hasn’t translated to secure shelter or prosperity for many: U.S. homeownership levels hit a 50-year low in 2016, and that same year, 37 percent of all home sales in America were made to absentee investors.

With Wall Street-backed Invitation Homes (owned by the Blackstone Group) now serving as the nation’s largest landlord of single-family homes—snapping up many of the same properties that were foreclosed on a decade ago—it’s hard to recognize the promise of home ownership as a tenet of the American Dream. Not that renting is much easier: Average move-in rents in the U.S. have more than doubled over the past two decades.