How Wall Street Is Buying Jacksonville One Neighborhood at a Time
When homes become financial assets instead of places to live, neighborhoods disappear one family at a time. A neighborhood is a fragile ecosystem, held together by proximity, shared memory, and the unspoken agreements of daily life. For Lynett Mitchell, that ecosystem did not collapse all at once. Her slice of the American Dream was dismantled in increments, surrendered one rent increase at a time. Mitchell had lived in her Jacksonville apartment long enough to lay down roots and consider it home. Then the price of remaining there surged by nearly $400 in only a few years. Like thousands of working Americans, she discovered that loyalty to a community offers no protection when the community itself has been converted into an investment portfolio. She took on a second job—not to build generational wealth, save for a comfortable retirement, or improve her family’s quality of life, but simply to remain beneath the same roof. “What money we’re making is not really enough,” she told re...