If You Think Airbnb Is Destroying Affordable Housing, This Corporation Just Said "Hold My Beer" 🍺
Just wait until you learn about AI algorithmic surge pricing systems
We’ve talked about it many times before: Like all other for-profit land-lorders, Airbnbs boost the cost of rent and the price of houses for everyone because they hoard and financialize housing, murdering the human right to shelter on the altar of compounding parasitic passive profits.
Working people just can’t compete on buying a house when they’re up against a land-lorder who can “earn” $50+K/year off the same unit.
As more and more worker income goes to land-lorders as rents and banksters as mortgage interest, there’s less money to spend in the real economy, meaning fewer jobs and worse pay. Throughout history, for-profit land-lording has ground the real economy to a halt, and this time will be no different.
Several years ago, I warned that we’re now living in a real game of Monopoly and that pretty soon all the homes would become hotels.
I warned that if civilization didn’t ban Airbnb and for-profit land-lording, soon we’d see predator investment funds buying up family homes to turn them into illegal hotels, driving more people into homelessness and everyone else into more housing hardship.
Well, it happened.
Wander, a high-end Airbnb knock-off, just launched Wander REIT, the “world’s first and only institutional-grade vacation rental real estate investment trust.”
😭😭😭 + 😡😡😡
To add insult to injury — ignore any corporation that says they’re “democratizing” investment — the Wander REIT is only for accredited investors (AKA hyper-wealthy people and billion-dollar hedge funds.)
In case you’re wondering what humanity’s future holds in store for you, it looks a lot like Airbnb and Wander and Harrington Housing — unless we ban for-profit land-lording, humanity’s future is rent-by-the-week roomshares with algorithmic surge pricing.
It’s how you end up in this:
Or this:
Or this:
Write this in your journal and circle back in a few decades:
In our lifetime, people will be slaving to rent units, rooms, and beds by the month, week, and night thanks to AI algorithmic surge pricing systems.
Because “the market” gets the final word.
Your voice doesn’t matter.
Capital has spoken.
In case I’m not making myself clear: Vacation rental REITs are only the start.
Wander and its ilk will continue to compound and eventually go public or get acquired by bigger entities, until all the houses on earth are owned by a handful of centa-trillion-dollar investment funds.
There will be more widespread homelessness, more mass housing hardship, zero community rootedness, and elevated endless struggle for the bottom 99%.
The math is clear: You will own absolutely nothing by 2050. The corporatocracy’s goal is assetless serfdom for the masses. It’s basically unstoppable at this point, but nothing changes until we find a way to eradicate for-profit land-lording.
Do your part by divesting of banking stocks, REITs, and rental properties, and stop using Wander and Airbnb. If you can’t make the world a better place, at least try to stop making it materially worse.
It’s ironic that the world’s first vacation rental REIT is called Wander.
Corporations want you to be a rootless wanderer, a permanent economic refugee, an ever-off-balance gypsy, that they can exploit for underpaid gig work and overpriced rents on everything you need to survive. Divide and conquer is the world’s business model. You are a serf-in-training, and don’t you forget it.
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