How Blackstone Fuels the Housing Crisis in San Diego and Beyond
What happens to tenants who are priced out of their homes or evicted after falling behind on rent? For many, especially in high-cost cities, the next step is not stable housing — it is a low- to mid-priced hotel or motel, often an extended stay property where people pay week to week just to remain sheltered. Increasingly, those hotels are owned by large private equity firms that also hold significant rental housing portfolios in the same regions.
In 2021, Blackstone Real Estate Partners and Starwood Capital acquired Extended Stay America in a $6 billion deal. With more than 650 extended-stay hotels and over 62,000 rooms nationwide, Extended Stay America is now the largest extended-stay lodging operator in North America. These properties are concentrated in the same metropolitan areas where Blackstone and other private equity firms also own large shares of rental housing.
The result is a system in which housing instability generates multiple revenue streams. Rent hikes push tenants to the brink. Evictions remove long-term residents. Displaced renters then turn to extended stay hotels to avoid living on the street, often paying more per month than they did in rent, without tenant protections or stability. In this system, private equity firms like Blackstone are positioned to generate revenue from rising rents, tenant turnover, and short-term lodging — all within the same communities.
To understand how this system operates at such a scale, it’s necessary to understand who Blackstone is and how private equity has reshaped housing in the United States.
Who and What Exactly Is Blackstone?
Blackstone is the largest private equity firm in the world and one of the largest corporate owners of rental housing in the United States. While many people recognize the name only vaguely, Blackstone’s influence extends deeply into housing markets nationwide.
According to data from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, Blackstone owns or manages more than 300,000 rental housing units in the U.S. alone.
Blackstone’s reach is not limited to residential housing. The firm is the largest real estate company in the world, with significant holdings across North America, Europe, and Asia. Its portfolio includes logistics centers, retail properties, hospitality, and hotels — allowing it to exert influence across multiple sectors of the housing and shelter ecosystem simultaneously.
What Is Blackstone’s Goal
To understand Blackstone’s goal, we first need to understand exactly what a private equity firm is and does.
As stated in the above data report, “Private equity is a type of investment where a firm acquires an asset, such as a company or real estate, through a combination of equity capital that it has raised from investors and debt.”
For Blackstone and other private equity firms like it, the process looks something like this: They buy an apartment building, raise rents, and charge tenants additional fees to boost cash flow at the property. Tenants who can’t meet these new demands are often quickly evicted. This increases the building’s value. Then, within a few years, it is sold for a profit. The financial gain depends on rent growth and asset appreciation, which often coincide with tenant displacement.
An Aggressive Buying Spree
What distinguishes Blackstone from other corporate landlords is the speed and scale of its expansion. Between 2020 and 2022, the firm’s real estate holdings nearly doubled as it went on an aggressive acquisition spree, purchasing roughly 200,000 single-family and multifamily rental units across the United States. This rapid consolidation reshaped local housing markets in a matter of years, not decades.
Blackstone is not alone. Other private equity firms, including Greystar, the second-largest corporate landlord, also control massive housing portfolios, with Greystar owning approximately 138,000 rental units. As of 2025, private equity firms collectively own more than 2.2 million apartment units nationwide, the majority of which were acquired in just the past several years.
The pace of consolidation is striking. More than 62 percent of all private equity–owned apartment units have been acquired since 2018, and nearly 42 percent since 2021 alone. This rapid accumulation has concentrated ownership in fewer hands, reducing competition while accelerating rent increases across entire regions.
A Focus on the Sun Belt States
Private equity firms have not expanded evenly across the country. Instead, they have concentrated their acquisitions in Sun Belt states, including Texas, Florida, California, Georgia, and North Carolina — regions with some of the weakest tenant protections in the nation. More than 55 percent of all private equity–owned apartment units are located in these states.
These states offer a favorable regulatory environment for large-scale landlords. Limited rent stabilization laws, streamlined eviction processes, and minimal tenant protections allow private equity firms to raise rents quickly and remove tenants who fall behind. In these markets, housing is treated less as shelter and more as a high-yield financial asset.
Texas now has the largest number of private equity-owned apartments in the country, with nearly 440,000 units. In Georgia and North Carolina, private equity companies own one in every five apartment units. In major metropolitan areas including Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Orlando, Raleigh-Durham, and Tampa–St. Petersburg, corporate landlords control between 25 and 33 percent of all apartments in some major metropolitan markets, enough to shape entire rental markets.
Creating Communities of Cost-Burdened Renters
According to the above report, areas with the largest concentration of private equity-owned apartments are also experiencing the sharpest rise in cost-burdened renters — households spending 30 percent or more of their income on rent and utilities. This trend is not coincidental. As corporate ownership expands, rents rise faster than wages, leaving fewer affordable options for long-term residents.
The Tampa–St. Petersburg metropolitan area illustrates this pattern clearly. Private equity firms own approximately 25 percent of all apartment units in the region. Between 2019 and 2023, the share of renters considered cost-burdened rose from 52.6 percent to 61 percent — the largest increase among major U.S. metropolitan areas.
Rent Hikes and Mass Evictions
Rent increases and evictions are not side effects of the private equity model; they are central to it. The business model adopted by private equity firms such as Blackstone is to increase rents and charge additional fees to tenants to raise a property’s value and quickly sell it to make a profit. A big part of this process requires severe rent hikes and mass evictions.
Documented in the Private Equity Stakeholder Project’s report, “Blackstone filed over 350 evictions in Florida between August and November 2022 – if this trend was present at all of its properties, then it means that Blackstone would have filed to evict thousands of tenants in the last six months of 2022 alone.”
When evictions are not possible, Blackstone has found other ways to force tenants out. In 2018, Reuters launched an investigation into Invitation Homes, Blackstone’s housing rental service until about 2019. In their investigation, they found that tenants were subjected to poor conditions and long waits for repairs, often leading them to leave on their own.
“The picture that emerges isn’t as much one of exceptional service as it is one of leaky pipes, vermin, toxic mold, nonfunctioning appliances, and months-long waits for repairs,” Reuters reported.
For tenants pushed out through eviction or neglect, stable housing rarely follows. Instead, many turn to extended stay hotels — paying nightly or weekly rates simply to remain sheltered in their communities.
As previously noted, many of these hotels are owned by the same private equity firms that displaced them. This means that Blackstone profits from the rent hike, to the eviction, to the hotel stay – extracting wealth from the same communities they have already made cost-burdened.
Blackstone Invests Millions to Fight Rent Control
Blackstone’s ability to profit from rent hikes, evictions, and housing instability depends on one critical factor: policy. As mentioned above, Sun Belt states lack the rent control policies that other states have. To keep it this way, Blackstone spends millions opposing efforts to limit rent increases.
According to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, Blackstone has spent millions opposing rent stabilization efforts in California alone. In 2018, the company contributed $6.1 million to defeat a statewide rent control ballot measure. Invitation Homes — founded by Blackstone and still partially owned by the firm at the time — contributed an additional $1.3 million. Two years later, Blackstone funneled $7 million to the California Business Roundtable Issues PAC, which in turn helped defeat Proposition 21, a measure aimed at expanding rent control protections.
In a letter to Blackstone, a United Nations human rights expert later warned that Blackstone was using its financial power to undermine housing protections:
“Blackstone is using its significant resources and political leverage to undermine domestic laws and policies that would, in fact, improve access to adequate housing consistent with international human rights law.”
Blackstone’s San Diego Takeover
San Diego offers a clear example of how private equity ownership reshapes housing markets. In 2021, Blackstone spent over a billion dollars to acquire 5,800 affordable housing units in San Diego. While these apartments were not subsidized, they were still considered affordable to working families and seniors who relied on them to remain in their communities. That affordability did not last.
Since August 2022, Blackstone has been going on an eviction spree, followed by rent hikes in San Diego County. According to a 2023 report, Blackstone evicted tenants who owed just one month’s rent, then quickly relisted the apartment with a 43-64% rent hike.
“By jacking up the price of their units, Blackstone is rapidly dwindling the number of affordable housing units in the area — exacerbating an already dire affordable housing shortage,” the report states.
California law limits how much landlords can raise rents for existing tenants, but those protections do not apply to new renters. As a result, the fastest way to raise rents is through tenant turnover. Eviction becomes not just a legal tool, but a business strategy — clearing the way for higher-paying tenants in a tight housing market.
From Eviction to Homelessness
Evictions are one of the strongest predictors of homelessness, particularly in regions where affordable housing is already scarce. In Southern California, where rents remain among the highest in the nation, tenants displaced by eviction often have nowhere to go. Shelters are full, waiting lists for subsidized housing stretch for years, and rents in nearby units far exceed what most households can afford.
While Blackstone plays a significant role in Southern California’s homelessness crisis, profits don’t stop there. Blackstone continues to profit from its evicted tenants as those same tenants make their way to nearby extended-stay hotels it also owns.
This model does not simply remove people from housing — it extracts wealth from entire communities. Rent hikes destabilize households. Evictions fracture neighborhoods. Extended stay hotels capture what little income remains. Together, these practices deepen poverty while consolidating housing and shelter under corporate control.
San Diego’s housing crisis did not happen by accident, and it will not be solved by ignoring the forces driving it. As private equity firms like Blackstone continue to consolidate housing, weaken tenant protections, and profit from displacement, homelessness becomes not a failure of individuals — but the predictable outcome of policy choices. Preserving affordable housing, strengthening tenant protections, and holding corporate landlords accountable are not radical ideas. They are necessary steps to ensure housing serves its purpose: as a place to live, not a vehicle for extraction.