Hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment trusts have been snatching up single-family homes all around the country for years, creating concern that homeowners themselves would be pushed even further out of the market. But a sweeping new bill introduced by U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley and Washington Rep. Adam Smith would, if enacted as written, essentially ban such corporate investors from the practice moving forward. 

The bill, which was introduced in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, would over a ten-year period require hedge funds and large institutional investors to completely divest from single-family home ownership. Called the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, the bill would require large funds to sell off 10 percent of their homes each year over a decade.

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“We shouldn’t allow private equity firms to buy up vast quantities of American homes and create a generation of lifelong renters. Congress needs to act fast and help promote access to safe, affordable housing and homeownership for American families, not Wall Street,” Smith said in a press release. 

The bill would require the Internal Revenue Service to tax large funds that fail to sell off their single family homes over that timeframe. It already has some support in the house, where it is co-sponsored by the U.S. Representatives Nikema Williams and Linda Sánchez, as well as in the Senate, where it is cosponsored by Senator Tina Smith. Advocacy groups Private Equity Stakeholder Project, Consumer Action, and National Consumer Law Center have offered additional support.

The bill defines a hedge fund as partnerships, corporations, or real estate investment trusts that pool funds from investors and have $50 million or more in net value or assets under management, with exemptions for nonprofits and companies primarily focused on construction. Hedge funds failing to report single-family home purchases would face a $20,000 fine that would go toward a housing down payment trust fund. Funds that fail to sell off their housing stock in the timeframe required would face a tax of 50 percent of the fair market value for each property, with funds also going to the housing trust fund.

Merkley and Smith cite data from an Urban Institute report that said in 2011, no single entity owned more than 1,000 single-family rental homes, whereas by June 2022 hedge funds and institutional investors owned a cumulative 574,000 single-family homes. This includes large corporate owners like Invitation Homes, which owns more than 80,000 homes across the country. While corporate investors only own 5 percent of the nation’s single-family housing stock, the ownership is often concentrated in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods and in some neighborhoods, entire blocks have been purchased by investors.

The practice has ramped up since the beginning of the pandemic, with 28 percent of all homes sold in 2022 going to institutional investors according to Pew Charitable Trust. In 2021, a venture-funded company backed by Jeff Bezos and other billionaires also got in on the act. 

Institutional investors have also been buying up multifamily apartments, and tenants across the country have been fighting back by forming unions to demand maintenance and push for stronger regulations.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed in the fourth GOP debate on Wednesday that for every 30 minutes a person spends watching TikTok, an app used by millions of Americans every day, they become 17 percent more antisemitic. 

The former South Carolina governor also said that 50 percent of young people thought Hamas was “warranted with what they did with Israel,” and that to combat this, TikTok needed to be banned. 

“We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all, and let me tell you why,” Haley said. “For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day, they become 17 percent more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that. We now know that 50 percent of adults 18 to 25 think that Hamas was warranted with what they did with Israel. That’s a problem.” 

Haley appeared to be referencing a survey conducted by Generation Lab, whose results were released last week. Data scientist Anthony Goldbloom stated in a post on X that the survey found a significant increase in “antisemitic or anti-Israel views” based on TikTok usage, as opposed to other social media. 

There is no denying that antisemitism is a real problem in the U.S., and the world. This was true before Hamas’ October 7 attack. However, there’s a few things worth noting about the survey, the underlying data of which was posted online. First, it only polled roughly 1,300 people online, not all of whom even use TikTok. This is an infinitesimally small fraction of the social network’s user base. The questions also included things like whether respondents felt comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel, whether Israel is a bad influence on our democracy, or whether Israel “is right” to defend itself against “those who want to destroy it.” While responses to these questions may be anti-Israel, they are not necessarily antisemitic. Moreover, the survey contained results such as people who reported never using TikTok saying, for example, that the holocaust was fake or exaggerated.

Overall, the survey’s ability to speak to wider trends on TikTok is doubtful. Even if the finding that people who spend more time on TikTok tend to hold more antisemitic views was accurate, it does not follow that spending time on the app linearly increases a person’s level of antisemitism.

TikTok has previously been accused of promoting pro-Palestinian content in an effort by its China-based parent company ByteDance to influence American public opinion. Last month, the company responded to these allegations, saying that the algorithm was designed to show people videos similar to those they had already interacted with. 

“Attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed,” a company press release stated, referencing Gallup polling data. “TikTok does not ‘promote’ one side of an issue over another…On TikTok, the videos people view, like, and share inform the recommendation algorithm about content they might find relevant. Using these signals, the recommendation algorithm creates a prediction score to rank videos to potentially recommend.”

Haley’s statement came in response to a question about her perspective on a Senate hearing on Tuesday, during which elite university presidents were asked whether pro-Palestinian protests on campus violated school conduct rules about antisemitism. The presidents agreed that the answer was “context-dependent.” Many politicians thought that the presidents were dodging the question, and a White House spokesperson condemned their statements on Wednesday. 

“It was disgusting to see what happened,” Haley said. “If this had been the KKK that was doing protests on those campuses, every one of those college presidents would have been up in arms.”

Haley stated that the U.S. needed to prevent colleges from accepting “foreign money,” and to change the definition of antisemitism to include anti-Zionism. The House of Representatives passed a resolution on Tuesday in which it “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and condemns the slogan used by pro-Palestinian activists, “from the river to the sea,” as a “rallying cry for the eradication of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Politicians, such as former president Donald Trump, have threatened to ban the app or limit its usage in certain states. Though the fourth Republican debate had spirited altercations between the four candidates on stage, no candidate responded to Haley’s comment on TikTok. 

GameStop, the darling of the WallStreetBets retail-trading movement, has decided to allow CEO Ryan Cohen to start gambling the company’s excess cash on the stock market. It's a highly unusual move that some financial analysts are calling “inane” and “alarming,” and the meme-stock community is celebrating as the first step toward the company becoming the next Berkshire Hathaway. 

The struggling 90s brand, which received new life in 2021 as retail traders piled in during the meme-stock era, had previously invested excess cash in comparatively boring fixed income securities, a more traditional place to park a company’s money. But on Tuesday, the company’s board of directors approved a new, perplexing strategy to allow Cohen to toss its more than $900 million excess cash and equivalents into the stock market, meaning that GameStop—and its stockholders—would essentially be betting on other corporations. 

As part of the new agreement, Cohen has not only received the “authority to manage” GameStop’s investments—along with anyone else he sees fit—but is allowed to invest his own money in the same companies as well. The company argued in a filing that the arrangement made perfect sense because it “[aligns] the interests” of Cohen and GameStop by placing “the personal resources of Mr. Cohen at risk in substantially the same manner.” With its legions of online fans, GameStop investing in a company could be enough to boost that company's stock, and perhaps personally enrich Cohen as well. 

Some analysts immediately called out the move as TK. “What could go wrong?” financial analyst Adam Crisafulli sarcastically wrote on Twitter in one representative quip. The investment firm Wedbush Securities, which has long been critical of the company, called the decision “alarming” and “one of the most inane moves we have ever seen” in its latest report on the company. 

WedBush argued that investors did not “need GameStop to act as a mutual fund,” since there are already a lot of those, and that the decision implied GameStop believed it could get “better returns by buying equities aside from its own.” Instead of betting cash on the stock market, WedBush suggested the company use the money to buy back stock, like a normal company. 

But GameStop is not a normal company, and it hasn’t been for some time. It is a meme-riding powerhouse, spearheaded by Cohen, who has been ordained with a cult-like status among his subreddit-lurking followers. WedBush itself acknowledged this, saying the share price has long been “disconnected from reality” as a result of meme stock mania and its aftermath. 

Predictably, the decision was celebrated by members of the now-infamous investing Reddit forum WallStreetBets and similar online investing communities, some of whom suggested (incredibly incorrectly) that the company was transforming into a hedge fund, which invests rich people’s money, but who more generally suggested that the company had essentially turned itself into the corporate equivalent of WallStreetBets. 

“Ryan is doing a WSB YOLO and will take the cash pile from the company and gamble it in the stock market near the all time high,” said one person in a post that was subsequently removed from the forum by a moderator who called GameStop fans a cult. "They hate hedgefunds! But wait… now they are one!!! Bullish," the moderator wrote in one comment. "Dumbest fucking people on the planet."

“It is as prophesied - boomer Charlie Munger has died, and Ryan Cohen has arisen!” another poster wrote in the same thread. 

"Let's go baby! This is an unexpected way to hopefully create generational wealth," wrote one user on the r/superstonks subreddit. 

The enthusiasm was not limited to Reddit. Justin Dopierala of DOMO Capital Management, longtime believer in GameStop who bet big on the company ahead of its 2021 rise and was featured in the documentary "GameStop: Rise of the Players," said he had hoped the company would adopt this approach for some time and could be “completely game-changing.”

“Welcome to the new Berkshire Hathaway!” his firm wrote on Twitter. 

Probably not, but if Cohen decides another company is the new GameStop, and bets the farm on them, who’s to say his disciples won’t follow his lead?

Over a couple of weeks this summer, I filed 136 identical public-records requests with police departments around the country. The requests were for stolen Kia/Hyundai data, but I ended up learning as much about how police departments and municipalities in general handle these requests as I did about car thefts.

I am no stranger to public records requests, which are formal requests for the release of records maintained by a government entity under applicable law. I have been filing them as a core part of my job for the last decade. I know that journalists whining about how difficult it is to pry records loose can sound more like fodder for a trade publication rather than a news story. But public records requests are how we—all of us, including everyone from ordinary people to government agencies—learn what our governments do. It is fundamental to a functioning democracy. (To pick just one recently relevant example, we learned of the true scope of Henry Kissinger’s “secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia, illegal domestic spying, support for dictators, and dirty wars abroad” while he was alive thanks to public records laws.) And processing public records requests in a timely fashion is not a difficult societal problem to solve. It is purely a matter of budgets and priorities. 

The gradual but severe reductions in institutional capacity to process records requests—combined with a lack of any enforcement mechanism to punish agencies that make it a matter of policy to ignore them—is a symptom of a larger disease of a government increasingly unresponsive to the people it supposedly serves. Whether you’re a believer that only a small government is compatible with individual liberty, a socialist fighting the police state, or anywhere in between, public records laws are how you hold your government accountable. 

The most well-known public records law is the Freedom of Information Act, a federal law applying to the executive branch that has existed since 1966 and was significantly strengthened in the 1970s following Watergate and other national scandals on abuse of power. Following the federal government’s lead, each state has enacted its own public records law that applies to state and local agencies. They are sometimes called freedom of information laws, but also go by public records laws or open records laws or right to know laws. They’re all the same thing. The fundamental theory of all these laws is that in the United States, the government works for the people, and therefore the people have the right to know what the government is doing.

But, like most laws, the theory of the laws is often very different from the practice. There are important variations in the laws between states. Some state laws are more likely to result in getting documents in a timely fashion than others. For example, agencies in Michigan are more likely than elsewhere to cite exorbitant fees for producing requested records which is an effective way to undermine transparency. New York’s Freedom of Information Law has glaring loopholes that make it trivially easy for agencies to ignore your request in perpetuity without the aid of a lawsuit. Agencies in Texas are almost shockingly responsive, but are prone to abuse a provision that allows the state attorney general to review any request for potential exemptions to disclosure rules. Pennsylvania’s law seems to encourage agencies to still use paper forms. And the differing laws encourage differing cultures. In Florida, records officers will generally look for a way to get you what you’re looking for. California records officers seem to look for reasons not to.

Usually, journalists file one or two requests at a time. Sometimes filing an identical request with all 50 state agencies, such as every state department of corrections or department of education, will also make sense for a specific story. In my experience, though, such requests are usually fishing expeditions; you’re hoping a couple of states give you useful responses but expect most to deny or ignore your request.

This is what made the Kia/Hyundai requests I filed different. I have never before filed so many identical requests in so many cities across so many states at the same time, resulting in a natural experiment in just how much responses can vary. Plus, I was not asking for anything speculative, voluminous, or difficult. Stolen vehicles are incredibly common types of police reports and there are federal standards for how such reports should be logged. (For those curious, I had to file the requests city-by-city because vehicle manufacturer is not included in aggregate statistics publicly posted by most departments.) Also, I was not asking for any potentially private information that would need to be reviewed for possible redactions. In theory, this was a basic request that most police departments should have been able to complete with minimal effort.

It has been about four months since I filed these 136 requests. Of those, 67 agencies, or almost exactly half, have provided the full records I asked for. (One, the Houston Police Department, provided records but the data is absurd, likely due to a bad database pull; it has not responded to several emails asking for the correct data). Of the ones that didn’t, 18 charged fees I wasn’t willing to pay, rejected my request and refused to explain why, had both broken online forms that made it impossible to file a request and no one at the city office willing to help, or, due to extraordinary circumstances, truly didn’t have the records I sought. The rest, or 51 police departments, have not responded to my request.

(This is illegal under most if not all state public records laws, which at minimum specify that an agency has to respond to a requester within a certain timeframe, which varies from place to place. There appear, though, to be no consequences for anyone who chooses to wad requests up and use them to play trashcan basketball.) 

With all this in mind, here is what I learned about the state of local public records requests in 2023.

The vast majority of requests I had to file required filling out forms through two portals: GovQA and Nextrequest, both purpose-built software for public records request management. Despite using the same two platforms for almost every city, I had to create a separate login for each city. On some level this makes sense, because each city is a separate client and it wouldn’t make sense for them to share the same user base. But it was annoying as hell.

This wouldn’t have been a huge problem if the portals were set up to accept an open-access standard that would let users log in with, say, a Gmail account, or even if setting up a new account was easy. Unfortunately, for GovQA, it wasn’t. A huge chunk of the time required to file these requests was dealing with GovQA’s buggy site. Often, it would auto-generate a new password it said it would email to me to verify my account, but then never did. I would then have to go through the “forgot password” process to get yet another new password. That would also often fail. Commonly, CAPTCHA codes straight up wouldn’t load and there was no CAPTCHA-specific refresh button, so I’d have to refresh the entire page, which wouldn’t save any of the information I had already put in, and essentially start over. Managing ongoing requests was also annoying as forms take forever to load.

NextRequest is a lot better. Setting up a new account could be done after filing the request by just adding a password. However, both platforms have worse-than-useless AI-like features that try to suggest help pages that either explain why your request won’t be fulfilled or otherwise trying to convince you not to file it. These pages are rarely even in the ballpark of the same topic I was filing about. But I had to dismiss the prompt before filing the request. It was a small example of how AI is accelerating the enshittification of the web experience.

I did encounter a third contractor a few times that was the best of the bunch, called JustFOIA. It offered a Google Forms-like experience that was fast to load, easy to use, and at no point wanted to make me stab my eyes out with chopsticks.

I had numerous experiences while filing these 136 requests that made me wonder what century I was living in or otherwise did not seem congruent with a high-tech 21st century life.

As I previously mentioned, Pennsylvania’s Right To Know Law appears unique in encouraging agencies to use a paper form, or a PDF equivalent. To file my request with the city of Pittsburgh, I had to fill out a Word document and email it back to them. Other Pennsylvania cities used PDF forms. Public records requests are uniquely annoying to fill out via PDF form because they usually provide two or three lines max for the entire description of your request, which is not nearly enough for any sufficiently detailed records request. It is a form designed to make the request impossible to fulfill. (This is at least better than the many rural agencies that specify they will accept requests only via facsimile machine.) 

Similarly, Corpus Christi, Texas has a field for “what records are you requesting” on its online form with a character limit of 130 and no option for an attachment. In other words, the text of your request had to be shorter than a tweet.

Irvine, CA had a peculiar form. A fax number is a required field. And the Are You A Human Test for me was the math question 5 + 4 = .

Sometimes, cities had what I would describe as borderline extralegal FOIA submission processes. Lincoln, Nebraska doesn’t have a FOIA page at all. I emailed the city clerk instead. Scottsdale, Arizona tries to make you pay a $10 fee simply to file a request. Salt Lake City informed me that “IDENTIFICATION is REQUIRED to receive Documents” and prompted me to upload a photo of my ID (I did not, but received the requested records anyways). Glendale, Arizona charged me a $10 “file transfer fee” I could not avoid.

A handful of states only accept records requests from residents of that state. According to Muckrock, a non-profit collaborative that provides a tool for filing and managing records requests, five states definitely have residency requirements—Virginia, Tennessee, Delaware, Arkansas, and Missouri—while Alabama and Georgia sometimes do. I had no problem getting Kia/Hyundai data from Atlanta, for example, but every Virginia city except Newport News cited its residency requirement after I filed my request. I had proxies in those states file requests on my behalf, which is perfectly legal. In addition to being inherently inane, undemocratic, and easy to circumvent, residency requirements make even less sense in the 21st century than they did in the 20th, in which the practices of one state government quite obviously have implications for residents in other states, too. 

Although I did eventually get the requested records from Washington, D.C., it was a real pain. The police department closed my request with no records or reason for determination. I tried to submit a question via the Message system in the portal asking why. It gave me an error message noting that I was not allowed to use special characters. I then proceeded to whittle down my message so it had no punctuation whatsoever, but still got the same error message. Once I spoke to a human at MPD, everything was sorted in rapid fashion.

For whatever reason, I had a lot of trouble with North Carolina cities. Most denied my request by citing a specific statute in the state’s law that states, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a public agency to respond to a request for a copy of a Public Record by creating or compiling a record that does not exist.” As they interpreted it, by asking for a data extraction from a database into a spreadsheet, I was asking for them to create a new record. This interpretation is not in accordance with how federal courts have interpreted the law—”[The court] agree[s] that using a query to search for and extract a particular arrangement or subset of data already maintained in an agency's database does not amount to the creation of a new record." I dutifully reminded them of this. 

My experience with Raleigh is emblematic. One hour after I submitted my records request to Raleigh, someone from their communications department told me, “There are not any responsive public records.” When I asked how this was possible—did Raleigh simply not collect stolen vehicle data?— I was referred to the aforementioned state law provision on creating new records. After I informed them of the applicable case law, I received radio silence, but then two weeks later received a spreadsheet of all the data I had requested in full. But most other North Carolina cities just ignored me. Thanks, Raleigh!

But nothing will top the response I got from Montgomery, Alabama. Randy Weaver, the record retention manager for the city, sent me an email that stated in its entirety: “You did not complete the record request properly. Your request is denied.” I asked, “Can you please inform me what was filled out improperly so I can re-submit in proper fashion?” I am still waiting to hear back from Mr. Weaver.

A 50% response rate after four months for a simple data pull that each of the departments is legally required to fulfill could be interpreted as either a success or failure, depending on your expectations. By the expectations of public records requests, gathering a usable dataset that has been released to the public, it was a success. 

But it is worth putting this relative success in perspective. Many of the nation’s biggest cities and best-funded police departments have thus far ignored my request. This includes but is not limited to New York, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Indianapolis, Seattle, Nashville, Boston, Detroit, and Baltimore. 

Delays are the most common complaints regarding public records requests. As with justice, transparency delayed is transparency denied. In this case, I was trying to assemble a complete national picture of how a design decision made by a multinational company was resulting in surging vehicle thefts. The companies blame social media. Did that defense hold water? The data could tell us, if only we had them. 

Again, it is worth emphasizing this is for the most basic and least controversial records request imaginable. It’s nothing compared to requests for emails, text messages, presentations, memos, etc. regarding something actually controversial. If they can’t produce these records in a timely fashion, what can they produce?

It is no secret that public record laws in the U.S. don’t function as they ought to. Sometimes they work great. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that records are released less in accordance with what the law says and more with what individual bureaucrats feel like. Public records departments are often treated internally as annoyances, distractions, and in some extreme but by no means universal cases, rubber rooms for civil servants who can’t be fired. Rarely are they given the resources and adequate staffing needed to do their jobs well. On some occasions I have had the genuine, true pleasure of working with public servants in records departments who wanted to help and were able to do so. I have a fleeting glimpse of what my job and our democracy might look like if this was more universally the case. And then I go back to work.  

Correction: A previous version of this article stated Washington, D.C. uses the GovQA portal. It does not; it uses a similar-looking but older and less functional portal. We regret the error.