Finance Terrorism – Corporate “Homewreckers”
Stay in the Streets and Shut it Down!
As a “homeless” nomad enjoying his 4th year on the road (who lost his house due to an Obama HUD multi-billion dollar bundled mortgage sale to a Hedge Fund for pennies on the dollar), a thought just crossed my mind as I read news reports of the pending “housing apocalypse” and the “tsunami” of evictions and foreclosures are triggered as over 42 million unemployed people go broke, can’t pay the rent or mortgage, and the CARES act protections expire.
Obviously, this will explode the currently totally outrageously large homeless population.
I’ll admit that sometimes I research the real estate and rental markets as I travel.
After more than 3 years on the road, this had led me to consider an affordable home purchase, as a sort of base camp.
Recently, I even attempted a home purchase, but the financing failed due to my credit history (which includes the Obama HUD foreclosure – so much for liberal “hope and change”).
Aside from the lessons I learned about mortgage financing, one thing that struck me in doing real estate market research was conditions that corporate owners of even rental properties place on prospective tenants (you can read about this and many other major housing finance abuses in Aaron Glantz’s excellent book “Homewreckers”).
I got my first taste of the rental market over 40 years ago in college. Basically, you checked the local newspaper want ads, called the landlord, toured the place, and if you liked it, wrote a check (with a month’s deposit) and moved in. No internet search, no realtor, no credit background check, no problem. (I had similar positive results with an individual – not corporate – landlord more recently, in renting a cabin on a farm West Amwell).
But now I note that owners require detailed credit checks for prospective renters and expressly prohibit even application for rentals to people with bad credit. That’s me.
I was aware of prohibitions on providing public housing to former convicts (which I obviously strongly oppose and is obviously another example of structural systemic racism), but had no clue that people with bad credit scores were treated the same way with respect to private rental housing.
So, effectively – from a housing standpoint – I am in the same category as a convicted felon who served jail time (and let me be clear, the restrictions on felons are wrong).
Only in Capitalist America.
BLM and other protesters, please stay in the streets and shut this shit down!