Last month I attended a community meeting in Cincinnati students of the Housing Systems course in the University of Cincinnati School of Planning to discuss “how institutional investors are impacting our city; what is currently being done to address this issue and what more we need to do.” I’ve posted before about the Port of Cincinnati’s efforts to thwart institutional investors buying single-family housing in the city. The question that was hard to answer at the meeting was what exactly is an “institutional investor” and whether ownership is causally related to bad housing outcomes, like higher rents, eviction, or dilapidation. Worrying about who owns housing seems to be yet another distraction from the real problem, lack of supply in the face of rising demand.

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