Bill Gates vs. LDS Church

wages for the past ten years in Utah have remained stagnant while home prices have increased by nearly double in the past decade.

Richard Markosian

July 27, 2021

The middle class is shrinking in Utah at an alarming pace because of three fundamental problems:

Wages for the past ten years in Utah have remained stagnant.
Home prices for starter homes have increased by nearly double.
Only tech-sector or six-figure income workers are able to afford starter homes in Salt Lake County

Why is this happening? The best clues come from following the money. Big money is moving into Utah from the largest Wall Street Corporations and largest money managers, venture capital groups, and asset managers.

Bill Gates was recently in bidding against the Mormon Church for farmland in Eastern Oregon. This is just one small example that demonstrates the extent of the current land grab underway. And it’s not just Bill Gates, but also the largest investment brokers and asset managers in the U.S.

The LDS Church also owns a massive amount of farmland throughout Utah. Their total holdings, according to Bloomberg, exceed 1 million acres of land throughout the United States under their shell corporation Ag Reserves Inc. The LDS Church is buying more land.

When we examine the current buying and selling trends of the largest asset managers in the country, we can see what the largest equity firms are doing to “chaise yields” and preserve wealth. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently sold $2 billion in Amazon stock, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg cashed in $2.8 billion in Facebook stock recently, and the largest asset managers in the world such as Blackrock are purchasing single-family homes. From these moves, it appears that the smart money is shifting from stocks into land and single-family homes. Why is this? Because by all measures the stock market appears highly overheated.

A key statistic not widely reported by the mainstream media is that in the first quarter of 2020 20% of all home purchases in the United States were made by institutional investment companies (AKA: Shadow banks and asset managers). These asset management companies are paying 20%-50% over asking price, driving up prices and reducing supply. But left-leaning sites like Vox.com claim Blackrock and institutional investors are not to blame. The total holdings of single-family homes by these companies represent a tiny fraction of the entire housing market. But it is worthwhile to examine the larger trends of the massive institutional investors and how they are shaping our current economy into something we have never seen before.

Blackrock, Vanguard and UBS, essentially “own Wall Street”, all together investment management companies own 41% of the entire market cap of all of the global markets. Each asset management company owns massive amounts of stock in Apple Computers, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, Tesla, and all of the top-performing stocks in the tech sector. Blackrock has seen total assets under their control increase from $7 trillion, in 2021 to over $9 trillion today. This matches half of the entire GDP of the United States. Blackrock is also in an increasingly cozy relationship with the United States Treasury Department as well as our Federal Reserve.

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Institutional Investment Companies Preventing Financial Collapse

In March 2020, (according to the New York Times) Treasury Secretary Steven Manuchen and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell met with the Blackrock CEO Lary Fink to determine the best course of action to prevent a massive financial collapse from occurring because stocks were in a nosedive. The Fed and Treasury Department decided to follow Lary Fink’s plan to buy up what was considered at the time “toxic assets” of corporate bonds that nobody wanted to buy on the open market. The solution: pour money into Wall Street like Draino, to prevent a backup.

The Fed’s bond-buying program has poured billions of tax-payers dollars freshly minted from the Fed to essentially bail out the largest corporations in the U.S. to remove their bad debt from their books so they could continue to report good news to shareholders and keep the bull market marching forward. So who’s bonds were they buying? Blackrock’s of course.

But why did they do this? And why aren’t they stopping?

Investor fears are greater now than they have been in the past decade. If the stock market were allowed to plunge in March 2020, while in the midst of a pandemic, it’s almost certain massive unemployment and financial ruin would be the outcome.

Since March in 2020 when the Fed’s “bond-buying program” began the stock market has risen to historic levels, and bank savings rates have plunged. More average investors are putting their money into stocks also “chasing yields”. If the Fed started raising interest rates this would benefit those who keep their money in banks, but it would certainly frighten Wall Street investors. Most experts now agree that the stock market is in a “massive bubble”. This is only due to the actions of the Fed following Blackrock’s CEO Lary Fink’s plan. The bubble will only burst when the Fed raises rates when inflation kicks into high gear, as it is currently doing. But scaring away the beast that has been laying the golden eggs for Wall Street, is giving Treasury Secretary Jannet Yellan pause about raising rates. Biden’s super generous unemployment benefits have caused millions of workers to stay home. This might be by design to prevent the economy from heating up too fast, requiring a rate hike, which would chase away Wall Street investors.

So the question comes down to who our national monetary policymakers are working for. Wall Street or Main Street? Giant investment firms (which represent the pensions of millions of Americans) or small businesses and average Americans? Average Americans are finding homeownership more out of reach than ever, and small business owners are finding labor more scarce than ever.

From Stock Market Bubble to a Housing Bubble

Most analysts now agree that we have an asset bubble in stocks, bonds, and real estate that very likely come crashing down. The only thing that is preventing the crash is near-zero levels of prime interest rates, which are the lending rates that the Fed offers to banks to feed money to developers, builders, and the elite who keep the cheap money flowing into the economy. Meanwhile, it’s the middle class that is getting the short end of the stick, as housing prices climb ever out of reach, and Wall Street’s money pours in driving prices higher and supply smaller.

What Can Average Investors and Local Governments Do to Mitigate its Effects?

Since the housing market collapse of 2008, institutional investors have been allowed to purchase single-family homes and turn these assets into investment vehicles. This was useful then because it prevented a complete nose-dive in housing prices, but today this is driving up prices in cities that have the highest rents.

According to a special report produced by CoreLogic’s study on investor purchases of single-family homes, buyers experiencing the greatest competition with institutional investors are mostly in high-rent areas, east of the Mississippi. The cities with the highest rents relative to home purchase prices. These cities include Atlanta, Philadelphia, Memphis, Detroit. Cities with the least amount of investor activity include Boise (Idaho), Ventura (California), Stockton (California), and El Paso (Texas). Cities, where home prices are high relative to rents, are less attractive to institutional investors, Utah falls closer into this category. 15% of all homes sold in Utah go to investors, which is below the national average. Utah’s home prices are rising so rapidly due to a lack of investment over the past ten years in homebuilding. Our supply is extremely low, and residents aren’t moving.

What can be done to drive housing prices down in Utah?

In short, zoning-law changes need to be made which could allow far more low-price single-family homes and townhomes to be built on very small lots in Utah. Smaller square footage homes, on smaller lots going for higher prices, will be the new reality for starter homes in Utah especially surrounding Salt Lake County, but this could happen if our State Legislature went to work.

Because so many of Utah’s politicians are developers and developers can earn significantly high returns on investment if they build for wealthy buyers, Utah’s political leaders have not made affordable housing a priority.

Luxury Apartments on 400 West in Salt Lake City. Studio apartments range from $1,400 up to $4,500 per month.

Perhaps only a citizen’s initiative could allow for the necessary zoning-law changes, which could open up more land to affordable housing. There is plenty of space for new affordable housing in abandoned big-box stores and other commercial retail centers such as the former Cottonwood Mall, but cities and developers have higher-value tax revenue generation ideas than affordable housing.

Meanwhile, apartments are being built at a rapid pace along the Wasatch Front in Utah, attracting money from developers from California to charge huge rents. Also, many of Utah’s political leaders are buying up or developing apartment buildings including Former House Speaker Greg Hughes; former Senate Speaker Wayne Niederhauser and Former Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Caroon.

The current land grab and increase in prices are benefiting Utah’s political leaders and elite, The LDS Church’s vast land holdings and portfolio. The question now comes down to, will our political leaders start working for middle and lower-class Utahns to prevent the continual growing divide between the rich and the poor? Or will they continue to serve themselves and their investments?

A Reason For Utah’s Legislature To Act on Affordable Housing

There is an incentive for Utah’s state leaders to act sooner rather than later on Utah’s housing crisis. If Millenials are not given the opportunity to buy affordable real estate and build equity, very likely the entire nation will continue to move to the left.

According to New York Magazine, in an article entitled, “Will The Great Wealth Transfer Spark A Millenial Civil War?” We learn that millennials are starting families and the largest segment of first-time home buyers are becoming jaded by the housing affordability crisis.

They are beginning to believe that perhaps a “Capitalist, free-market system” no longer works for them. Millennials whose only prospects are to rent and who have zero home equity by in large are far more supportive of the ideas of Bernie Sanders and leftist ideas of socialism and wealth confiscation. If our State Republicans really value keeping their wealth it might serve their own interests to take meaningful action on affordable housing for the next generation.

There is a solution to the problem of Utah’s middle class that political leaders want to ignore. We offer the solution to this problem in our Utah Stories podcast.

If you want to watch just the solution part of the video click HERE otherwise watch the full video below.

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Richard Markosian

I am a story teller and journalist. I have a passion for farmers, local craftspeople, and folks who aspire to create, build and grow their business in the local marketplace. Why local? By supporting locally-owned businesses we create more opportunity for entrepreneurs, and we claim our sovereignty to shape our communities how we want to see them. I aspire to build Utah Stories Magazine into a household Utah name, and assist Utah businesses and makers with marketing. On the journalism side of things my passion is investigative journalism that offers true insight into issues. I believe strongly in the forth estate: strong, meaningful, insightful journalism is essential to a free market Democracy.

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Why Most People Stay Stuck in Business and What It Takes to Move Forward

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Prakash Shah is the kind of man who has spent enough time around risk that he no longer treats it like an interruption.

Today, he works in business brokerage and advisory, helping owners sell companies, helping buyers decide whether they should step in, and, when the fit is right, helping connect those buyers with private equity. He works in a world of valuations, leverage, due diligence, and hard questions that most people would rather postpone. He also operates in Utah real estate and has built a career around seeing value before it is obvious to everyone else. That is who he is now. What makes him interesting is how early that instinct started to form, and how little his life resembles the way most Americans are raised to think about comfort, career, and security.

He grew up in Nepal in a boarding school system that would feel severe to many Americans. He was an only child, yet he saw his parents only twice a year for twelve straight years, until high school graduation. He lived inside routine. He shared space with boys from different social classes and different family circumstances. The school was structured enough that money did not buy you any special standing once you were inside. Everyone followed the same rules. Everyone was subject to the same discipline. In his case, it was an army school. Everything was measured. Everything was scheduled. In that kind of environment, you do not build your life around preference. You build it around adaptation.

That contrast matters.

A lot of American children are raised to search for what fits them. What are you passionate about? What do you enjoy? What feels right? Those are not bad questions, but they can create a habit of waiting for life to align itself before action begins. Prakash learned something else much earlier. He learned that life often does not align itself first. You enter the room as it is, you deal with the people in it, and you figure out how to function without making your comfort the center of every decision. He said that one of the biggest lessons from those years was tolerance, the ability to live with people from all walks of life and genuinely learn to get along with them. That is not a soft value. In business, it turns into resilience. In negotiation, it turns into patience. In career terms, it turns into range.

When he came to the United States over 25 years ago, he did not arrive with the kind of runway that allows for a prolonged identity search. He came with two suitcases and enough money for one semester. He went to Hunter College in New York City, then to NYIT near Central Park, studying media and then media and technology management. He also studied psychology. Those details matter because they show something about his mind. He was interested in people before he built a career around deals. Even then, what attracted him was not technical prestige. It was understanding motives, behavior, and how people reveal themselves.

But New York is merciless toward vague ambition. It demands payment in rent, transit, food, and time.

Prakash worked constantly. He took multiple jobs. He paid tuition, paid rent, and skipped most of what Americans imagine as college life. There were no romantic years of drifting from café to concert to self-discovery. He talked about not having the luxury of dates, travel, or finding himself. He was working. Even laundry was not a small detail. In New York, he pointed out, you do not just throw clothes in a machine at home. You haul them to the laundromat, count quarters, and measure what is necessary. He also described distraction in a way that most native-born Americans probably do not think about. For immigrants, distraction is not always pleasure. Sometimes distraction is the constant pressure of competing needs. Tuition or rent. Food or savings. A better coat or another month of making do. He was not romanticizing the struggle. He was describing the arithmetic of it.

That arithmetic did not make him cautious. If anything, it did the opposite.

While in college, he had the option of safer analytical work. Instead, he took a sales job with Time Warner Cable that sent him into the South Bronx from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. to knock on doors. He is not a physically imposing man. He knew exactly what kind of neighborhoods he was walking into. He described apartment buildings where people kept pit bulls, where tension was normal, where one mistake in tone or timing could end a conversation immediately. For most people, that kind of job would have been something to survive and forget. For him, it became a school in human behavior. “It’s not about talking… it’s about listening,” he said.

One story from that period says almost everything about how he operates. He knocked on a door one night around 8:45 and found himself facing a huge man with a gun on the table, pit bulls nearby, and a half-eaten pizza in front of him. It had all the ingredients of a very bad scene.

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Housing

Utah Homelessness Crisis: Tyler Clancy Challenges ‘Housing First’ Failures

“It’s not normal to see someone sleeping on the sidewalk in a sleeping bag with a needle sticking out of their arm.”

That sentence should not be controversial. In a sane society, it would barely need saying. But in Utah — where politicians, nonprofits, consultants, and bureaucrats have spent more than a decade congratulating themselves for “addressing homelessness” while the streets of Salt Lake have become more dangerous, more drug-soaked, and more morally disorienting — it lands like an indictment. And it came not from a crank, a talk-radio host, or a downtown business owner at the end of his rope, but from Tyler Clancy, Utah’s newly appointed homeless coordinator.

That matters because if Clancy is serious — and after sitting down with him, he appears to be — then he represents something Utah’s homelessness system has not had in a very long time: someone willing to say the obvious out loud. The old script is dead. Everybody knows it, but almost nobody in power has wanted to admit it.

For years, Utah’s homelessness policy has been built on a polite fiction — that if we build enough units, distribute enough funding, and avoid being too “judgmental,” the crisis will gradually resolve itself. That story was easier to maintain when Utah was receiving national praise for “solving chronic homelessness.” It is much harder to sustain now, when the conditions on the ground tell a very different story.

Magnolia Apartments opened to help alleviate homelessness, but the results were not all positive.

Part of that failure became painfully clear over the last four years. By most accounts, former homelessness coordinator Wayne Niederhauser was a decent man and a very nice guy. But one person close to him described his tenure as that of “a tiger without stripes”— someone with the title, but not the appetite to challenge the sprawling network of nonprofits and service providers receiving millions in taxpayer dollars. That lack of accountability has had real consequences. Multiple former and current residents have told Utah Stories that of the roughly 60 original tenants who moved into Magnolia when it opened, about 20 have since died — most, they say, from accidental drug overdoses.

If those accounts are even close to accurate, they should have triggered a public reckoning. Instead, the system kept moving, protected by good intentions, insulated from scrutiny, and largely unbothered by outcomes that would be considered a scandal in almost any other context.

That is the machine Clancy is stepping into, and unless he is willing to confront it directly — not just coordinate around it — his role risks becoming one more layer of management over the same failures. The reality he inherits is not complicated in the way policymakers like to suggest. It is visible, immediate, and increasingly impossible to explain away.

Open drug use, fentanyl addiction, untreated mental illness, rising disorder, and a growing sense among both the public and the homeless themselves all indicate that the system is not working. Complexity exists, but it has also become a convenient shield for cowardice. It is the language people use when they want to avoid saying what is plainly in front of them: Utah has spent years managing visible human collapse while calling it compassion.

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For years, Utah’s approach to homelessness rested on a narrative few in power were willing to question. It sounded compassionate. It polled well. And it avoided uncomfortable truths.

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Continue reading and support independent Utah journalism with a purchase of Utah Stories (Digital + Print) or 3 month free trial (Digital).
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