Target 11.1: Safe, affordable housing

By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums

Helpful Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.

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Why shareholder democracy is helpful

Imagine every listed homebuilder, REIT and institutional landlord treating affordable, adequate housing as a core objective and lobbying for it. Junk fees and deposit withholding of the kind the FTC found at Invitation Homes would end. The FTC cited undisclosed fees above 1,700 dollars a year and secured a 48 million dollar settlement in 2024. The real-estate money that defeated California's 2018 rent-control measure would instead back supply. Blackstone, Essex and Equity Residential were among the top donors to that 72 million dollar campaign. The National Association of Realtors, the largest federal lobbying spender in 2024 at 86.3 million dollars, would put its weight fully behind zoning reform and accessory dwelling units. That would ease affordability in the high-income rental and for-sale markets where public companies operate. The bulk of the target sits elsewhere. Some 1.1 billion people live in slums and 2.8 billion are affected by the housing crisis, mostly in countries where housing is built by households and informal builders. In those countries, tenure, land titling, sanitation and slum upgrading are government and community tasks. Public-company conduct therefore helps at the margin rather than delivering the outcome.

How this was scoredHelpful

Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.

We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.

Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.

Sources

No shareholder advocacy found yet

We looked and found nothing that met our standard, which is a source we opened and confirmed. Extensive criticism of institutional single-family landlords exists, but it runs through regulators, legislators and researchers rather than through ownership. No Rule 14a-8 proposal, investor letter or coalition engagement was located at Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent, Blackstone, Essex, Equity Residential or a listed homebuilder on junk fees, deposit withholding, rent setting, housing affordability or the company's housing-policy lobbying.

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Explore more goals the world has agreed on

UN Sustainable Development Goals, every item scored for how far it depends on owners voting their values, with the reasoning and the sources behind each rating.

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How this rating was made

Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.

Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.

The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.

How we score dependency, in full.