You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway
You can rely on the old man’s money
You can rely on the old man’s money
It’s a bitch, girl, but it’s gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway
Say money but it won’t get you too far
Get you too far
Rich Girl by Hall and Oates
UPDATE 5.26.24: Article about the massive loss of wealth in Atlanta ($1.25 billion) from corporations buying property on Rough Draft.
UPDATE 6.2.24: Substack piece by Matt Stoller about the monopolies controlling housing begin BUSTED by the FBI this week. Hopefully you can read most of it – Substack is odd. (Outline: The corporation Cortland, that owns 85 THOUSAND rental units in 13 states, is being busted by the FBI for unfair practices and the software it uses, RealPage, is being investigated for cartel-like control over and price fixing via the rental companies who use it. I hope this leads to real legislation that bans corporations owning single family homes and limits the number of apartments as well. And I hope RealPage gets the shit kicked out of it and the owners jailed.)
I had an exchange with a wildly out of touch rich girl the other day on FB. A friend posted this meme: 
I’ll post all the screen shots at the end, but for discussion, I’ll be copying her comments [MB] and posting my retorts [AP], not necessarily exactly as I did in the original post, but mostly copied and edited w/ this: [snipped]. Anything new in my retorts will be italic. The egregious part of her nonsense I’m responding to will be BOLD. Ok, got it? Here we go!
MB:
Are you okay with taking on the liability personally. Most LLCs can be pierced. Getting a loan for an individual in the 5-16 unit range is nearly impossible -> not to mention landlords don’t understand how to manage 50 units and below > causing distress properties. A corporation provides benefits to the employees and makes profit, but for the most part they do upkeep the property > which is something an individual won’t do because they just hire contractors.
Just food for thought. You would also have a bigger housing crisis in cities without corporates because there would not be any housing. An individual can’t have more than 4 mortgages…
AP:
The corporations now own most of the rental properties available ANYWHERE and they make it nearly impossible to rent. It took my friends 18 months and thousands in application and viewing fees (non refundable, of course) to find a place. They were routinely rejected [snipped].
It is fallacy that corporations take better care of properties! They’ve had to replace a toilet [snipped] themselves, because the corporate landlord refused to fix anything.
What you are missing is that THERE IS NO HOUSING AVAILABLE because the corporations won’t rent to anyone. There are so many empty houses that squatting has become quite common. My friends had TWO different houses lined up, only to find that squatters had set up housekeeping in them and the corporation could not evict them w/out due process. [snipped] The corps don’t care if they rent the houses or not. They are just a write off if they are empty or full of squatters.
If you think having corporations control 90% of rental homes and having no available affordable starter homes is of benefit, I invite you to cruise around S Dekalb and have a look at how successful that notion really is. If we lose this home, we are SCREWED. We’ll never find another house to rent because of our credit. Nevermind that we have never been late a single time in 10+ yrs, that won’t matter at all. We can’t afford to buy when everything is $400k+++. How that is better for us and everyone else in our position is beyond me. ??
Now is where the lecturing and amazingly tone deaf bullshit begins:
Continue reading “Rich Girl”