By Guy Page
As the Democratic Convention opens today in Chicago, Vermont’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives is blaming Wall Street for the housing shortage.
Furthermore, Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) says VP and presumptive Dem presidential nominee Kamala Harris supports her bill to stop ‘predatory’ landlords. Harris is on record supporting various types of price controls in an effort to reduce inflation.
We can protect working families in a big way by cracking down on price fixing and gouging.
“@VP [Harris] supports my bill to ban digital price fixing by predatory tech companies and landlords,” Balint tweeted today. “Rent is already too high. We *literally* can’t afford to let this go on.”
Vermont has the fastest-rising housing prices in the nation, according to a Federal Housing Finance Agency report. As reported in VDC June 11, Vermont’s housing sale prices rose 12.8% between Quarter 1 2023 and Quarter 1 2024, the highest in the U.S. New Jersey was second with 11.6%.
Furthermore, the highest rate of increase for off-campus student rentals among all U.S. universities belongs to UVM, according to another recent report.
While many observers blame Vermont’s exorbitant cost of housing on the Legislature’s decades-long and continued tight control of development via Act 250 and the state’s ‘green’ energy building and remodeling regulations – laws passed under Balint’s watch as a leader in the Vermont Senate – as well as aggressive land conservation and an influx of immigrants across the economic spectrum, Balint instead blames the center of capitalism, Wall Street.
“Regular Americans don’t stand a chance in the housing market if we’re up against Wall Street. It’s ridiculous and can feel hopeless,” Balint tweeted August 16. “The economy needs to work for our working families, not massive corporations.” She claims that one in four homes in the U.S. are bought by ‘big investors’, thus driving up the cost for would-be middle-class buyers.
In June, Balint introduced the Preventing Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act, which claims landlords using specialized software are “coordinating prices to increase rents (by between (5% and 12%), resulting in less competition and higher rent prices for consumers.”