Private equity firms, private equity-backed firms, firms that offer private equity real estate funds, and firms with other private equity co-investors or joint ventures own at least 1 million apartment units in the country – around 3.6% of all apartments – according to a June 2022 research memo by Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit and non-partisan coalition.
Climate change is a risk multiplier that exacerbates racial and economic inequality, and it is progressing at an alarming rate. Acute and increasingly frequent climate-related disasters, such as wildfires and hurricanes, as well as chronic issues such as heat stress, sea level rise, and drought,
AFREF submitted a comment to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on December 27th supporting its proposals that would centrally clear the $27 trillion U.S. Treasury market, one of the largest and most systemically important markets in the world.
Shockingly, despite the Treasury market’s importance, no one regulator has complete visibility into this market and the SEC’s proposals move closer to implementing the Inter-Agency Working Group on Treasury Market Surveillance’s (IAWG) recommendations to give regulators such as the SEC and the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) greater visibility and oversight.
Our rent affordability crisis has hit people of color particularly hard. Nationally, over half of Black and Latinx households rent their homes, compared to just 28 percent of white households. Forty percent of homeless Americans are Black, compared to 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Washington, D.C. – The record Consumer Financial Protection Bureau settlement with Wells Fargo over widespread wrongdoing in providing auto loans, mortgages, and deposit accounts represents an opportunity for all federal regulators to force durable change at the oft-penalized megabank.
AFREF led comments to the Federal Insurance Office in support of their proposed “Climate-Related Financial Risk Data Collection” from insurers. AFREF supports this data collection because the increasingly prevalent and severe weather hazards caused by climate change pose a massive threat to the housing stability, affordability, and safety of Americans nationwide. Purchasing insurance policies is one of the few actions individuals can take to protect their property from the effects of climate-driven natural disasters. Therefore, the cost and availability of insurance is deeply related to a household’s monthly housing costs and their ability to recover from damages following severe weather.
“The fact that there were no commitments for the vehicles to be union-made is a glaring omission for an administration that prides itself on being union friendly,” said Porter McConnell, campaign director of the consumer rights group Take on Wall Street and co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition. “We will be looking to future announcements committing to the Oshkosh and the commercial off-the-shelf vehicles being union-made, which we know is entirely feasible.”
AFREF joined partners in submitting comments to the CFPB in response to their initiative to enhance public data on auto lending.
For private equity firms, said Andrew Park, a policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, “it’s heads I win, tails you lose.”
AFR and Demand Progress led a group of consumer advocates and public interest organizations to send this letter to Congress, asking Members to take a more deliberative and systemic approach to advancing policies to regulate digital assets. The letter urged Congress to resist pursuing legislative proposals compromised by crypto industry influence or that do not adequately address the systemic problems found within the digital asset industry. Instead, the signers called on Congress to empower financial regulators to use their existing authorities and prioritize consumer and investor protection over the digital asset industry’s largely unproven promises.