Wall Street Is Making Phoenix Housing Unaffordable, New Economic Liberties Report Finds
September 9, 2026 — Today, the American Economic Liberties Project released a new paper, “Phoenix Case Study: Single-Family Rentals, Built-to-Rent, and Undoing the Corporate Capture of Housing,” which examines how Wall Street investors have transformed Phoenix into one of America’s top markets for corporate-owned single-family rentals, second only to Atlanta. The paper by Laurel Kilgour and Allie Gross traces how decades of policies weakened local homebuilders and opened the door to investor capture, leaving Phoenix residents with a more elusive promise of homeownership, more expensive rent, and more aggressive evictions.
Break Up Ticketmaster Coalition Urges Court to Reject DOJ’s Live Nation Settlement as Corrupted, Impotent, and Unlawfully Disclosed
September 8, 2026 — The Break Up Ticketmaster Coalition filed a public comment last week urging the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to reject the Department of Justice's proposed settlement with Live Nation.
‘Judges are just blessing monopolies at this point,’ Economic Liberties Calls On Congress to Step In and Regulate Big Tech Following News That Google Beat US Bid To Force a Break Up
September 2, 2026 — Following today’s remedies ruling rejecting the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) proposed breakup of Google’s ad tech monopoly after the company was last year found guilty of illegally monopolizing key pieces of the online advertising marketplace, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement:
Economic Liberties Joins Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari for Phoenix Roundtable on How Institutional Investors Are Reshaping the City’s Housing Market
September 2, 2026 — The American Economic Liberties Project will join Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari (AZ-03) on Thursday, September 10 for a roundtable examining how Wall Street investors have reshaped Phoenix's housing market, squeezing out renters, aspiring homeowners, and local builders in the process. The event, "Private Equity Housing Takeover: How Institutional Investors Push Phoenix Tenants, Local Builders, and Aspiring Homeowners to the Brink,"will feature Laurel Kilgour, Research Manager at Economic Liberties, alongside State Senator Analise Ortiz, Phoenix City Councilwoman Anna Hernandez, housing advocates, and community members discussing how Phoenix became one of the country's top markets for investor-owned housing, and what can be done to protect tenants, potential homeowners, and local builders.
COMPETE Act Passes California Legislature Stripped of Its Teeth; Economic Liberties Warns Against Declaring Victory
September 1, 2026 — The California legislature gave final approval to the COMPETE Act (AB 1776) over the weekend, and many are hailing it as a landmark win against monopoly power. It isn’t. After a heavy, big-budget campaign by the California Chamber of Commerce, amendments adopted in the final days of the session stripped the bill of its private right of action — a key enforcement mechanism — carved back the authority of public enforcers, and gutted the reach of California’s Unfair Competition Law. While the bill does close a century-old loophole in California antitrust law, it leaves Californians almost no way to use it.