Not Content To Destroy Affordable Housing, Investors Are Now Buying Trailer Parks and Jacking Rents
Not Content To Destroy Affordable Housing, Investors Are Now Buying Trailer Parks and Jacking Rents
The financialization of human necessities like shelter is pure evil
There will come a point in history when most of humanity will agree with a mathematical and moral fact that is currently unthinkable to today’s sheeple, but is already blindingly obvious to some of us:
That investors are extractive predators who weaponize capital to passively extract wealth from the contributor class.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the monopolization of housing for usury… AKA land-lording.
For-profit land-lording, as we (and Adam Smith) have discussed, is a parasitical non-contributing activity that monopolizes property in order to loan it to someone and receive it back with interest.
Interest/usury/rent is horrible for civil society for a whole host of reasons:
Morally speaking, it is theft of the contributor class by the parasite class.
It’s mathematically unsustainable.
It’s anti-meritocratic.
It’s anti-contribution and anti-production.
It has created a massive housing debt bubble that is so big that humanity has forgotten that owning a house should cost no more than 2–3Xs the annual median salary of a single worker.
But investors don’t care about how their hateful actions impact others.
Their literal fiduciary reason for existing is to produce private profits at the public’s expense.
Case in point: In the first quarter of 2022, parasite land-lording investors devoured a record 28% of U.S. single-family home sales in order to rent trap tenants for corporate profit.
This is pure evil.
And they’re just getting started.
Now that land-lorders have bid up middle-class house prices so high, they are turning on a lower class of contributors who cannot even afford homes with permanent foundations.
In the ownership class’s continued war on the poor and working class, the next field of conquest is trailer parks.
Predators in a dangerous time
Harmony Communities.
The name sounds nice, but it’s a complete lie.
A trailer park was for sale and the residents were trying to organize a co-op, but these horrible Harmony people outbid them.
Then Harmony raised rents by 50%, defending the increase by saying “We believe in charging a fair market rent.”
Then, just one month after buying the park, Harmony offered to sell it to the residents for way more than they paid for it.
When the residents made an offer, Harmony declined it.
And this isn’t a one-off scenario:
Institutional investors devoured 23% of trailer park sales in the past two years, nearly double what they consumed in the two years before that.
Blackstone owns trailer parks.
Carlyle Group owns trailer parks.
Apollo Global Management owns trailer parks.
Stockbridge Capital Group owns trailer parks.
Brookfield Asset Management owns 135+ trailer parks.
Billionaire Sam Zell owns a controlling interest in 170,880 sites.
Arch-villain Warren Buffett owns the biggest mobile home manufacturer in the US with half of the total market share, plus he owns the two biggest mobile home lenders, where 72% of black borrowers got their first loan at crushing rates.
Why are billionaires and hedge funds so interested in poor people?
Because desperate people are the easist to milk for cash.
Take Mobile Home University, an obnoxious and revolting course for wannabe trailer park owners:
“The fact that tenants can’t afford the $5,000 it costs to move a mobile home keeps revenues stable and makes it easy to raise rents without losing any occupancy.”
In other words: Take advantage of the poor because they are trapped.
How bad can rent-trapping get?
Some people take rent-trapping to extreme lengths, like trailer park owner Lori Lee, who specializes in renting to… wait for it… sex offenders.
“Last year I bought a park down the street, got rid of all the families… and brought in convicted felons. And then I bought the property across the way. Once you’re into it and you’re making money it’s easy to say, One more, one more.”
When asked how often tenants leave her parks, she answered:
“When they die. They stay forever, they have no place to go.”
As Esther Sullivan, author of Manufactured Insecurity, says:
“The vulnerability of these residents is part of the business model. This is a captive class of tenant.”
And the opportunity for exploitation is huge:
20 million poor Americans live in trailer parks.
The immorality of rent-seeking
How genuinely evil do you have to be to buy up trailer parks, drive up rents, squeeze the poor for all they’re worth, and leave them homeless when they can’t afford to pay?
And how hatefully callous do you have to be to invest in any 401(k), RRSP, mutual fund, index fund, REIT, or ETFs that own shares in these anti-human companies?
And that’s the hard truth of the situation:
Unless you, dear reader, have done the right thing and cleansed your portfolio from all rent-seeking stocks, you are directly benefiting from the untold anguish and hardship of millions of men, women, and children who have been rent-trapped by corporate land-lorders.
This should make us weep for the state of our global family and our suffering brothers and sisters.
And this truth should drive us to immediate action.
Otherwise, nothing will change.
In fact, it will only get worse.
The rich will do what they want, and the poor will suffer what they must.