Janine Jackson reaired archival interviews with Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz about housing and media for the November 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Housing and home ownership represent a critical vector in the project of a multiracial democracy, and we've talked about that a lot on the show. Today we will revisit relevant, informed conversations with veteran housing analysts and advocates Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz. Housing and the media: This week on CounterSpin.
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Home ownership is a key ingredient in what is still called the “American Dream.” Beyond the meaningful symbolism of having one's own patch, home ownership is instrumental in wealth creation. It's the difference between living paycheck to paycheck and being able to think about the future, and maybe hand something off to your children.
That's why many people are looking with worry at the phenomenon of institutional investors, meaning Wall Street, gobbling up a larger and larger percentage of homes, and particularly entry-level homes, the very ones that first-home buyers would be looking at as affordable. We talked about this with longtime housing advocate Gene Slater, chairman and founder of CSG Advisors. This is us with Gene Slater a couple years back:
Gene Slater: Traditionally, there have been many, tens of millions of ma-and-pa small landlords. But the idea of Wall Street, with virtually unlimited access to cash, buying up single-family homes is a recent phenomenon.
It started in 2010, after the financial crisis, in part encouraged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who financed some of these entities to buy up homes.
And then it remained, and it sort of fell back, and was at a modest level. And the last couple of years, toward the end of the pandemic, it’s really mushroomed significantly.
And I think that’s for two reasons. One, from the Wall Street point of view—and I’m talking about REITs, particularly general partnerships—they had raised tremendous amounts of capital before the pandemic to invest in real estate, and suddenly, in the pandemic, one wasn’t going to invest in shopping centers or retail or in office buildings.
So a lot of that got focused on either just buying normal rental properties, standard apartment buildings, but also got focused on buying single-family homes, because they saw single-family homes going up, becoming less affordable, and they could buy. And their focus was in buying in less-expensive neighborhoods, more affordable parts of the country.
And so they saw this as an opportunity to make long-term gains and to push up rents. And they did algorithms showing, we could add rent charges for this…. Unlike ma-and-pa landlords, they could basically create standardized ways of doing this.
So they’ve seen this as a big opportunity. And the more inflation has heated up, the more they’re now pitching this to their investors as, “This is a perfect hedge against inflation.”
JJ: This has also huge racial ramifications as well, yeah?
GS: Yeah. In fact, part of the way I approached this problem is, I had just written a book last year, Freedom to Discriminate, on how the realtors conspired to segregate housing and divide the country. And as I’ve been talking about that in different places, this issue has come up in those discussions, in places I didn’t expect. Talking about this in Greensboro, North Carolina, and basically turned a community meeting about gentrification in East Greensboro into one of out-of-town investors buying homes.
So it’s happening there. It’s happening virtually everywhere. It’s not only in minority areas; it’s not necessarily deliberately targeted, but it’s targeted, buying homes on average 26% below the statewide average.
So that means a focus on startup homes, on modest homes, many of which have been in minority areas. So it’s having an outsized impact.
There’s an excellent Federal Reserve of Minneapolis study, mapping where these corporate landlords are buying, and you can see tremendous overlap with areas where minorities live or would normally buy.
JJ: You also note—and you just tilted towards this, but it might need spelling out—with fewer families able to buy homes, those people stay renting, and so landlords can then push up rents as well. It’s kind of a self-feeding cycle.
Gene Slater: "The starter homes, the modest-cost homes, families can’t even bid on them, because they’ve been swooped up in all-cash, no-inspection offers that no family can compete with."
GS: Yeah. Those people remain renters, and they’re at the top end of the rental market, so it allows landlords to push up rents in general. And these corporate landlords are pace-setting, and very explicitly they’re deciding, “Well, the median income of our tenants is this; we can push to a higher percentage of disposable income.” That’s what’s happening.
And the impact is of reducing the number of homes that families can buy. This is what’s really key. There’s a record-low level of how many homes are available for purchase, because people are staying in their homes longer, because they’re affected by being able to find another place.
And with that record-low inventory—this happened especially during the pandemic—there’s a pressure to push up prices. If you remove a lot of the starter homes, the modest-cost homes, families can’t even bid on them, because they’ve been swooped up in all-cash, no-inspection offers that no family can compete with. They’re bidding against each other for a smaller and smaller share of homes. That’s pushing up prices, and that’s pushing up rents.
JJ: And then also, ownership means power, so it matters, in terms of policy, that this market is now one where Wall Street is invested, and is going to be trying to call the shots. Who owns the homes in a neighborhood has an effect on policy in that neighborhood. And it’s just another element that this is affecting, right?
GS: Yes, absolutely. And it also has an effect on neighborhood stability, especially single-family neighborhoods that have been largely ownership, or significantly ownership, to remove the opportunities for ownership makes those into less stable neighborhoods.
It’s a long-term effect on home ownership in the country, and it’s really asking, “Who do we want to own America? Who do we want to own our neighborhoods?”
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Janine Jackson: Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its Black population. So says researcher and author Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute in an essay from May of 2015 on the roots of protests around the killing of Freddie Gray. We talked with him about all of those interconnected issues.
Richard Rothstein: "Segregation was a government policy, it was racially conscious, it was not the unintended consequence of benign policies."
Richard Rothstein: We have a myth in this country that we have what the lawyers call de facto segregation, that we created these neighborhoods—like the inner city of Baltimore, that are almost all Black, that are poor, segregated from mainstream society—by accident, either because Black people were too poor to move to the suburbs, or because there was private prejudice, or because it was white flight of people who didn’t want to live near Blacks.
And although some of that is true, the bigger cause, the most important cause of segregation is public policy that was deliberately intended, for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, to separate Black and white families. And segregation was a government policy, it was racially conscious, it was not the unintended consequence of benign policies. It was designed by federal, state and local governments to segregate our communities. This is true in every metropolitan area in the country.
Now in Baltimore, in the early 20th century, Baltimore actually passed an ordinance defining which blocks Blacks could live on and which blocks whites could live on. When that kind of ordinance was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917, the mayor of Baltimore set up a committee on segregation to make sure that even without the ordinance still being in effect, that housing inspectors and health inspectors would enforce segregation, and if any family in a white neighborhood were to sell to a Black family, the housing inspectors and health inspectors would make sure that the Black family could no longer live there. And this kind of thing went on at the local level for many years.
Then the federal government played a major role in explicitly segregating neighborhoods in Baltimore and throughout the country. The first civilian public housing program began in a deal under the Public Works Administration; it was a New Deal program to create housing for civilian populations, and it was segregated. The director of the Public Works Administration in the Franklin Roosevelt administration established what he called a neighborhood composition rule, which was that public housing could only be established for people of the race in the neighborhood where the public housing was established.
In fact, many of the public housing projects were established in integrated neighborhoods; they tore down integrated neighborhoods and created segregated neighborhoods in their place. That’s one of the things that happened in St. Louis, for example, that led to the kind of situation we have in Ferguson.
That continued; public housing continued to be segregated throughout the 20th century up until the mid-1950s. In 1949, President Truman proposed a massive expansion of public housing programs in this country; at the time, there was still a civilian housing shortage, so public housing was for whites, not just for Blacks. And in order to try and defeat his public housing proposal, Republicans in Congress put forward what they called the “poison pill amendment.” That was an amendment that would require public housing to be integrated—knowing that if the amendment passed, Southern Democrats would no longer vote for public housing, and the entire public housing program would be defeated.
So liberal Democrats in the Senate and the House, led by people like Hubert Humphrey, campaigned against the integration amendment, because they argued that if the public housing was integrated, there would be no public housing at all.
And this was true throughout the country; this was not just for the South. So segregated public housing was created throughout the country.
The biggest federal policy probably was the policy of the Federal Housing Administration, which financed, starting in the early 1940s, builders of subdivisions, mass-production builders of places like, if you’re familiar with, Levittown, New York, or Daly City in California, and subdivisions everywhere in between. They financed builders to create subdivisions of single-family homes in the suburbs on condition that they be sold to whites only. That was an explicit condition of the Federal Housing Administration financing of bank loans to developers.
So while whites and Blacks who were of similar incomes, returning war veterans for example, working-class families, could have afforded to buy into the suburbs, only whites were permitted to do so. Blacks were consigned not only to urban ghettos, but to segregated public housing in urban ghettos.
And those are the kinds of policies that resulted in what we see in Baltimore today, what we see in St. Louis, and what we see around the country in the last 50 years.
One more thing: In 1970, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Nixon administration was a fellow named George Romney, the father of the recent presidential candidate. George Romney understood everything I've just described to you—as did most people at that time; we’ve forgotten this history. George Romney said that the federal government created a "white noose" around inner-city ghettos, and it was the job of the federal government now to untie that noose, and George Romney began a program which he called “open communities,” in which he denied federal funds to suburbs that refused to desegregate.
And one of the first test cases he made of this policy of denying federal funds for sewers and parkland and water projects was Baltimore County. He told Baltimore County that it was not going to get any more federal funds for any urban projects unless it repealed its exclusionary zoning ordinance, the ordinance that prohibited the construction of multi-family dwellings in the suburbs, unless it accepted public housing with African-Americans, and unless it accepted subsidized low-income housing. Baltimore County was one of the first places that he tried to do that.
Eventually George Romney was reined in by the Nixon administration, because there was a white backlash to his desegregation policies, and Romney himself was eventually forced out as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and we’ve had nothing as aggressive in the way of desegregation since.
So this history was once well-known; it was once widely accepted and understood that segregation was not an accident, but it was a purposeful creation of state, federal and local government, and we’ve now forgotten it, and we think it happened by accident. And when we think it happened by accident, we then think there is nothing we can do about it. Whereas if we understood that this was the product of government policy, we would understand that there are government policies that could reverse it.
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Janine Jackson: For many people, and for media, the idea of racial discrimination in housing invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A book by our guest illuminated the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live. The book was called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. We spoke with its author, George Lipsitz.
George Lipsitz: "A lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing."
George Lipsitz: Housing discrimination raises in people's minds a direct act of discrimination, a refusal to rent or sell to a person of a targeted race, or the long effects of redlining. And these are still in effect, and they have an enormous impact on people's life chances and opportunities. But a lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.
I talk in the book about the ways in which low-ball home-value appraisals of property owned by Black people hurt their ability to sell and refinance. And those same houses have artificially high property tax appraisals, which makes them pay a disproportionate share of taxation, makes them subject to tax lien foreclosures and auctions, which have been a massive transfer of wealth, especially in the last 10 years.
Housing discrimination puts people from aggrieved groups in what Tricia Rose calls “proximity to toxicity,” close to incinerators, toxic waste dumps, diesel fuels, pesticides.
It also is enacted through a tax system that functions as an engine of racial inequality. Property tax relief in some cities for homeowners has meant that renters—and the city of Ferguson in Missouri is an example of this—are harassed by predatory policing that imposes arbitrary fines, fees and debts on them as a way to raise municipal revenue, to make up for the subsidies that are given to people who’ve been able to profit from housing discrimination.
And there’s also mass incarceration, a disabling process, a disease-spreading practice. It affects people’s nervous systems, and anxiety produces hypertension.
Even something like insurance, which appears to be race-neutral because it’s determined by algorithms; the algorithms are created by humans, and they basically make the success of past discrimination an excuse for continuing and extending it by equating Black people with risk.
I’ll give an example. One of the things that affects your credit score is the kind of loan that you got. And so if you got a subprime loan, even if you qualified for a prime loan, you’re considered to be a credit risk, but there was nothing wrong with your behavior. It was the discrimination of the loan that was given to you.
So I say that the danger zone is everywhere, that housing discrimination harms health and steals wealth. And as you said, it not only harms its direct victims, it also squanders the skills and abilities of the people whose lives are shortened because of it, misallocates resources, and it basically increases costs of insurance and healthcare, policing, for everyone.
JJ: Let’s spell just a couple of things out, first about health: Housing discrimination harming health is not limited to polluters, like I talked about FreshDirect, being placed in aggrieved communities. The impact of housing policy on health—there’s a number of other pieces to that, yes?
GL: You can be in an area that has no medical services. We found that areas that have concentrated poverty, and concentrated populations of people who can’t move elsewhere because of housing discrimination, have more pedestrianaccidents. The street lighting is worse.
People who are renters in this age of incredible shortages of housing—and part of that is because of a massive buy-up of homes by private equity firms—can’t really bargain with their landlords. If your landlord is somebody you know, that’s one thing. If it’s a private equity company that has 20,000 or 30,000 residences, you may not even be able to find out the identity of that landlord. And then it becomes very difficult to say, “Repair the furnace, make sure that the electricity is safe, make sure that the water is OK.” So it creates health hazards inside the houses. It creates hazards outside the houses.
Also, people who live in places where a lot of houses have been torn down—especially in a city like Detroit, where private equity firms have been buying them up and tearing them down—that produces dust, which young children bring into their homes and it increases their likelihood of asthma and many other deadly diseases.
Farm workers constantly live in housing that is close to pesticides, close to pollution, but they also suffer from being in places that are food deserts, where you can’t get nutritious food, or food swamps, where you can only get unnutritious food. And they also suffer from the lack of medical insurance, some of that caused by the high cost of housing. It means that rather than be evicted from their homes, they’ll forego necessary medicines and remedies that they would otherwise buy.
JJ: I don’t believe that people understand the interconnectedness of this, and I think that’s part of the way that we talk about things: Healthcare problems are one thing, housing problems are another thing. And if you disconnect those things, then you don’t get what’s happening. And that’s exactly what I think this book is getting at, is the way that these things are immediately connected. They have everything to do with one another.
For example, stealing wealth, which is the other part of the title: People think owning a home is central to the American Dream, and it’s not just because you have a roof over your head. It’s because you have hereditary wealth. You now own a thing that you can transfer to your children, and that has everything to do with your sense of confidence in your life, and your ability to provide for folks, and your absence from, your distance from, precarity. All of these things are connected, which I think the book is trying to get at.
GL: These impediments to being able to inherit assets that appreciate in value, can be passed down across generations, it’s a massive transfer of wealth, and a tremendous injury that goes across generations. But it’s also a matter of: housing and healthcare are talked about separately, but they’re also talked about separately from education, from incarceration, from transportation, and yet they’re mutually constitutive.
Even within some of these fields, when people are trained in law, they focus on the tort model of injury. And this teaches them that discrimination has to be individual, intentional, interpersonal, and that it’s an aberrant practice in an otherwise fair market.
But, actually, this has nothing to do with the way housing discrimination works most of the time. Although there are 4 million instances of intentional, individual, interpersonal injuries every year, housing discrimination is also collective, cumulative, continuing. It produces inequalities that can’t be remedied one at a time.
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Janine Jackson: That was George Lipsitz, speaking with CounterSpin last fall. Before that you heard Richard Rothstein, and Gene Slater.
