Americans Should Not Have to Rent the American Dream | Opinion

The following is adapted from the author's New York Times bestselling book, You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back.

For decades, people around the world have come to America to embrace freedoms, including property rights. The American Dream is often illustrated by owning a very specific piece of property—a home. That's not a coincidence; the home is the largest asset on U.S. household balance sheets in terms of dollar value.

But in recent years, the balance sheets of young and old alike have been wrecked by inflation, debt and college loans. Home prices have also been driven up by undersupply, government regulation, and even corporate competition.

With that, more Americans are finding their dream isn't attainable—it is only for rent.

Corporations have been given a huge advantage through government and central bank policy. With this unlevel playing field, these institutional investors drove up the prices in traditional asset classes. When they couldn't find enough of a return on their investment from the usual sources, Wall Street-backed corporate investors decided to come into the single-family home market.

The New York Times Magazine reported that "from 2007 to 2011, 4.7 million households lost homes to foreclosure, and a million more to short sale. Private-equity firms developed new ways to secure credit, enabling them to leverage their equity and acquire an astonishing number of homes."

It was an epic transfer of wealth.

Moreover, it consolidated power with big institutions and has impaired the ability of many Americans to gain wealth via home ownership.

While there was no meaningful institutional corporate investment in the housing market prior to 2010, at the end of 2022, more than one in every five homes was purchased from a corporate investor, according to CoreLogic.

Imagine for a moment an America without broad individual home ownership.

That America would be one with further exacerbated non-merit-based inequality. We know the rich and well-connected will continue to own housing assets and collect the wealth driven by both the rents and the price appreciation of those houses.

Owning a home leads to more family wealth, directly and indirectly. Those who have more money can afford a house and eventually other investments, but those who face increasing rents are often priced out of investing, creating a cycle of non-ownership and lack of participation in wealth creation.

NGOs like the World Economic Forum—which famously predicted in a 2021 video "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy"—and publicly traded corporations buying up tens of thousands of single-family homes to rent back to the middle class pretend that moving away from ownership is for your convenience and happiness. But the "care-free life" of not having the ability to generate legacy wealth hasn't worked out too well for people throughout history. Those without ownership have typically been unfree and unhappy—thus the old Hebrew Proverb: "He is not a full man who does not own a piece of land."

In consolidating ownership within the hands of the wealthy and well-connected and taking the American Dream away from the middle class, central planners are choosing the haves and have nots—a divide that's been accelerating over the past decade and a half with more and more wealth being transferred from Main Street to Wall Street, by policy and by design.

Non-ownership of single-family homes also has material and concerning implications for freedom. Non-ownership means that more of Americans lives are dictated by the cooperation and coercion of corporate and government forces. A corporation may not let you have a firearm in your home to defend yourself. If you say something they don't like on social media, they may kick you out of your living space. Your rights hang in the balance.

And as we've seen at length with the Twitter Filers, the government can get the corporations to do their dirty work with a wink and a nudge. If the government wants to rid your life of gas stoves, water heaters, ceiling fans, ice cube makers, or whatever their pet-project du jour is, it's much easier for them to do that at scale via their corporate cronies, who don't have to live with the conditions they are enforcing.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest are buying up more hard assets. One of today's most famous purveyors of socialism, Bernie Sanders, has three homes. Homes and Gardens Magazine did a November 2022 piece on the several homes owned by the Bidens. Other wealthy individuals and even university endowments are buying up productive land and water rights.

That's why the prediction is "you'll own nothing"—not "we'll own nothing."

The middle and working class deserve to participate in the American Dream. Barriers to owning housing need to be removed. People need to get involved at the local level to make building easier and more abundant. Individuals should consider whether or not they want to sell their house to a corporation, which will take it out of family ownership for the long-run.

And, for goodness sake, ignore what the elite are saying and do what they are doing. They will keep owning houses; you deserve that opportunity, too.

Carol Roth is a former investment banker, entrepreneur and author of the new book "You Will Own Nothing" from Broadside Books. Her previous books are "The War on Small Business" and the New York Times bestseller "The Entrepreneur Equation."

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.