Shelter became an asset class. This is the ledger.
Plain, sourced, unsentimental accounting of how capital financialized the roof over your head — and what it costs the people underneath it. Kept by someone with no stake in the comfortable conclusion.
In the fall of 2013, a Wall Street firm turned the roof over three thousand American families into a bond. The instrument worked. It is still working. This is what it costs.
In November of 2013, out of the wreckage the foreclosure crisis left behind, Blackstone's subsidiary Invitation Homes did a thing that had not been done before. It took 3,207 single-family houses — homes in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, and Illinois, the states the recession had gutted worst — bundled them into a single instrument, and sold the future rent checks of the families living in them as a bond.
They called it Invitation Homes 2013-SFR1. It was the first of its kind. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, studying the structure a few months later, asked the question that mattered and answered it too softly: is this new asset class here to stay?
It was. It is.
There is no shortage of housing commentary. There is a shortage of accounting — plain, sourced, unsentimental, kept by someone with no stake in the comfortable conclusion.
This publication exists to keep that account. To trace the machine that converts shelter into yield: the foreclosure inventory bought at the bottom, the rent securitized into bonds, the algorithm that sets the price, the judgment that follows the missed payment.
And to keep the other ledger beside it — the human one. The household with $210 left at month's end. The cheap unit that vanished. The family sent away from a courtroom in five minutes.
Every figure on these pages traces to primary source. Nothing is invented to make the point land harder. The facts are damning enough on their own.
Long-form, sourced essays on the machinery of housing financialization — securitization, institutional ownership, algorithmic pricing, the apparatus of removal.
First-hand accounts from the ground where the machine touches people — the courtroom, the conversion notice, the clawed-back concession. Where the numbers acquire faces.
The recurring brief — the running count. New data, new filings, new deals, read plainly and weighed against what they cost.
Free to read. Delivered when there is something worth saying — never on a schedule that demands filler. The record, in your inbox.