Housing residential real estate
1119 belated aha
no merri
biggest buffer/ only source of wealth accumulation for MC? 20% of ppl/MC own stock?
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ISSUE IN 2024 ELECTION KAMALA 25k HELP
rental housing becomes the next bubble gt recession CDS? blackstone
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an 3 26
President Donald Trump can usually rely on The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board to support his economic programs, but on Tuesday the venerable newspaper slammed the Republican Party leader for being too “progressive.”
“Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs,” the Editorial Board observed. “The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is a big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.”
Describing the Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act as “a melange of some 40 bills,” the editorial board took issue with a provision that bans large investors from purchasing single-family homes to rent.
“President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say ‘people live in homes, not corporations,’” the Editorial Board observed. “But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.”
Arguing that Trump’s bill would bar most investors with 350 or more homes from purchasing new ones, while others would need to sell any properties they acquired under these exemptions within seven years, the Board argued that it is bad both for the investors and for renters.
“Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand,” the Editorial Board argued. “If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.”
In the name of achieving a political victory, the editorial board argued that “the White House is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the bill and wants the House to accept it. But why do Republicans want to provide a down payment for Ms. Warren and fellow progressives to expand Washington control over housing in their states?”
This is not the first time the Journal has called out Trump’s economic programs. Earlier in March it pointed out that the February jobs report was “lousy,” adding that “the U.S. shed 92,000 jobs and revised down gains for January and December by a combined 69,000. The question is what to make of the declines.”
Other conservatives have also criticized Trump’s economic policies. Writing for the conservative-leaning publication The Bulwark, commentator Mona Charen denounced Trump’s tariffs and predicted they would cost the Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.
“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” Charen said. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”
Indeed, Trump’s tariffs are so controversial that six Republican lawmakers joined their Democratic counterparts to vote for a bill to repeal Trump’s tariffs against Canada. Those lawmakers include Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Kevin Kiley of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Jeff Hurd of Colorado.
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TARIFFS --> MOODY RATING
AN 5 25
'A lot of uncertainty': How Trump is aggravating a troubled housing market
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an 525 PP
How a 'We Buy Ugly Houses' franchise left a trail of financial wreckage across this red state
lost Investments: People who invested with a Dallas HomeVestors franchise, once touted as the largest, accuse the owner of operating a scheme that cost them tens of millions of dollars.
- Red Flags: HomeVestors says its franchises follow best business practices. But investors say lax oversight allowed the “We Buy Ugly Houses” brand to be used to further the scheme.
- Company Responds: HomeVestors has denied responsibility for the franchisee’s actions, saying its franchises are independently operated. It has sued the franchise owner.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Ronald Carver was skeptical when his investment adviser first tried to sell him on an “ugly houses” investment opportunity eight years ago. But once the Texas retiree heard the details, it seemed like a no-lose situation.
Carver would lend money to Charles Carrier, owner of Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, a high-producing franchise in the HomeVestors of America house-flipping chain known for its ubiquitous “We Buy Ugly Houses” advertisements. The business would then use the dollars to purchase properties in which Carver would receive an ownership stake securing his investment and an annual return of 9%, paid in monthly installments.
“Worst case, I would end up with a property worth more than what the loan was,” Carver said of the pitch.
Carver started with a $115,000 loan in 2017. And sure enough, the interest payments arrived each month.
He had worked three decades at a nuclear power plant, and retired without a pension and before he could collect Social Security. He and his wife lived off the investment income.
The deal seemed so good, Carver talked his elderly father into investing, starting with $50,000. As the monthly checks arrived as promised, both men increased their investments. By 2024, Carver estimates they had about $700,000 invested with Carrier.
Then, last fall, the checks stopped. The money Carver and his father had invested was gone.
Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from scores of investors, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews with people who said they lost money. The financial wreckage is strewn across Texas, having swept up both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes who dug into retirement savings on the advice of the same investment advisor used by Carver.
As early as 2020, Carrier had begun taking out multiple loans on individual properties — some of which he never owned. In cases reviewed by ProPublica, as many as five notes were recorded against a single property, far exceeding the property’s value. Carrier also failed to properly record many deeds that were supposed to secure the loans, accumulating more debt than he could ever repay while investors remained unaware they had no collateral for their investments.
“It’s incalculable the amount of damage this guy did,” said one investor who lost about $1 million and asked not to be named to avoid embarrassment and not to interfere with a criminal investigation into Carrier’s scheme. “He’s ruined some lives.”
Carrier, who declined an interview request, said in a brief phone conversation that he’s not trying to avoid responsibility for the harm he caused. “When this thing finally stopped, it was completely driven by me saying ‘enough’ and going to the people and saying, ‘Here’s the mess I’ve created,’” he said. “This is a mess created by me.”
Series Timeline
April 18, 2023...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/elizabeth-warren-sounds-the-alarm-on-a-mounting-housing-crisis-and-the-profiteers-who-will-take-advantage/
During her 2020 presidential primary campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a lot to say about the United States’ housing crisis — and after suspending her campaign and endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden (now the presumptive Democratic nominee), the Massachusetts senator continued to address the subject. Warren, in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post with Carroll Fife (director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), stresses that the coronavirus pandemic has made a brutal housing crisis even worse. And private equity firms, according to Warren and Fife, are hoping to cash in on the misery by gobbling up “distressed real estate.”
“The nation is facing an acceleratinghousing crisis,” Warren and Fife warn. “Too many people had no stable housing before the pandemic hit, and COVID-19 has made the problem even worse. Renters who were already facing an affordable housing shortage — with many spending more than half of their income on rent — now have no federal rental assistance or federal protection from eviction. Homeowners have less than a month left of foreclosure protection. And more than 30 million people receiving unemployment insurance just saw their benefits cut by $600 a week, raising the threat of a wave of defaults that could trigger a double-dip recession.”
But while “families” see as a “looming catastrophe,” they add, “private equity firms just see dollar signs.” And Warren and Fife cite a Wall Street Journal report that investors are hoping to buy “distressed real-estate assets at bargain prices.”
According to Warren and Fife, such “profiteering” is “straight out of private equity’s playbook during the 2008 financial crisis."
"Following the 2008 crash,” they explain, “corporations that grabbed up properties on the cheap, converted those homes into rentals and turned into the worst kind of slumlords — jacking up rents, neglecting maintenance requests and health and safety concerns, and eagerly assessing fines, fees and eviction notices. Other corporate-owned homes were left vacant in a hoarding of housing stock. We cannot stand by while this history repeats itself.”
Warren and Fife’s recommendations range from “strong federal legislation to guard against the coming wave of evictions and foreclosures, including emergency rental assistance” to preventing “predatory companies from further destabilizing neighborhoods and profiting off the displacement of families.”
“If we fail to prevent another private equity real estate grab,” Warren and Fife warn, “we risk allowing another massive upheaval in the housing market that could wreak more havoc on low-income Americans — especially black and brown families still recovering from losing their homes a decade ago. Against a decades-long backdrop of racist federal policies that have impeded black homeownership, lawmakers’ refusal to proactively address this problem would be an indefensible oversight that would again give Wall Street carte blanche to use a national crisis to enact a massive, generational transfer of wealth from vulnerable Americans to corporations."
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eviction and foreclosure crisis is looming
Bob Hennelly / SalonJuly 19, 2020
Come autumn 2020, the convergence of disease, death and economic misery across our wounded nation will likely be without living precedent. And the damage that’s being done and will be…
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-housing-rights/global-investors-wreaking-havoc-on-low-income-renters-u-n-says-idUSKCN1R71L5
3/19
(Thomson Reuters Foundation) -Large investment firms are worsening global housing shortages by forcing vulnerable out of low-income homes and upgrading them for higher rents, said United Nations human rights experts, who appealed to countries to tighten up regulation.
These firms had become the world’s biggest landlords, and “converted homes into financial instruments and investments”, said Leilani Farha, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, in a statement released Tuesday.
“Landlords have become faceless corporations wreaking havoc with tenants’ right to security and contributing to the global housing crisis,” she said.
Farha and Surya Deva, chairman of the U.N. Working Group on business and human rights, wrote to Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, and authorities in Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Czech Republic.[have laws that req action; US not sign treaties/agreement int'l]
Preferential tax laws and weak tenant protections in these countries have left vulnerable communities at risk of eviction and homelessness, they said.
“We remind all States, that while gold is a commodity, housing is not, it’s a human right,” they said.
Authorities must “regulate investment in residential real estate so that it supports the right to adequate housing and in no way undermines it. This cannot be left to the private sector to undertake on a voluntary basis,” they said.
In response, Blackstone - which owns the biggest U.S. home rental company - told the U.N. in a letter on March 25 that it had contributed to the availability of “well managed rental housing”.
“The injection of private capital is part of the solution to addressing the chronic undersupply of housing in major metropolitan centers around the world,” said Ken Caplan and Kathleen McCarthy, global co-heads of Blackstone Real Estate.
Globally, at least 150 million people, or about 2 percent of the population, are homeless, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N agency for urban development and human settlements.
More than a fifth of the world lacks adequate housing.
In their letter to the Czech Republic, Farha and Deva pointed to the increased vulnerability of the minority Roma community to evictions.
While in Ireland, the number of families on the social housing waiting list had doubled between 2005 and 2017 due to severe shortages, they said.
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Global investors 'wreaking havoc' on low-income renters, U.N. ...
https://www.reuters.com › article › us-global-housing-rights › global-inves...
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U.N. blasts Blackstone Group for worsening the U.S. housing ...
https://www.cbsnews.com › MoneyWatch › Trending
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Missing: homeless | Must include:homeless
UN Observer Calls For 'Moratorium' On Criminalizing ... - KPBS
https://www.kpbs.org › news › aug › un-observer-calls-moratorium-crimin...
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How private equity eroded the right to housing | New ...
https://newint.org › 2019/06/19 › unitednations-leilanifarha-housing
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California's housing bubble is spilling over into poor and exurban neighborhoods, creating waves of crises
California has such a huge undersupply of housing -- and oversupply of housing speculators -- that affluent homebuyers have effectively rendered the state's major cities unaffordable for all but the very wealthy, even pushing into neighborhoods that were historically undesirable due to poverty, poor housing stock and crime. Read the rest
BUILD HOUSING / CALEXIT / CALIFORNIA / HOMELESSNESS / RENT CONTROL / THE RENT'S TOO DAMNED HIGH / WEAPONIZED SHELTER
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1119 pro publ
| Separated by Design: Why Affordable Housing Is Built in Areas With High Crime, Few Jobs and Struggling Schools |
1119
invert yield curve; homewreckers book 8 mil foreclosures; big % llc shell corps; // CDO; R wolff says banks can't deal with hit 1/2 of Gt Recession , get loans to cover loans; mnuchin etc wilbur recalled gov't baillout after S&L; mnu sez put 1.x billion but pain nothing for indybank and then got subsidies to foreclose?! // get car for free, put some bucks in then pocket total profit 11/8/19
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new
steve mnu piad 0 for indy bank, and gov't guar lose no money, sold to buddy in same blg (bunch of pluto-crats ) soros, paulsen, wilbur
extensive interview: https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-23-2019/
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-21-2019/
aaron glantz homewreckers