SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
corporate landlords
Government-Funded Landlord Trump Hypocritically Attacks Government Spending
The Trump real estate fortune was built by hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and huge tax breaks, none of which are available to the working people Trump is hurting with his current attacks.
Feb 04, 2025
President Donald Trump is making good on his promised threat to “dismantle Government bureaucracy” and “cut wasteful expenditures,” issuing orders to choke off the funding pipeline for federal grants and assistance programs.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Because government spending, particularly the generous big-landlord benefits baked into U.S. law and tax policy, forms the very foundation of Trump’s own wealth. The Trump real estate fortune was built by hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and huge tax breaks, none of which are available to the working people Trump is hurting with his current attacks.
Trump became wealthy the traditional American way: he was born into it. As most thoroughly described in Samuel Stein’s excellent 2019 book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Donald’s father Fred’s real estate empire began with Brooklyn and Queens housing developments financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). For some of those Trump developments, the path was literally cleared by government demolition of existing homes and buildings. Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.
That was not the only investigation targeting Fred Trump’s government-funded properties. His Maryland buildings were so decrepit and his ignoring of the residents’ pleas for help and city orders to repair so blatant that the elder Trump was actually arrested in 1976 for operating a “slum property.” A U.S. Department of Justice discrimination lawsuit during the same era showed that the Trump properties systematically blocked Black prospective renters, using racist practices like attaching to their applications a paper bearing a big letter “C”—for Colored—so they could be rejected out of hand.
Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.
That federal housing discrimination lawsuit, filed in 1973, did not just name Fred Trump. It also included the company’s president, his 27-year-old son Donald.
Donald Trump soon followed in his father’s footsteps by exploiting government programs to develop his buildings. The benefits included an unprecedented 40-year tax abatement, funding that was designed to support low-income neighborhoods, sweetheart deals to privatize public land, and government bonds used to finance his developments. “Donald Trump is probably worse than any other developer in his relentless pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” a New York deputy mayor told the New York Times in 2016.
For example, the famous Trump Tower benefited from over $163 million in tax abatements provided by New York politicians whose campaigns Trump helped fund. That money was part of what the Timesestimated was nearly a billion dollars Trump received in government grants and tax breaks for his New York properties alone, not counting the government benefits for his properties in Florida, Nevada, and Atlantic City. "Donald Trump's business wouldn't be possible but for major government subsidies,” Timothy O'Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, toldNPR.
Trump’s dependence on government funding is more than matched by the taxpayer dollars hoovered up by his designated government waste czar Elon Musk. As CNN has reported, the world’s richest person reached his status thanks to government loans and contracts that propped up Tesla and SpaceX in their vulnerable beginning stages. Musk still rakes in billions of dollars from government contracts and government-mandated payments to Tesla by other automakers.
“The foundation for Musk’s financial success has been the U.S. government,” tech analyst Daniel Ives told CNN.
We know that the Trump-Musk attacks on federal government programs are deeply harmful to vulnerable people, devoted civil servants, and communities and organizations trying to make the world a better place. Less well known is that Trump and Musk both owe their fortunes and careers to the very government spending they demonize now. They used government programs to climb to great heights, and now are intent on pulling up the ladder behind them.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once said that a hypocrite politician is one who cuts down a redwood tree, then stands on its stump to deliver a speech about conservation. When the wealthy and powerful Donald Trump mounts his attacks on government programs, he does so while standing on a platform built by government largesse.Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden DOJ Sues Major Landlords Over Algorithmic Price Fixing
"If you mess with the price of rent, be prepared to meet the DOJ on the other side of that scheme!" wrote the American Economic Liberties Project.
Jan 07, 2025
The U.S.Justice Department on Tuesday announced that it has added six landlords as defendants in an antitrust lawsuit that the agency initially filed against the real estate software company RealPage, which the DOJ accused of engaging in a price fixing scheme that allows reduced competition between landlords so they can increase rents.
At the center of the case is RealPage's "algorithmic pricing software," which generates rent price recommendations using software based on their and their rivals' "competitively sensitive information," which they submit to RealPage, according to an August statement from the Department of Justice regarding the initial complaint.
The new complaint alleges that the six companies—Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC; Blackstone's LivCor LLC; Camden Property Trust; Cushman & Wakefield Inc and Pinnacle Property Management Services LLC; Willow Bridge Property Company LLC; and Cortland Management LLC—"participated in an unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing, harming millions of American renters," according to a Tuesday statement from the Department of Justice.
The landlords collectively operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia, according to the agency.
The Department of Justice alleges that in addition to using RealPages's "anticompetitive pricing algorithms," the companies coordinated in a number of ways, including "communicating with competitors' senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics" and participating in "user groups" hosted by RealPage, during which landlords would discuss, for example, how to modify the software's pricing methodology and the companies' own pricing strategies.
"While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today's lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high," said Doha Mekki, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, in the Tuesday statement.
Two states, Illinois and Massachusetts, have also joined the suit as plaintiffs.
The American Economic Liberties Project, a group that urges government to confront corporate concentration, touted the updates to the lawsuit, writing Tuesday, "If you mess with the price of rent, be prepared to meet the DOJ on the other side of that scheme!"
Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog Accountable.US, said in a Tuesday statement that "corporate landlords like Camden Property Trust, one of the landlord companies included in today's complaint, have reaped hundreds of millions in profits while using RealPage's algorithm, and that's just the tip of the iceberg."
According to the Tuesday release from the Department of Justice, pending a consent decree which must be approved by the court, the DOJ may resolve its claims against one of the landlords, Cortland, which would then cooperate with the Justice Department's investigation and litigation.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Struggling Tenants Tell Our Next President: Here is How You End Our Housing Crisis
The situation is dire. The good news is that there is a serious, detailed plan that our next president and Congress can implement to address the needs of our clients and the millions of others like them. It comes from the tenants themselves.
Nov 01, 2024
There is an outstanding plan for the next Presidential administration to fix our housing crisis. This plan would go a long way toward helping the nine million households behind on their rent and nearly 700,000 people living unhoused. But the plan does not come from either of the two major presidential candidates.
It is not that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ignoring housing. They are well aware that three-quarters of swing-state voters say that housing costs are the biggest economic stressor in their lives, and that young voters rank housing costs as their number one issue. So both candidates have housing plans.
Of the two, Harris’s is far better, of course. Trump, who has a long and sordid history of discrimination and unlawful behavior as a landlord, mostly uses the housing crisis as a platform for demonizing immigrants, pledging that his plan of mass deportation will reduce housing demand and costs.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for another Trump presidency proposes catastrophic housing ideas like privatizing public housing, gutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and undermining fair housing protections.
Harris’s plan features proposals to increase the supply of housing through expanded and new tax credits and relaxing regulations on home building. Harris also proposes down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers and limiting tax breaks now enjoyed by corporate landlords.
That’s all OK, as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go very far.
Every week, my students and I represent low-income tenants being forced from their homes in Indianapolis eviction courts. Building more market-rate housing, especially since most of that new building is focused on higher-end housing, doesn’t help them at all. They are facing eviction because low wages, disability, family crises, child care obligations, etc. mean they already can't afford market rate housing.
This is true across the country. “The most effective housing assistance for low-income households is not found in building more units but in helping low-income households afford the units that already exist,” Alex Schwartz, New School professor and author of the seminal Housing Policy in the United States, and Kirk McClure, professor emeritus in urban planning at the University of Kansas, have written. Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress and the National Housing Institute, agrees, bluntly titling one of his articles, “Rents Will Only Go So Low, No Matter How Much We Build.”
The good news is that there is a serious, detailed plan that our next president and Congress can implement to address the needs of our clients and the millions of others like them. It comes from the tenants themselves. Specifically, the plan is provided by the national Tenant Union Federation, which includes local unions like Bozeman Tenants United, the Louisville Tenants Union, and KC Tenants, the latter of which is currently engaged in an historic rent strike.
As Tara Raghuveer, Tenant Union Federation director says, “We can build, build, build as much as we want, but without federal rent caps and protections for tenants, people will continue to be priced out of their homes and the economy will continue to suffer.”
Social movement historians would not be surprised that tenants are taking the lead. Time and again, the most impactful reforms are the ones pushed not by elected officials but by those directly affected by the targeted injustice.
So the tenant union proposal for the next presidential administration, a twelve-page, 59-footnote Tenant Policy Agenda supported by three dozen other housing advocacy organizations, includes:
- Building and preserving twelve million units of permanently affordable housing
- Rent caps imposed as a condition of landlords receiving federal financing
- A Tenant Bill of Rights to guarantee both safe and healthy housing conditions and tenants’ rights to organize
- Reinvestment in existing public housing and the Section 8 voucher program
These needed housing reforms won’t be cheap, but the Tenant Union Federation rightly points out that we already use our tax code to generously reward corporate landlords, speculative homebuying practices, and uber-wealthy home purchasers. The next iteration of Washington leaders can change that. “Congress should ensure that the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share while raising significant revenue for robust public investments in permanently affordable, decommodified, climate resilient housing,” the Agenda states.
One hundred million people in the U.S. live in renting households. We can tell you first-hand that many of them are struggling right now. For now, the most complete and compelling plan to address that struggle is coming from the tenants. But hopefully the plan will be embraced by the next president.
“Tenants need a fighter in the White House who will champion tenants’ rights and usher in a new era of housing stability,” the Tenant Union Federation agenda states. “With record homelessness, unaffordability and coordinated rent gouging rampant in the rental market, it’s high time for the most pro-tenant administration in American history.”Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular