Problem Statement: Housing as a Weapon For most families, a home is supposed to be more than shelter. It is the anchor of stability, the center of memory, and, in America, the most common way wealth is passed down. But for Black people, housing has always been a battlefield. From redlining and racial covenants to predatory loans and gentrification, the roof over our heads has been manipulated into a tool of dispossession.

Today’s enemy is not just a banker with a red pen or a landlord with a grudge. It is institutional capital itself—private equity firms, hedge funds, and corporate landlords who see neighborhoods not as communities but as spreadsheets. They are not building homes to be lived in. They are extracting wealth from the very ground beneath us.

Exposing the Scam: How Institutional Buyers Rig the Market

Here is how the modern housing hustle works:

Bulk Buying Discounts

A developer builds a subdivision—say, 500 homes. A working family might expect to buy one for $500,000. But an institutional investor comes in and buys all 500 at once, paying only $300,000 per home. Volume gets them a steep discount.

Artificial Scarcity

Instead of filling the homes with families, the investor keeps them empty. The neighborhood sits unfinished, looking like a construction zone. The message is clear: this is not for you.

Self-Dealing to Inflate Comps

A year later, the investor sells three of the homes—but only to themselves, through another fund or LLC they already control. Each sale is booked at $700,000. That’s double what they paid.

Those three sales are now comparables (“comps”), the standard appraisers use to set neighborhood values.

Paper Wealth, Real Exploitation

Suddenly, the entire subdivision is “worth” $700,000 per house. On paper, the investor has doubled their money. They can now rent the homes out at obscene rates because local families no longer qualify for mortgages at those inflated prices. Worse still, the investor can borrow against this inflated portfolio, pulling out cash to buy the next community.

The Fallout

Families are priced out of ownership.

Renters face skyrocketing costs.

Communities are hollowed out, wealth siphoned away.

This is not free-market housing. This is engineered scarcity and price-fixing in plain sight. And it is happening across the country, particularly in Black and working-class neighborhoods where desperation makes people easiest to exploit.

BIT as the Answer: Flipping the Script

The Black Infrastructure Trust (BIT) was created to break this cycle. Where Wall Street sees homes as profit centers, BIT sees them as community foundations. Our strategy is simple: use the same tools of scale and finance, but redirect the gains back into the people.

Collective Buying Power

Instead of 500 homes going to a hedge fund, BIT pools member resources and buys them in bulk. We demand the same discounts institutional investors receive.

Community Comps, Not Inflated Comps

Rather than sell to ourselves at inflated prices, BIT does the opposite: we sell or lease units at affordable rates to our members. That sets a different kind of comp—one that stabilizes neighborhoods instead of pricing people out.

Permanent Affordability

BIT locks housing into cooperative and community land trust structures. That means homes cannot be flipped for profit on the speculative market. They remain affordable, generation after generation.

Reinvestment, Not Extraction

The money families spend on housing stays in the community. Rental revenue funds childcare centers, healthcare clinics, and schools—expanding the safety net rather than shredding it.

Closing: From Exploitation to Liberation

The scam is clear. Housing was weaponized against us through manipulation, speculation, and financial engineering. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With BIT, we flip the playbook. We stop being the prey of outside capital .

A home should never be a casino chip. It should be a sanctuary. And BIT exists to make sure it stays that way.