This article in Bloomberg, “Wall Street, America’s New Landlord, Kicks Tenants to the Curb,” struck me as a particular scathing criticism of Wall Street. This article is based on a study done by the Atlanta Fed. The article says
“My hope was that these private equity firms would provide a new kind of rental housing for people who couldn’t -- or didn’t want to -- buy during the housing recovery,” said Elora Raymond, the report’s lead author. “Instead, it seems like they’re contributing to housing instability in Atlanta, and possibly other places.”
In interviews and court filings, renters and housing advocates said that some investment firms are impersonal and unresponsive, slow to make necessary repairs and quick to evict tenants who withhold rent because of complaints about maintenance. The researchers said some landlords use an eviction notice as a “routine rent-collection strategy.”
This second article “Private Equity’s Real Estate Empire,” describes how investment firms got involved in the single family home rental business. It says one of the first and one of the leaders was Blackrock, whose CEO, Larry Fink, is Jewish.
“The last time Wall Street devised a plan to make mountains of money off our homes it ended catastrophically,” the Atlanta branch of the American Friends Service Committee said on its blog after a protest at a foreclosure auction that was dominated by private-equity bidders. Economists at the Federal Reserve have noted the same potential for danger.
To the private equity and hedge fund landlords their tenants are not people; they are figures on an income statement. Their pain and suffering is irrelevant. All that matters is the bottom line. These are some of the most callous, heartless, immoral people in the world, but they view their properties from an ivory tower far from the hardships of their tenants. Many Wall Street investors are Jewish, although by no means all. Charles Dickens was often concerned about the poor living in London, where their oppressors were mostly Gentile, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. On the other hand, Henry Fort was particularly critical of Jewish landlords in his book, The International Jew. Ford wrote:
The real estate speculations of the Jews are familiar to all, but unfortunately do not constitute their entire land program. Many American cities have changed their characters entirely during the past 15 years by reason of Jewish speculation in residence property, and it is a fact established in the larger eastern cities that the recent exorbitant and extortionate rise in rents was largely a matter of the Jewish landlord. The governor of one of the most important of our commonwealths was loath to sign a bill regulating rents. His hesitancy was encouraged by very heavy pressure brought to bear upon him by the weightiest Jewish financial interests in his own and neighboring states. He finally decided that he would sign the bill and give the law effect, and the fact that decided him was his personal investigation and the investigation of his personal agents into hundreds of cases of abuse where he discovered that it was a common practice among Jewish landlords to transfer the same piece of property round and round to every member of the family in turn, each "transfer" being the excuse for a new increase in the rent. Men have their eyes opened to the Jewish Question in various ways: this was the way a governor had his eyes opened.
That, however, is not the peculiarity of Jewish landlords alone; Gentile landlords have played the same trick. But landlordism is peculiarly a Jewish ambition and distinction; the Jew is the Landlord of America. Any group of tenants almost anywhere in America, except the West, could testify to this.
Nor is landlordism itself reprehensible, things being what they are, unless it is anti-social and anti-American. And just here is where it gets point. Some of the oldest and most sacred shrines of Americanism in the East have entirely lost their character as such by the invasion -- not of "foreigners" -- but of Jews.
Ford, Henry. The International Jew (pp. 120-121). . Kindle Edition.
On the other hand, the President-elect, Trump, is a Gentile real estate investor who has been criticized for some of his dealings, although he invests mostly in high-end, high-rise buildings that are not linked to this problem with single family homes.
On Bloomberg TV yesterday, I watched a representative of the financial industry defend its practices regarding rentals. His name was Tom Shapiro, which sounds Jewish, although I don’t know if he is. The interview is found here. He defended the industry by saying that an investor’s owning a number of single family homes is like an investor owning a large multifamily apartment building, which has been common for years. He said 36% of rentals are now single family homes, as opposed to apartments. Many more people are renting rather than buying; so, investors are focusing on millennials who prefer to rent.
No comments:
Post a Comment