Forum Post: It's time to talk about Passive Income Privledge
Posted 4 years ago on July 28, 2020, 9:36 a.m. EST by elf3
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Landlords, developers, non-profits have leaped on board the Black Lives Matter movement as a means to collect even greater sums of government grants and funds. It's pretty disgusting to watch them dive all over it for the purpose of continuing to raid our government coffers mostly paid for now by essential workers. For the life of me it is astonishing that rather than demand rent control we continue to allow the all white country club caste to continue to use black and people of color and the next generations as cash cows for their continued luxury lifestyles sitting by the pool and paying ten grand a month in white club member dues. It's time to command RENT CONTROL. It's time to get companies and passive income landlords out of our housing so that prices come down and the population is not forced to bid against this pre-existing ownership (often bought up before we were born when housing was cheaper) for people to own homes. Fixing home costs is the KEY to upward mobility. It is the single variant that allows people the ability to retire. Having a fixed payment is necessary as one ages and is unable to work unlike rent which increases yearly and costs much more than mortgages. While banks are prohibited from red-lining they are not prohibited from lending on homes with peeling paint and other repair situations which is often the case with homes that are affordable. (Insurance issue or whatever) So this is currently how they are still able to practice red-line lending. It is impossible for regular people to outbid the cash offers of corporations and landlords who create bidding war situations on affordable housing. They lurk in lower income communities like sharks quickly turning single family homes into rentals. On top of this as they cry foul about moratoriums they receive every write off under the sun - including capital gains rate breaks and DO NOT have to pay a commercial business tax rate. We must demand RENT CONTROL. We must limit landlords and corporations from owning all of our housing. We do not have a housing crisis in this nation. We have a LANDLORD CRISIS.
https://truthout.org/articles/unmasking-the-secret-landlords-buying-up-us-properties/
A subset serving (ie feeding on) those even lower on the ladder are the self storage facilities, they become apartments of last resort, that's why you see them everywhere..
Very true. Landlords have lawyers on speed dial. They evict with impunity and often steal deposits claiming trumped up damages. With first last and security being so high now - it's an extreme amount of money for people to come up with, I have no doubt that renters feel blackmailed with this money hanging out in limbo and fear calling on things that need to be fixed (don't want to get on the bad side). There is already a total power imbalance in this situation. Renters have very little power. Landlords also have a lot more time than the average working person to file paperwork and go to court and deal with things. A working renter is strained on time. Landlords know that. Most Americans get very little time off from work. That being the case spending all of that little time filing paperwork and court seriously impacts their quality of life. American's don't even get time off to move so there is another problem. Moving is a major headache for working people. So they may tolerate a shitty situation or for longer than they should or fail to fight back for all of these reasons.
And you know no one asks why are hospital corporations also in the rental business? Well they are. Why is a car dealership also in the rental business? Well they are. Why does every business also have an office in the Virgin Islands? They do.
And once we get on this conversation it's easy to see why small businesses fail. They are renting and often facing the same issue. Business starts doing well (and the landlords literally are monitoring their businesses) Then they go up on rent often so much that the business folds - it's extortion.
We have had so much cry me a river landlord/developer propaganda in this country for a while now. Which doesn't surprise me when Blackstone is sitting at the president's ear. Suddenly they are doing our nation a great service by making themselves rich on the backs of the working class. They feel bad for all the headaches they deal with in this "tough business" where they sit in the country club and wait for their monthly checks...and finagle their taxes with their accountants (and it's always a business when it comes to losses). But when it comes to taxes and grant money - now they are a "community provided service".
And again I ask why is our government paying to meet astronomical rents instead of making laws that bring down the cost of living? Limiting what landlords can own in the way of housing? Limiting what they can charge in rent? Why are Americans renters and home owners alike willing to keep lining their pockets. With wages frozen we have not seen costs come down. Large companies have shifted their holdings into homes and rental units because they keep getting paid. Just get them out of it altogether and prices will fall - which needs to happen. If Americans are unable to get paid more as everything shifts to low wage gig jobs then costs need to come down. But the working people can't sustain this. Especially when corporations and the rich offshore and contribute nothing. IE Jeff Bezos is paying ZERO tax. I wonder too - does he also diversify with rental holdings?
In the days of the railroad workers were forced to purchase all their goods from the company store - who proceeded to extort them. That is America now - one big company store.
If the Soviet-era bus stops were equipped with utilities and amenities, they could become amazing temporary shelters as unique apartments of last resort. If we think in the opposite direction ( i.e. bringing people to the goods rather than bringing the goods to the people ) when many people become camper/truck/automobile dwellers, these bus stops can become great roadside drive-by vending spots or even simpler as dual-end-accessible mailboxes like those in a post office, only bigger and better protected by the roadside concierge service.
Russia has pretty nice and modern apartments affordable to Americans with a moderate amount of wealth to spend. $5 a month unlimted internet has been unheard of in the U.S. for at least decades already or maybe it has never been that cheap ( $10 a month telephone dial-up internet service was surely available a long time ago.) I wonder why Edward Snowden would even want to be back in the U.S. as long as he's allowed to stay in Russia. His initial longing to come back to the U.S. might have just been due to adjustment loneliness. Of course, he has to give up some "freedom" to live in Russia but it seems that the Russian people have far more guts criticizing their government than the Red Chinese ( here, excluding the Hong Kongers, for obvious reasons if you've been following the news ) do--they have "an attitude !" ( that of the well born kind who don't mince words; in some cases, it may get them into troubles with the oppressive authorities.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/29/donald-trump-white-suburban-voters-rule-rollback
Is it possible that this is an effort to get out in front of a push for rent control and any effort to try to reign in landlording by reverse psychology? Stating there will be no more low income housing in the suburbs will of course create a backlash. I believe Trump wants that rental housing there as rentals and so do his developer supporters - as much of it as possible for his favorite backer Blackstone who thrives by using the poor and by occupying America's homes. This is ridiculous. I do think there is same strange effort to use reverse psychology on this issue. It's definitively racist as well. We absolutely must have affordable housing but with RENT CONTROL and by getting corporations like BLACKSTONE out of American housing. Let's not be fooled on this issue. This administration has a clear agenda for corporate owned housing and for passive income landlord privilege- he himself is a developer whatever maneuver this is - it makes no logical sense for him to suddenly promote this other than as a method to astroturf and promote a rentier state and worse than this is he is further promoting racial tension and proposing what is non other than segregation it's disgusting. I'm sure the corporate bought Dems will dive right in proclaiming we must promote landlordship and fund it with all our almighty collective taxes. So that's the game huh? Two parties one agenda to feed the corporate coffers. Bad Cop/ Good Cop as long as corporations and the rich and their own wallets win - they will throw themselves on the sword.
Landlords received Covid bail outs as well. In my secretary jobs - I can tell you every business I ever worked for diversified their holdings with rental units. It is how they avoid the tax man. We can see this as well with multi-national conglomerates like Blackstone who buy up luxury buildings that basically sit empty as a new kind of tax shelter. It's also happening in local communities with regular housing. We must save our country. Housing is the economy stupid.
I fail to see how shifting the responsibility of housing onto the working class so renters can meet extortion "market" rates benefits the citizens of this country. What we must do is get the sharks out of our housing by commanding rent control coupled with commercial tax rates. We regulate food prices as well as medicine. This is no different - housing is a basic fundamental human right. Not one to be taken advantage of by corporations or passive income sharks who largely raid government coffers on the lie that they are somehow helping the poor by growing ever richer on money that could be going towards getting people into owning, or to truly lift up our population. Instead we seem to be locking our citizens into dependency on the very sharks who eat them. Developers grow ever richer and buy up more and more housing. It is a viscous cycle of greed keeping our citizens on a treadmill and breaking our system which can NOT maintain or sustain this especially when incomes have not risen to meet these astronomical rents and shark market home prices. The very Republicans who cry foul about subsidies feed off of them like pigs at a trough. I would wager most every politician is in the landlord business - and they benefit from this screwed up passive income privilege system which lines their pockets and keeps our population stuck and dependent . It is modern day slavery and one that the slaves are funding collectively to boot - it is worker money which piles in to section 8 subsidies which we need because landlords are price gauging. instead of forcing the price to come down - we are funding our own demise.
The kicker is their sweet passive income business doesn't cover health insurance - so they then take a nice little seat in local or federal office to cover that and their passive income pays for the campaign costs. They can't bare to shell out for anything themselves - they find a way to get other people to pay for everything in their lives. They consider that smart instead of what it is - EVIL not to mention hypocritical. The second they are called upon to contribute something back to society in the way of taxes - they run for the hills and decide the "scum and villainy and greed" of the lower classes is the problem. Irony.
Also when the elderly passed away in previous generations - housing opened up for the next generation. This isn't happening now. Instead banks are reverse mortgaging them and basically taking ownership of the properties. As well as when a home does go up - it's being bought by corporations - multinational ones as well (Chinese and Saudi businessmen). This is a new kind of corporate colonization of the American Dream. It's the stuff we see in third world nations. When our own citizens own nothing, and have no self-reliance, we are at a dangerous point in history. We can not continue on this path. We can not have an entire generation colonized and extorted by multinational conglomerates. Businesses have no business being in housing. Again I must point out it is a fundamental human right. The land is the economy. Powerful interest would stop at nothing in stopping us from pointing this out. But it's obvious. They can't hide behind their supposed philanthropy any longer. And don't get me started on mortgage interest rates, bank closing fees and points, and worked in lifelong broker bonuses. And brokerage firms - the scum sucking bottom feeders of the rental and housing world. And on top of all of this Air B&B which has largely become a money laundering enterprise. (No one checks to see if someone actually stays in a room once it's been booked) - someone can literally get anything on the books from sex traffickers to shady business dealings) With all Trumps concerns about crime - it's funny how this glaring problem just sits there totally unregulated; so now there sits a unit or home empty that could be more available housing just being used to launder money and we wonder why crime seems to be increasing. Criminals have a whole new way to operate as legitimate businesses.