EAST LANSING - Scott Soodsma looked down his bench in the third quarter. 

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He saw his starting forward sitting next to him in foul trouble and his starting guard in crutches with his ankle wrapped in ice.

It wasn’t looking good.

“We had some issues with foul trouble early with two of our top players,” Soodsma said. “Obviously, that put us at a disadvantage. But you have to give credit to Freeland. I think they battled.”

Unity Christian lost to Freeland 42-32 on Saturday night in the Division 2 boys basketball state title game at The Breslin.

Brogan Sherd injured his left ankle playing defense with 6 minutes left in the third quarter. Unity Christian was trailing by just one point at the time, 18-17.

More: Unity Christian basketball powers into Division 2 state finals, led by black eyes

“It was really tough,” Soodsma said of the injury. “He’s been one of our leaders throughout the tournament run. I think we were ahead when he went down. And when he got hurt, it was kind of an emotional blow. We also had Owen (VanderWaal) on the bench with four fouls. So our scoring so dwindled without him on the floor.”

VanderWaal played with four fouls in the fourth quarter. 

Jack Kamming led the Crusaders (24-4) with 14 points and five rebounds before fouling out in the fourth quarter. Kyler Berghuis added six points. 

The Crusaders, who are an elite shooting team, was just 1-for-15 from beyond the arc.  

“We just couldn’t score,” Soodsma said. “If you would have told me we would hold them to 40 points, I’m thinking we win that ball game by 10.”

VanderWaal and starting center Luke Tubergen each finished with four points and five rebounds. 

“I thought Jack really stepped up and made a couple of key baskets,” Soodsma said. “Berghuis did a nice job defensively on (Wilson) Huckeby, for the most part.” 

Freeland wins the first state title in school history. Wilson Huckeby, who will play at Saginaw Valley, had 12 points and Tristian Comer, who will play football at MSU, also had 12 points.

Is this it for Soodsma?

Soodsma has coached for 43 years. But is this it for him?

He isn’t ready to say if this was his last season.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tonight’s not the night to ask. I’m not going to come up with a decision until later. Gotta let this one settle in a little bit. We just have to get by tonight first.” 

Final game for seven seniors

Every starter on the team is a senior: Brogan Sherd, Kyler Berghuis, Owen VanderWaal, Luke Tubergen and Jack Kamminga. Two other seniors are Cody Walters and Kaden Bareman.

“They’re awesome,” Soodsma said. “We had a good devotional time before the game. I expressed how I thought of them. Win or lose, I said to these guys, you’re something special. You’ll always be special. When you leave here, I want you to be a leader. Someone who stands up for your faith. Someone who is an example to other kids. Great young men.”

Not the end for four seniors

Four players on the Unity roster will continue to play basketball at the college level.

Kamminga, Berghuis, VanderWaal and Tubergen will play at Calvin University next season.

“I’m really excited about that,” Kamminga said. “Knowing we have four more years together knowing that we can build on that chemistry playing in college together. It’s something cool that not many people get to do, especially from the same school.”

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Unity Christian falls in state finals to Freeland in boys basketball

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President Donald Trump and Senate Democrats have finally found something they can agree on: banning institutional investors from buying single-family rentals. But it won’t be the cure-all to the housing affordability crisis they think it will be. 

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“We want homes for people, not for corporations,” Trump said during the State of the Union address in February, touting his plan to cap institutional ownership to 100 single-family homes. 

On Thursday, the Senate voted 89-10 to pass a bill containing number of measures to make housing more affordable, including banning any investor that owns at least 350 homes from buying more. 

The proposed bans come as the U.S. housing market is facing a shortage of 4.7 million units, an all-time high according to Zillow, and the median age of the average first-time homebuyer in the United States has shot up to 40 years old.  

The affordability crisis is real, but economists say both proposals won’t break fundamental barriers to homeownership and may backfire for the low-income Americans the bills aim to help. 

“People want to identify a boogeyman that can say, ‘Hey, this is the problem, and give me an easy button to solve it right now,’” rental housing economist Jay Parsons told Fortune. “It’s an emotionally satisfying answer, even if it’s not a real solution.” 

He said targeting large institutional investors—who only own about 3% of the single-family rental market—is unlikely to have an impact on affordability for lower-income Americans and could leave millions unable to afford a place to live. 

Institutional investors serve tenants who are typically locked out of the gates of homeownership for reasons that have nothing to do with corporations. Parsons said many rent because they cannot meet the requirements to apply for traditional mortgages due to lower incomes and credit scores, or they can’t afford the additional $1,000 a month in homeownership costs. 

“These are real people, real families, who live in these homes, and the assumption and the narrative is they would be homeowners, if not for the fact that the investors own these houses,” Parsons said. “The reality is that most of them can’t.” 

Homeownership is a ‘sacred cow’

Despite Trump’s claim that the U.S. is at risk of being “a nation of renters,” there are about a million fewer single-family rentals than a decade ago, and the share of single-family homes being rented has gradually decreased since 2014, according to the National Association of Realtors. 

Meanwhile, Sean Dobson, the CEO of real estate investing giant The Amherst Group, said he sees younger generations rethinking which assets are the most valuable, challenging the notion that homeownership is a “sacred cow.”  

Homeowners can lose up to 9% of a property’s value from transaction fees, which have increased as home prices have soared over time, making mortgages become less valuable. Rather than “being tied to one asset in one town,” young people are prioritizing freedom, saving, personal choice, and life balance, he said. 

Dobson also argued people should adjust their expectations to align with longer life expectancy and explained that Americans are accomplishing major milestones like getting married or having children at later ages as life becomes less affordable. 

Amherst rents to more than 200,000 people, and 71% of its current residents would not be approved for a mortgage at the current credit and income standards, according to internal research shared with Fortune. An 85% majority of their residents would not qualify to buy the homes they live in today, Dobson said.  

The average single-family renter has a FICO score of 650 and a household income of $88,000, much lower than the average single-family homeowner, who has a FICO score of 730 and an income of more than $150,000, according to Amherst Group data. A lower credit score often leads to higher interest rates, so renting from institutional investors is often cheaper. 

Renting also has become a way for low- and moderate-income Americans to avoid the traps of subprime mortgages, Parsons, the economist, said. At the same time, mortgage delinquency rates for low-income Americans have been increasing over the past few years due to growing unemployment and higher home prices, according to the New York Federal Reserve.

Moving the needle on affordability

Banning institutional investors would reduce rental housing supply, slow down new unit development, and displace more than a million people from their homes, the National Rental Home Council said in a statement to Fortune. The council’s members include some of the largest single-rental family owners, including Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, American Homes 4 Rent, and Tricon Residential.

“There’s a real problem in America where we have a severe shortage of affordable, quality housing of all types,” Laurie Goodman, an institute fellow at the economic policy think tank Urban Institute, told Fortune.

Zoning laws as well as high land, labor, and materials costs are the main reasons for the 4.7 million housing unit shortage and high costs, she said. 

Preventing institutional investors from buying single-family homes will just mean a small investor gets it, Goodman added. In fact, as interest rates and maintenance costs have gone up, institutional investors have slowed down purchase units in recent years, she explained.

“Banning a small piece of the market does nothing to solve for the actual affordability challenges facing people who want to buy a house,” Parsons said. “Ninety percent of single-family rental investors are smaller local moms-and-pops.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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