Meet your new landlord: Wall Street

Greg Hanscom

Greg Hanscom Jul 1, 2025

Jan 12, 2018

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                <h1>Meet your new landlord: Wall Street</h1>
                <h2><p>As if it wasn’t hard enough to find a house in the Northwest’s burgeoning urban centers, now we have to compete with Wall Street, too. In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Lee Van Der Voo of Investigate West talks about high rolling investment firms that are storming</p></h2>
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               <p>By <a href="/author/greg-hanscom-crosscut-com/">Greg Hanscom</a></p> 
              <p><time datetime="2025-02-04T05:00:00-08:00">Jan 12, 2018</time></p>
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            <p>As if it wasn’t hard enough to find a house in the Northwest’s burgeoning urban centers, now we have to compete with Wall Street, too. In an interview <a href="http://invw.org/2015/09/14/reporter-conversation-is-wall-street-scooping-up-portland-rentals/?ref=dev.cascadepbs.org">with Oregon Public Broadcasting</a>, Lee Van Der Voo of Investigate West talks about high rolling investment firms that are storming the Portland-area’s real estate market, buying up hundreds of houses and, as she puts it, using them as collateral to “raise huge amounts of capital that they’re putting into more real estate.” The practice grew out of the Great Recession, when Wall street went looking for a way to profit from the real estate crash, and it has grown from there, says Van Der Voo, who wrote a recent <a href="http://invw.org/2015/09/08/wall-street-moves-in-on-portland-rental-homes/?ref=dev.cascadepbs.org">feature story</a> on the topic. The Seattle Times has reported that one such company, Blackstone, is active in Seattle, too, <a href="http://www.seattletimes.com/business/wall-street-buyers-snap-up-thousands-of-local-homes-for-rentals/?ref=dev.cascadepbs.org">hoovering up homes for cash</a> and turning them into rentals — and in the process, pushing home prices even farther out of reach for working families.</p>
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As if it wasn’t hard enough to find a house in the Northwest’s burgeoning urban centers, now we have to compete with Wall Street, too. In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Lee Van Der Voo of Investigate West talks about high rolling investment firms that are storming the Portland-area’s real estate market, buying up hundreds of houses and, as she puts it, using them as collateral to “raise huge amounts of capital that they’re putting into more real estate.” The practice grew out of the Great Recession, when Wall street went looking for a way to profit from the real estate crash, and it has grown from there, says Van Der Voo, who wrote a recent feature story on the topic. The Seattle Times has reported that one such company, Blackstone, is active in Seattle, too, hoovering up homes for cash and turning them into rentals — and in the process, pushing home prices even farther out of reach for working families.

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By Greg Hanscom

Greg Hanscom is formerly the executive editor of Crosscut and KCTS 9 public television. In his more than two decades as a journalist, Hanscom’s writing has run the gamut from inner-city schools and ur