From two exciting young reporters at The Wall Street Journal comes the untold story of the rise of the American landlord, the government blunders that created a housing crisis, the next big rent surge that may be just around the corner, and our growing desperation to fight back.

Every morning, millions of Americans sit down at desks, or put on hardhats, or step behind counters and start working for their landlords. If you’re a renter and you’re lucky, you work the first couple hours of your day so that you can pay the owner of the home you live in. Around noon, you’re then free to earn money for food and health insurance, to pay down your car loan or save for a vacation. Or maybe you’re one of the unlucky ones. You live in Phoenix, Miami, Dallas, New York, or any of the other cities big real estate investors have swooped in on. Your rent has doubled, but your wages have hardly risen at all. You toil for your landlord until late in the afternoon.

You’d be forgiven for thinking things were always like this. But they weren’t.

This is the story of how your monthly rent became big business. It’s a tale of shifting tax incentives and loosened regulations, of a leather-clad, weed-smoking rebel who decided that apartments belong on Wall Street, and the retired Superbowl winner who, baseball bat in hand, built a rental empire out of the foreclosure crisis. It’s the story of a small but feisty (and growing) tenant rights movement, and an investment craze that’s hooked thousands of desperate ordinary Americans who see rent collection as their best (or even their only) path to financial freedom.

A deviously entertaining, only-in-America yarn, Big Rent is the outrageous story of how the rent got so damn high, who really profits from it, why the golden age of the American landlord may only be getting started… and what it just might take to stop it.