When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord

The "Name on the building", as it were, represents a valuable lever for the public to identify and hold to account the management that makes their lives hell. Whipping up a new legal fiction, changing faces, but keeping the same people at the top needs to not be as trivial as it seems to have become, especially if the Courts are treating these entities as distinct instead of as a wrapper or veneer on the same rotten core.

Let's be honest here, it will all come down to cheaper costs, which inevitably will impact quality.

But because the alternatives are clear - either have a roof over your head or go homeless - there is no incentive to maintain quality at the expense of larger margins.

This is essentially what happens with healthcare. You cannot just opt-out of it if, thus terrible but cheap practices will always exist, and people will die as a consequence of this.

I worry we might see the opposite. Someone will be convinced the "solution" to the housing crisis is to just remove citizen ownership of housing to begin with.

As soon as you have groups pooling money to snatch up land to rent, you sort of destroy one of the big draws of the American dream, because in the end, the market will adjust to the whims of the conglomerates instead of the lone citizen.

This is exactly the outcome he was trying to avoid.

The people could get together and make laws to protect themselves, and there's some whispering of this with recent attempts to form unions and so on, but against the political might of the rich, the people don't look to have much of a chance.