I recall that a few years ago, at least one developer in the Phoenix area refused to sell houses to people who wouldn't live in them but I haven't been able to find a source for that.
Researchers at the NY Fed have found that housing speculators played an important role in the late Housing Bubble. From their report:
At the peak of the boom in 2006, over a third of all U.S. home purchase lending was made to people who already owned at least one house. In the four states with the most pronounced housing cycles, the investor share was nearly half—45 percent. Investor shares roughly doubled between 2000 and 2006.
Importantly, we also show how buy-and-flip investors can make higher bids on houses, even if they had relatively little cash, by using low-down-payment loans. Nonprime credit—mortgage lending to borrowers who were unable or unwilling to qualify for cheaper, prime loans—enabled optimistic investors to speculate by making highly leveraged bets on house prices.
When the prices began to fall, the investors began to rapidly default:
CONCLUSION:
In 2007-09, investors were responsible for more than a quarter of seriously delinquent mortgage balances nationwide, and more than a third in Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada.
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http://jonathanturley.org/2011/12/11/a-sordid-tale-of-discriminatory-lending-practices-and-ghetto-loans/
Came across this.
At any rate Greenwald nails Obama's hypocrisy. Needs primarying from the Left.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/12/obama_i_cant_comment_on_wall_street_prosecutions/singleton/
"Or does this sound like a President who applies exactly that kind of political pressure on the DOJ when it suits him, and is now cynically invoking this excuse to avoid having to take responsibility for the virtually full-scale immunity given to the financial-crisis-causing Wall Street criminals under his watch?"
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UPDATE: It’s certainly true, as President Obama said, that many of the unethical and damaging acts of Wall Street were not illegal: thanks in large part to the orgy of de-regulation that took place in the Clinton era under Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Gary Gensler and others (also known as: Obama’s economic team). But — as even life-long Wall Street apologist Alan Greenspan admits — much of what was done by Wall Street was outright fraud. Even after the 1990s spasm of deregulation, fraud — e.g., representing debt instruments to the public as sound and top-grade while scorning them privately as toxic junk — is (as Greenspan pointed out) still very much illegal, criminal, under existing statutes."
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