New Year’s resolutions had barely been resolved before parents across the nation started thinking ahead to summer. The scramble to sign kids up for summer camp begins in January, because limited slots and huge demand have led to a highly competitive environment that verges on absurd. Case in point: Rachael Deane, a mother in Richmond, Virginia, has a summer-camp spreadsheet. She joked to me that it is “more sophisticated than a bill tracker” she uses to follow legislation in her work at a children’s-advocacy nonprofit; the spreadsheet is color-coded, and registration dates are cross-posted onto her work calendar so she can jump into action as soon as slots open.

Deane’s intense approach reflects the state of modern parenthood. The lack of universal child care is a pain point for parents throughout the year, but the summer is a unique headache. As with after-school care, parents have to navigate a confusing patchwork of options, but in the summer, they need a plan for all day, every day, for three months. And society leaves them largely on their own to figure it out: A 2019 survey from the Center for American Progress found that for three-quarters of parents, securing summer care was at least a little bit difficult. The system is essentially a competition that has winners and losers, and rests upon a willful ignorance of the reality of most American families—only one-fifth of all parents are stay-at-home. Change is long overdue.

I believe part of the problem is that in the U.S., education is a right for kids, and a responsibility for the state, while care outside schools, despite being just as vital for child development, is seen as solely the parents’ responsibility. So when the academic calendar ends, the government bows out. As Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who has studied summer care, told me, “We’ve made a decision culturally to push the burden of caring for kids during the summer fully onto parents, and forcing them to manage. It’s in some ways a throwback to an idealized family setup and work setup that never existed for most people anyway.” Indeed, the system’s assumption that one parent (read: the mother) should be available to watch the kids is a prime example of what the historian Stephanie Coontz calls “the way we never were.”

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

Although some people wax nostalgic about lightly supervised summers spent mainly by themselves or with friends, the landscape has shifted since the 1980s, and this is no longer a viable option for many families. The sociologist Jessica Calarco explained in an interview with the writer Anne Helen Petersen that several factors led to the change. These included new laws about the minimum age at which children can be home alone, and a desire among certain parents for specialty camps to give their kids a leg up in college admissions. In parallel, the economic challenges of running camps drove a decline in options and an increase in prices.

The lack of affordable summer care leads to very different choice sets for parents in different income brackets. The mid-winter dash for summer-camp spots occurs mostly, though not exclusively, among wealthier, more educated parents. Lenhart’s research found that about one-third of parents in 2018 were sending their kids to camp; another study concluded that the kids of college graduates had an attendance rate seven times higher than that of kids whose parents had only a high-school diploma or less.

Parents who go this route face a logistical puzzle: Few summer programs run for multiple weeks, cover the hours when parents are working, and are reasonably affordable. Although many municipal parks-and-recreation departments valiantly try to provide inclusive low-cost options, there simply aren’t enough slots to go around. Making matters worse, camp sign-ups tend to be first come, first served, provoking a page-refreshing scrum more appropriate to acquiring Taylor Swift tickets than securing care for one’s children. I was discussing this topic with my literary agent, Laura Usselman, and she told me that in her small Georgia city, camp registration opens at 9 a.m. on one day in January, and “many of the camps are full by 9:03.”

Lower-income parents, for whom camps are often entirely out of reach, sometimes have to shape their entire work lives around the need for summer care. The Center for American Progress survey found that, to accommodate summer-care needs, more than half of families had “at least one parent [plan] to make a job change that will result in reduced income.” Calarco explained that in her research interviews with mothers, “quite a few have talked about how they made their own career decisions around the fact that their kids would be home in the summers and after school”—choosing a lower-paying job because it was closer to family who could help, for example, or taking part-time gig jobs.

The most obvious solution to this problem—year-round school—has never really gained traction in the United States. A mere 4 percent of U.S. schools have year-round schedules, and these still have substantial breaks. Summer vacation’s place in the American cultural mindset is deeply entrenched; there is also a fair case that children need opportunities for open play and creativity through an extended summer break to complement academic study.

Other countries have different approaches that preserve summer vacation without leaving parents scrambling every year. Municipalities in Sweden, for instance, are required by law to offer parents slots in programs known as fritidshem, or “leisure-time centers,” until their children turn 13. These centers provide both before- and after-school supervision and care during school breaks. In Germany, children have a legal right to day care; although there isn’t a corresponding policy for school breaks, some towns and cities organize comprehensive holiday programming, often in partnership with local schools. It’s not free, but the costs are moderate and financial aid is generally available.

Approaches like these in the U.S. would, of course, require funding, and maybe even legislation. Sadly, this country has shown time and again that it is unwilling to commit major resources to child care, laying the problem at parents’ feet instead. A cultural shift is needed to smooth the path for potential policy shifts. The summer scramble seems unlikely to end unless U.S. society moves its philosophy away from “every family for itself” and toward an understanding that school, work, and child care are all interconnected.

[Read: Why child care is so ridiculously expensive]

There have been recent glimmers of possibility. Although it was interrupted by the pandemic, two New York City council members introduced legislation in early 2020 to offer free summer camp for all youths in the city. Last year, several school districts across the country used pandemic-relief funding to temporarily provide free summer programming. Yet the fact that such policies are new and notable underlines the absurdity of America’s inconsistent ideas about when and where families deserve support. As Lenhart told me, “We’ve decided culturally and politically that the care of very young children, and the care of children in one season [of the year], is a burden to be borne by the family as opposed to spread across the community.”

Child care shouldn’t be a luxury good that the wealthy fight over, the middle class squeezes to acquire, and low-income folks do without. But that’s what it becomes every summer when parents’ options are shelling out for expensive camps, fighting for limited slots in affordable programs, or nothing. Until action is taken, forcing parents to sprint to sign up for summer camp in the dead of winter is a not-so-subtle message about how the nation really feels about them.

In reporting on the housing crisis, I often hear some version of a simple story purporting to explain why so many Americans struggle to afford a place to live. The story goes like this: Housing costs are unaffordable because [INSERT BAD COMPANY HERE] is greedy and jacking up prices. The villain can be Airbnb or developers; it can be deep-pocketed foreigners or iBuyers. The story is compelling because it does not directly implicate regular people, sympathetic institutions, or elected officials.

To state the obvious, stories can be compelling without being true. Especially suspect are stories that scapegoat a group or an entity that is impossible or at least very difficult to defend: banks or oil companies or criminals, say. The scapegoat takes the blame for a complex problem. The trick is to cast a villain such that the surrounding facts become irrelevant. Who cares whether criminals have actually destroyed American cities? Attempting to stress-test theories like this just makes you look pro-crime and puts you on the same side as people who have committed terrible acts. But false narratives are dangerous because they distract attention from real problems, and plausible solutions.

The latest version of the housing-villain story targets private-equity firms and hedge funds, broadly “institutional investors” that have supposedly been outcompeting regular homebuyers and are therefore responsible for the skyrocketing rents and home prices of 2020 and 2021. “One of the largest hedge funds, the largest Wall Street firms in the world, is going around and buying up every single-family home in this country,” J. D. Vance argued at the start of his senatorial campaign in 2021, noting that first-time homebuyers, disproportionately Black Americans, were unable to become homeowners as a result.

I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but the idea that these firms are ultimately responsible for our housing-affordability crisis is absolutely ridiculous, and no one who knows anything about housing markets believes it. Yet this story has gained so much traction that it has spawned hearings and bills on Capitol Hill. One recent effort by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon seeks to levy high taxes on any company owning more than 100 single-family homes, in order to push it to sell those homes to owner-occupants or smaller investors. I asked Merkley what drew his attention to hedge-fund activity in the housing market, and he told me that he had “started to hear from people in the neighborhood saying, ‘Here’s the problem: We’re competing when we’re looking for a home; we’re competing against all-cash offers from businesses’ … It brought me back to thinking about whether we should have American families having to compete against billionaires to have a place to rent or to buy.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

In order to have the type of pricing power that would allow any entity to push up rents and home prices, it would need to own significant shares if not an outright majority of homes in a particular market. At the national level, this is obviously not happening. According to one report, institutional investors purchased just 3 percent of homes sold in 2021. At the state level, the story seems unlikely as well. Georgia, a state with a relatively high amount of investor activity, saw some 8.5 percent of 2021 home sales go to the largest investors, according to CoreLogic data. In Merkley’s home state, just 2 percent of sales went to “mega-investors,” who own 1,001 or more properties. But 8 or 2 percent of home sales doesn’t mean 8 or 2 percent of the total housing stock—far from it. After all, most homes aren’t up for sale; from year to year, a great majority of homes remain in the same hands. Further, a purchase does not mean a permanent holding. Investors in both states quite likely went on to sell some of these homes.

At any rate: Home prices and rents increased quickly across the country, in communities large and small. When trying to determine what is responsible for this phenomenon, you have to find an explanation that is common to all of these places, not one that is particular to this market or that one. From August 2020 to August 2021, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana, and Idaho, saw the most significant home-price increases, but of those states, just the first two saw relatively high rates of mega-investors, again according to CoreLogic data. (2021 data shows that Arizona saw the highest at roughly 8.9 percent of homes on the market going to mega-investors.)

Additionally, some proponents of the scapegoat story argue that even if institutional investors are not dominant at the state level, they could still be distorting local real estate. Someone looking for a three-bedroom single-family home in the suburbs of Atlanta is not equally satisfied with one in the Savannah suburbs, so what matters to that person is the local context. But just because something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean it’s actually happening. And these theories imbue investors with a mastermind quality that they frankly haven’t earned. For instance, fearmongering about Zillow buying up real estate fell flat when the company exited the market after off-loading many homes at a loss.   

If there are no solid data supporting the institutional-investor-scapegoat story, there are certainly plenty of misleading statistics. Here’s one egregious example: A report from the House Financial Services Committee reads that “in the third quarter of 2021 alone, institutional investors bought 42.8% of homes for sale in the Atlanta metro area and 38.8% of homes in the Phoenix-Glendale-Scottsdale area.” These are unbelievably big numbers, and they are—literally unbelievable, that is. The citation provided in the document was not correct, but I was able to find the relevant report and, wouldn’t you know it, that’s not what it says. The report shows only the share of purchases made by investors, not institutional investors. Why does this matter? Because investors include people or entities who own fewer than 10 properties, midsize investors who own 10 to 99 homes, iBuyers—which buy properties and then immediately resell them—and even people who purchase vacation homes through an LLC. Relatedly, a New America report last year of investor activity in North Carolina suggests that investor growth in that market is actually being driven by smaller players.

I’ve seen this type of bait and switch more times than I can count. Instead of being clear that institutional investors make up just a small fraction of total investor purchases, politicians conflate statistics, tangling up true facts with a predetermined story. At an event on the rise of institutional investors, Marcia Fudge, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, noted that in Cleveland’s eastern inner-ring suburbs, “investors have purchased nearly ⅓ of homes every year since 2015.” This is not as blatant as the House committee report, because Fudge was careful to say merely “investors.” But in the context of her remarks, given at an event titled “Institutional Investors in Housing,” the implication was that private-equity firms or hedge funds were taking over Cleveland.

[Annie Lowrey: The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine]

This bait and switch matters. First, because it reveals a lack of rigor when people find data to fit a preordained narrative instead of looking to determine what is actually happening. Second, because if these homes are being bought by a wide range of investors, this reduces even further the likelihood that any single investor has significant enough market share to mess with prices.

The other deceptive part of the latest scapegoat story is that these institutional investors are regularly outbidding homebuyers with all-cash offers. Although all-cash offers are certainly on the rise, many of these bids are from wealthy people, house flippers, or smaller landlords. And one survey of realtors found an average “0% difference in offer price of institutional buyers compared to other buyers.” In 2021, according to a recent report, the “median purchase price of institutional buyers [was] typically 26% lower than the states’ median purchase prices,” suggesting that they are not typically competing with ordinary individual buyers, anyway. Institutional investors tend to specialize in distressed communities. In these markets, they can take advantage of economies of scale in making repairs.  

There are real problems with corporate landlords. For instance, large corporate investors are significantly more likely to file eviction notices “even after controlling for past foreclosure status, property characteristics, tenant characteristics, and neighborhood,” according to a study of Fulton County, Georgia.  As the sociologist Esther Sullivan has argued, corporate investors may also take advantage of mobile-home owners, who tend not to own the land beneath their unit, by escalating fees for the maintenance of park properties.

These problems are worth solving by, say, increasing resources for code enforcement so that landlords of all stripes are held accountable for not keeping their properties habitable. Local governments should also  create rental registries that can track important information about properties and landlords to allow for both careful study and accountability of bad actors. The urban-policy expert Bruce Katz and his co-authors have also recommended that states require LLCs to disclose beneficial owners—anyone who owns more than 25 percent of the entity.

But if some institutional investors make bad landlords, that doesn’t mean they’re behind the housing-affordability crisis. They are not why rents are so high or why homeownership is out of reach for so many. Investors are not driving the unaffordability; they are responding to it. Many different investors are all flocking into the housing market; what is most relevant is the fundamental reason  they are all being drawn there.

Housing is primarily unaffordable in this country because of persistent undersupply. In fact, institutional investors are entering the single-family-home market precisely because supply constraints have led to skyrocketing prices. One institutional investor’s SEC filing admitted just that, celebrating a “decline” in supply that has “driven strong rental rate growth and home price appreciation.” The filing also lamented the possibility that “continuing development … will increase the supply of housing and exacerbate competition for residents.”  

A lack of supply is caused by a complex web of rules and regulations that prevent developers—profit and nonprofit alike—from building enough housing to meet demand. A recent report from Freddie Mac estimates a shortage of 3.8 million housing units. For decades the United States has been underbuilding in employment hubs (such as San Francisco, New York, and Boston) and the surrounding suburbs, pushing prices up. Elected officials have allowed the home-building process to become hijacked by unrepresentative opposition and gummed up in legal challenges, many under the guise of bogus environmental concerns.

If elected officials want to fix the problem, they should eliminate those constraints, such as regulations that require large structures on large lots of land or bans on duplexes, triplexes, and multifamily buildings. And they should curtail the various legal pathways that are used to obstruct new housing. As the Brookings Institution expert Jenny Schuetz explained to the House Financial Services Committee last summer: “Targeting a small subset of landlords without addressing underlying market conditions and policy gaps will not meaningfully improve the well-being of renters and prospective homebuyers.”  

[M. Nolan Gray: How California exported its worst problem to Texas]

As I’ve followed the scapegoat story, I’ve also been struck by the implicit suggestion that renters are less worthy of single-family homes than owner-occupants are. After all, corporate landlords rent to real people. In his announcement speech, Vance made the implicit explicit, arguing, “If you can’t own a home in your community, you’re not a real citizen.” And Merkley’s bill, which hopes to transfer single-family-rental homes to owner-occupants, skates past what its success would mean for renters. One report indicates that 85 percent of single-family-rental residents would not qualify for a mortgage.

I asked Merkley’s office what would happen to the families renting these properties if his bill were to pass and large investors were forced to sell them off. His office pointed me to a provision that would create down-payment assistance for potential homebuyers, and argued that pushing investors out of the market would reduce rents. But down-payment assistance doesn’t change the fact that most of these renters don’t have the credit score to qualify for a mortgage, nor would the assistance necessarily go to the families settled in these homes now. And I hope by this point it’s clear that even if institutional investors exited these markets, that would not make a dent in home prices or rents. Notably, a similar policy in Hong Kong led to a reduction in short-term speculation but did “not effectively cool down housing prices.”

Private equity isn’t the first villain, and it likely won’t be the last, to be cast in the role of the housing scapegoat. Airbnb, foreign buyers, greedy developers—all of these groups have taken center stage and probably will again. Nobody needs to defend these entities, but playing whack-a-mole with the villain of the moment won’t increase the amount of affordable housing we build, it won’t untangle the uncomfortable matrix of interests that opposes change and growth and opportunities for first-time homebuyers, and it won’t satisfy the growing anger of the tens of millions of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

The political project of building enough affordable housing and enacting necessary tenant protections is a hard one. Don’t let make-believe villains distract you from the real solutions to the housing crisis. We have to build.