REITs allow investors to buy shares in real estate portfolios and are exempt from corporate taxes if they distribute 90% of their income to shareholders. As a result, REITs are incentivised to extract maximum profits from tenants, often through rental increases, cost-cutting maintenance schemes, and rapid turnover. REITs now dominate the rental market, particularly in fast-gentrifying urban areas. For example, Equity Residential and AvalonBay Communities, which are two of the largest residential REITs, own tens of thousands of apartments in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. A study by the University of California Berkely found that REIT ownership is correlated with higher rents, higher evictions rates, and reduced affordability. This structural violence means that basic shelter becomes a dividend-yielding commodity, resulting in tenants becoming nothing more than revenue streams for these corporations, feeding into a system of displacement.
As Wall Street consolidates ownership, real estate developers play the role of reshaping urban space to serve the wealthy. Through luxury condominiums, commercial rezoning, and “urban revitalization” schemes, developers have organized the wholesale remapping of working-class neighborhoods to serve their interests. In Brooklyn’s Williamsburg or Boyle’s Heights in Los Angeles, developers have colluded with city governments in order to transform once affordable minority neighborhoods into spaces for the affluent.
In the process, thousands of long-time residents have been forced out in what’s been described by the non-profit Right to the City Alliance and other organizations as a new form of colonialism in which land and culture are seized by capital. This process is abetted by state and local governments, which often offer zoning varriances, tax breaks, and infrastructure investment to developers and systematically cutting funding for public housing. The slow-motion attacks on public housing is another front to ongoing class war.
Since the 1990s, under programs like Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) and HOPE VI, the federal government has shifted from directly operating public housing to subsidizing private landlords. As a result, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, over 250,000 public housing units have been lost since 1995 and in their place private developers have erected mixed-income complexes with fewer affordable units that are managed by REITs and LLCs. The result is displacement masked by the language of “revitalization”. Author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues that “When it’s just left up to the market to determine the floor on housing prices, it will go as high as humanly possible. That’s what we’re experiencing now—historically high rents, historically high levels of housing insecurity.” Taylor describes this not as a housing “crisis” but “housing under capitalism.” “It’s insecure, it’s unstable, it’s every person for themselves.”
The racial geography of the class war over housing is undeniable, especially as minority renters—namely Black Americans—are more likely to live in REIT-owned housing, more likely to be evicted, and face higher rents. According to a Princeton Eviction Lab report, the eviction rate for Black women renters is nearly double the national average. Meanwhile, gentrification deepens segregation and displaces historic communities with the intention of walling off the poor and forcing them into homelessness. As of 2024, over 650,000 people in the US are homeless on any given night, despite many working full-time jobs.
But there is nothing inevitable about this. Around the world, governments have recognized that housing must be decommodified, and in the US tenant movements are demanding the same. Groups like Homes Guarantee, and People’s Action have organized rent strikes, pushed for social housing, and are attempting to build alternatives to landlord rule. Some cities are also experimenting with community land trusts and rental control expansion. The popularity of NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s rent control proposition speaks to the desperation facing working class people, and their demands for a better life for themselves and their communities. Yet, while these are important steps, there will be no change without confronting the immense political power of the real estate lobby and financial institutions.
René Moya—a member and organizer of the Highland Park local of the L.A. Tenants Union—told Splinter that Trump’s assault on the poor and working class can be analyzed along three axes, the first being the unprecedented attacks on immigrant workers—“the very foundation of the economy in America’s richest state, California.” Moya explains that immigrants in Los Angeles—and now across much of the country—are questioning the risks tied to everyday life: going to work, buying groceries, dropping their kids off at school, and simply being present in public.
“This has the immediate effect of reducing economic activity and putting tenants at risk of eviction for non-payment of rent as they fall behind due to job loss,” Moya said. “And, further, these attacks on immigrants impact construction workers specifically.”
On top of the societal consequences of the current administration’s violent attacks, federal divestment in public housing has also accelerated, and Moya argues that the administration’s plans for reforms to the structure of federal housing funding goes beyond just disinvestment in public housing. “Federal fair housing rules cut housing programs across the board through block granting federal housing funds to states—impacting Section 8, public housing investment, rental assistance programs, and more. All told, millions of households that depend in some form or another on the architecture of federal housing assistance are at risk.”
When asked what housing justice means to him, Moya describes it as being—at the bare minimum—”the ability of all people to live in their communities for as long as they chose, in conditions of their choosing, in dignified housing that is the centre of stability in our lives and not a source of fear, frustration, and ill health. But I also think it’s much more expensive than this: it means democratic control over our lives and for the development of real community over which we all feel a stake.” This is why confronting the attacks being unleashed by the Trump administration and the power of corporate landlords means more than reform, and it will require rebuilding housing as a social good; until this happens we will only see more rent hikes, evictions, and the weaponization of displacement.
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