Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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SECOND

Thursday, March 12, 2026 4:20 PM

Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, Page A14

Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup

The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives.

Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs. The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.

The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/whats-in-the-21st-century-road-
to-housing-act/

Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.

Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).

President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.

Investors who own 350 or more homes would be barred from buying new ones with a few exceptions—namely, if home builders construct homes specifically for rental purposes; if investors make substantial renovations to bring homes into compliance with local building codes; or if they buy them from other large investors.

Investors would still be required to sell any homes they acquire under these exemptions within seven years. This may not be enough time to recoup their investment, especially since they would have to pay hefty taxes and transactions costs upon selling a home. They also face risk if prices fall.

Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand. If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter warn that federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises might seek to prevent evictions by easing underwriting standards to enable tenants to buy homes that investors are forced to sell. This would increase the risk and costs for taxpayers who backstop mortgages.

The bill implicitly acknowledges the potential for collateral damage by giving the Treasury Secretary carte blanche authority to issue rules to “minimize market disruptions” and “mitigate, to the extent possible, negative impacts on consumers and communities.” Treasury could also redefine “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” and “excepted purchase.”

In other words, Treasury would have the power to rewrite the provision. Don’t Republicans want to pare back the administrative state? We’re told the Trump team demanded this unfettered discretion because they realize Ms. Warren’s drafted language would cause problems in the housing market.

Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels on all homes!

Oh, and don’t forget a

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SECOND

Thursday, March 12, 2026 4:48 PM

As Iran pinches the Strait of Hormuz, American farmers are getting squeezed

By Harry Bruinius | March 12, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET | Plant City, Fla.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2026/0312/iran-war-farmers-fertilizer-st
rait-hormuz

Lance Lillibridge is looking through his financial ledgers over the past few years, putting some perspective on the rising costs of fertilizer for most American farmers.

Mr. Lillibridge, an Iowa corn grower and part of a family of farmers going back a century, has roughly 1,250 acres devoted to his corn crop – including a few acres of hay to feed his some 60 head of beef cattle. Every year, he needs to add nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to his fields. “Fertilizer is our No. 1 expense, other than land,” he says.

In 2021, his price for a ton of anhydrous ammonia, which he uses to shoot nitrogen into the soil, was $492. The price of corn at the same time was around $4.50 a bushel, according to his records. By January 2025, the price of corn he commands remained about the same. But anhydrous ammonia jumped to $745 a ton.

Why We Wrote This

American farmers are seeing fertilizer prices spike as supply is choked off by Iran’s threats to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, in response to attacks by the U.S. and Israel. It’s a sign of how the war is affecting the global economy – including spring planting.

Then the United States and Israel attacked Iran, which retaliated by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz – the narrow, 21-mile-wide waterway between Iran and Oman through which nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows. It is also the choke point for roughly one-third of the world’s traded fertilizer supply.

“On Feb. 13, the cost was $850 a ton, and the price of corn was just above $4,” Mr. Lillibridge says of the weeks before the attacks on Iran began. “Fertilizer’s going up; corn’s going down. And today, [anhydrous ammonia] is $1,050 a ton,” he says as he checks his supplier’s website. “That’s what’s going on with Iran.”

Indeed, the attacks on Iran are jolting global energy markets, continuing to push up the price of oil. But for America’s farmers, the more immediate crisis might be unfolding in the current spikes in the cost of fertilizers.

The timing could hardly be worse. Across the Corn Belt, spring planting begins in a matter of weeks. Nitrogen fertilizers, considered the most critical input for growing corn, must be in the ground before seeds go in every year, and are used later in the season as well, unlike phosphorus and potassium.

“I’ve had many, many phone calls this week from farmers in panic,” says Mr. Lillibridge, a past president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association. “They can’t even get a price on it.”

Other crops, too, are feeling the effects of what has become a price spike on top of a price spike. In Georgia, some watermelon growers report they can no longer afford to plant a crop because of fertilizer prices. In Arkansas, rice and cotton growers report a looming economic crisis as fuel and fertilizer costs skyrocket and commodity prices fall.

In Florida, strawberry farmers have recently been celebrating the close of the winter season, during the first week of March, as they begin to prepare for the next. While fertilizer costs are a much smaller line item – labor costs being the highest, as strawberries are picked throughout the winter months – farmers here are also feeling pinched by rising costs, and by weather disturbances.

“We have never, ever seen this amount of wind during a freeze in Florida, ever,” says Bob McDowell, a manager at Fancy Farms in Plant City, Florida, where he has been working for about 25 years. “A lot of the old-timer farmers that I talked to, they said we’ve never experienced those two conditions at the same time.”

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a disaster declaration for the freeze, estimating agricultural losses at more than $3 billion. But the war with Iran has affected Florida agriculture in other ways as well, Mr. McDowell and other experts point out.

Indeed, there is a partic

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, March 12, 2026 8:50 PM

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:
Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, Page A14

Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup

The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives.

Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs. The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.

The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/whats-in-the-21st-century-road-
to-housing-act/

Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.

Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).

President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.

Investors who own 350 or more homes would be barred from buying new ones with a few exceptions—namely, if home builders construct homes specifically for rental purposes; if investors make substantial renovations to bring homes into compliance with local building codes; or if they buy them from other large investors.

Investors would still be required to sell any homes they acquire under these exemptions within seven years. This may not be enough time to recoup their investment, especially since they would have to pay hefty taxes and transactions costs upon selling a home. They also face risk if prices fall.

Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand. If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter warn that federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises might seek to prevent evictions by easing underwriting standards to enable tenants to buy homes that investors are forced to sell. This would increase the risk and costs for taxpayers who backstop mortgages.

The bill implicitly acknowledges the potential for collateral damage by giving the Treasury Secretary carte blanche authority to issue rules to “minimize market disruptions” and “mitigate, to the extent possible, negative impacts on consumers and communities.” Treasury could also redefine “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” and “excepted purchase.”

In other words, Treasury would have the power to rewrite the provision. Don’t Republicans want to pare back the administrative state? We’re told the Trump team demanded this unfettered discretion because they realize Ms. Warren’s drafted language would cause problems in the housing market.

Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels

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