Revealing the Secret Landlords of U.S. Real Estate

Jade Hindmon and Marissa Cabrera report:

The debate over California's housing crisis tends to center on the lack of housing and how much more housing needs to be built to meet demand.

But there's another part of the conversation that often gets left out. It has to do with who owns the housing that already exists.

Another journalist, Aaron Glantz, is leveraging public records to fill gaps in public knowledge about the real estate market. Glantz and colleagues at Reveal have sued the Treasury Department to find out more about the "secret landlords" controlling the housing market.

An article by Glantz, written in December, provides more information about what we do know about how anonymous shell companies hide their wealth in real estate:

All-cash transactions have come to account for a quarter of all residential real estate purchases, “totaling hundreds of billions of dollars nationwide,” the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – the financial crimes unit of the federal Treasury Department, also known as FinCEN – noted in a 2017 news release. Thanks to the Bank Secrecy Act, a 1970 anti-money-laundering law, the agency is able to learn who owns many of these properties. In high-cost cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, it’s flagged over 30% of cash purchases as suspicious transactions. But FinCEN also cites this bill to hide this information from the public, leaving the American people increasingly in the dark about who owns their cities.

The article linked below includes an interview with Glantz for Midday Edition, a show airing on KPBS in San Diego.