Photo Courtesy: inewsource<\/i><\/p>\n
San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer recently used a clever stunt to show her progressive supporters that she is in their corner.\u00a0 For the rest of us, meh.<\/p>\n
At the July Board of Supervisors meeting Lawson-Remer advanced a resolution entitled \u201cFighting Back Against Corporate Homebuyers and Wall Street Landlords\u201d.\u00a0 It was a \u201cstudy the issue\u201d motion, nothing real.<\/p>\n
The day before that meeting she joined a demonstration against Blackstone, a large investment firm with sizable real estate holdings.<\/p>\n
The event was held in front of a Blackstone-owned apartment building in Pacific Beach and featured Terra in a chartreuse-colored jump suit<\/a>, bull horn in hand, accompanied by social justice allies from SEIU and the ACCE Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n Political theater \u2013 not up to AOC\u2019s standards perhaps but a clever prelude to her Board of Supervisors move.<\/p>\n Perhaps too clever. Terra\u2019s stunt could backfire. A closer examination of this issue should lead her District 3 voters to recognize that she isn\u2019t being straight with them on housing policy.<\/p>\n Yes, high housing costs are troublesome, the biggest factor in the post-pandemic inflation surge.\u00a0 If one doesn\u2019t own a house that\u2019s a problem. But a solid majority of county residents live in owner-occupied housing \u2013 they benefit from rising prices.<\/p>\n Moreover, the geography of Terra\u2019s 3rd Supervisorial District skews more suburban, with 65-70% home ownership in the affluent coastal North of her district.<\/p>\n Another problem for Terra is that observers who delve into the topic will discover that she plays fast and loose with the facts.\u00a0 An example would be her misleading conflation of investor ownership of single-family homes with that of multi-family buildings.<\/p>\n She attacked Blackstone as \u201cthe largest residential landlord in the U.S., with an estimated 300,000 rental units in their portfolio\u201d.<\/p>\n Seems like a lot until one recognizes the country has something like 128 million households \u2013 300,000 units is about 0.23 % of the total. Similarly, she decried Blackstone\u2019s purchase of 66 properties containing 5,600 units in San Diego, an insignificant portion of the county\u2019s 1.5 million households.\u00a0 Do the arithmetic on that and you\u2019ll see that\u2019s about 85 units per property \u2013 they\u2019re apartment buildings.<\/p>\n Lawson-Remer also neglected to mention that Blackstone paid more than $1 billion<\/a> for those properties.\u00a0 The seller was the Conrad Prebys Foundation, benefactor to many progressive causes.<\/p>\n According to Molly Kirkland of the Southern California Rental Housing Association the portfolio of properties was old and in need of improvement, which Blackstone has the resources to accomplish.\u00a0 The deal was clearly not a mom-and-pop opportunity.<\/p>\n But it serves Lawson-Remer to demonize the large investors whom we depend on to finance big projects.<\/p>\n As for the theory that big investors are driving up the cost of single-family homes, it\u2019s not supported by the data \u2013 Terra misleads voters with her claim that \u201cinstitutional investors\u201d and \u201chedge funds\u201d are competing with first-time homebuyers. According to real estate analytics firm Parcl Labs, institutional operators own around 0.73% of the total U.S. single-family housing stock<\/a> (less than one in 100 homes).<\/p>\n And in the past two years (2022-23) only two units were bought by large investors in the entire state of California, says Melanie Woods of the California Apartment Association.<\/p>\n The broad term \u201cinvestor\u201d includes any purchaser who is not a natural person. According to a source cited in Lawson-Remer\u2019s memo to the Board of Supervisors (CoreLogic), investor purchases of single-family homes have been trending downward since mid-2021, yet home prices have continued to advance. And most landlords are still small operators with between one and 10 homes<\/a>.<\/p>\n The big picture is that San Diego County suffers from a lack of new housing, in part because development at the periphery of the metro area is restricted. As Supervisor Joel Anderson pointed out there has been essentially no new housing construction in the county in the past three years.\u00a0 Couple that fact with the low mortgage rates that prevailed for so long and San Diego home prices naturally went through the roof.<\/p>\n Lawson-Remer\u2019s attack on Blackstone etc. serves two purposes.<\/p>\n It reinforces her standing with the progressive-activist community she relies on to get elected, and it deflects attention away from her majority\u2019s responsibility for the lack of supply.<\/p>\n Anderson said it well when he declined to support Lawson-Remer\u2019s measure: \u201cIn my district we need more housing\u2026Without large corporations\u2026 none of these projects will be built. If we\u2019re going to say that mom-and-pops are the only ones who can build homes for potential rentals, we\u2019re killing the market and we\u2019re hurting the people that we say we serve.\u201d<\/p>\n