Soil to Shelter: The Death of Local Ownership
Walk down any major East Bay city street and you’ll see a quiet story playing out: multiple homes and commercial spaces for sale and large investors circling with cash in hand, waiting for the right opportunity to buy undervalued investments.
When it comes to providing homes, rental housing providers own and operate most of the rental housing (over 60%) as small businesses. These are predominantly single-family homes, duplexes, and triplexes. Many of these properties have been passed down from a previous generation of individuals who struggled and toiled to obtain a piece of the American Dream.
As new regulations and housing policies roll out from state and local governments, housing providers, often small family businesses, feel like they’re being squeezed out. Meanwhile, large corporate housing operators, with vast financial resources and legal teams, manage to thrive.
This situation is not unlike what has been happening in America’s farmland, where there’s been a rapid decline (66% decrease) over the last 75 years in family-owned farms—more notably for Black farmers (95% decrease). Since 1950, we’ve seen a drop from 5.6M to about 1.9M for all small farm owners and 560k to 28k for Black farmers.
For decades, small family farmers were the heart of food production, but now the remaining few struggles under the weight of federal and state policies that favor industrial agriculture. Corporate subsidies, compliance rules, seed disputes, water rights issues, land use and zoning changes, arbitrary tariffs, and trade wars have less impact on corporate agriculture, leaving small farms to be acquired, consolidated, or go out of business.
New agriculture census data released last year by USDA is cause for concern as the number of farms operating in the United States and the number of farm acres have both fallen significantly. The 2022 Census of Agriculture reports 141,733 fewer farms in 2022 than in 2017. The number of farm acres fell by more than 20 million from just five years earlier.
“The latest census numbers put in black and white the warnings our members have been expressing for years,” stated Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest agricultural organization. “Increased regulations, rising supply costs, lack of available labor and weather disasters have all squeezed family farmers to the point that many of them find it impossible to remain economically sustainable.”
Like small farmers, small housing providers are facing policies that make it increasingly difficult to operate. These policies are often enacted to protect renting consumers but end up favoring large corporate owners and institutional investors. “Mom-and-pop” rental owners are the ones most likely to live in the same communities as their renters, maintain their own properties through sweat equity, and reinvest in their neighborhoods. Yet, growing layers of rent control, eviction restrictions, increased fees, along with rising insurance rates, higher maintenance costs, and arduous compliance mandates are driving small housing providers out of business or forcing them to sell to larger, outside, institutional investors who have no connection with the local community.
Just take a look at the rise of rent registries, “Just Cause” ordinances, free renter legal services, and relocation payment requirements. While large corporate owners have larger rental portfolios that can absorb the administrative and legal costs of these new challenges, small rental providers often cannot. Each new law means more forms, more permits, more fees, more enforcement, more potential liability, and more time spent on compliance rather than maintenance or improvement of their properties, not to mention more confusion for all parties.
Just as small farmers are being pushed out, small rental owners, who in many cases are providing deeply affordable rentals, are being forced to sell. When they do, this hurts the renters who may be in a below market rate home. Properties often end up in the hands of large investors who push out the lowest-paying residents, increase rents, and turn modest community-based housing into corporate portfolios.
Recent data from a survey conducted by the East Bay Rental Housing Association (EBRHA) shows that nearly 34% of small housing providers in Alameda County are considering selling within the next 24 months, and 27% have vacancies or have already taken units off the rental market. Small rental owners are looking to sell, and corporations are willing to buy.
Tenant advocacy groups argue that stricter rental housing regulations “level the playing field” or protect renters from unfair practices. But in reality, they often do the opposite. When a city imposes rent caps that don’t allow owners a “fair return” or net positive income due to inflation, insurance, capital improvements, or impose eviction rules that make it nearly impossible to address lease violations, it’s the small providers who lose the flexibility they need to manage their properties responsibly.
Large corporations, on the other hand, have teams of lawyers, accountants, and property managers to navigate these complex ordinances. They can afford to absorb fines, pay compliance fees, or challenge rulings in court. Small providers cannot. For them, one legal dispute or months of lost rent can mean financial ruin.
This dynamic mirrors what happened to small farmers when large corporations gained control of supply chains, lobbying power, and subsidies. Mom and pop businesses can’t compete. Not because they lacked skill or integrity, but because the system was built to serve scale, not the community. This can be observed in other industries as well: retail, healthcare, and banking.
To help preserve family-run farms struggling under the weight of consolidation and regulation, several new federal initiatives were introduced. The USDA’s “Small Family Farms Policy Agenda” aims to simplify applications, expand access to credit, and make it easier to pass farms to the next generation.
Meanwhile, the proposed Office of Small Farms Establishment Act would create a dedicated USDA office to ensure equitable access to programs for smaller producers, and the SOS Farms Act of 2025 seeks to improve crop insurance and disaster protection for small farms. Together, these efforts signal a growing recognition that preserving family farms is vital to America’s food security and rural economy.
Imagine if housing policy mirrored these kinds of support programs aimed at preserving small family farms? What if there were grants for maintenance, tax breaks for reinvestment, or legal assistance for navigating new housing regulations? Instead, rental owners often face legislators who assume all property owners are wealthy, imposing more regulations, taxes and fees that simply don’t match the realities of small ownership.
When small housing providers disappear, communities lose more than affordable homes. They lose local investment and accountability. Small housing providers tend to charge lower rents, respond faster to maintenance requests, or work directly with their renters to resolve issues. They take pride in their properties and relationships. Large investors, on the other hand, often prioritize profit margins and operational efficiency. Decision-making gets centralized, repairs get outsourced, and the human connection between housing provider and renter fades away.
Governments favor big business and everyday people pay the price. The East Bay doesn’t just need more housing, it needs better housing policy to keep small owners/operators in business and affordable units on the market. Policies that value the people who provide homes, not just the corporations that can afford to own them.
The East Bay Rental Housing Association believes that protecting small housing providers means protecting the future of our housing ecosystem. Just as we’ve come to appreciate the importance of small, local farms in ensuring food security, quality, and sustainability, we must recognize that small housing providers are essential to community stability and affordability.
*Source: American Farm Bureau - www.FB.org
This article was featured in the 2025 October issue of Rentrospect. Chris Tipton is the Marketing, Communications, & PR Manager for the East Bay Rental Housing Association.