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corporate landlords
'We the People—Not the Wealthy Few': Voters Target Greed of Landlords, Insurers, and Gas Giants
"We deserve a government that uses our money to fund our care, not one that uses our money to line the pockets of corporations," said one protester.
Feb 26, 2025
After meeting with their members of Congress, working-class voters on Wednesday marched to the Washington, D.C. offices of three companies behind the nation's housing, health, and climate crises that are set to cash in on federal Republicans' planned tax giveaways.
Organized by People's Action Institute, the protest targeted Blackstone, an investment company that has become the world's largest corporate landlord; UnitedHealth, the country's biggest health insurance company; and American Gas Association, which represents more than 200 energy companies that provide services to 189 million Americans.
The participants—who hailed from 60 congressional districts across 27 states—emphasized issues including unaffordable rent rates, housing insecurity, homelessness, denied medical treatment, unpayable healthcare costs, high utility bills, health harms from fossil fuels, and corporate lobbying for tax cuts that benefit companies and billionaires rather than working people.
"We're here today because we want to make the rich pay their fair share!" declared JJ Ramirez of People's Action Institute member organization VOCAL-Texas. "Blackstone is a private equity company that has over 300,000 rental properties across the country. They gobble up these homes, raise our rents, price gouge us, and then evict us when we can't afford to live in their places. We're here today because Blackstone has conspired with other corporate bad actors so they can gobble up everything that we have."
While the protesters gathered outside Blackstone, they stressed that corporate landlords in general are an issue. Ann Kiesling of Progressive Maryland, which supported tenants at the Enclave Silver Spring apartment complex, said that "I will never forget a woman with a disability telling me about the time she had to hop up, with the help of a neighbor, 15 flights of stairs to get to her apartment because the landlords refused to fix the elevators. I will never forget the parents of a four-year-old telling me how they had to heat up water on their stove to give their kid baths because their landlord refused to fix their hot water for over a month."
"An out-of-state private equity landlord, Hampshire Properties, is raking in massive profits by charging luxury rent prices while letting the building fall apart and leaving tenants with the consequences," Kiesling continued. "And while we are here fighting for basic living conditions against mold, broken elevators, pest infestations, corporate landlords like Hampshire Properties, like Greystar, like Blackstone, are pouring our rent money into lobbyists and elected officials' campaigns instead of fixing their buildings."
Hannah Peterson, a disabled veteran, seminary student, and member of the People's Lobby in Chicago, pointed out Wednesday that "just last night, House Republicans passed their budget resolution to cut millions from Medicaid."
That resolution
sets the stage for cutting not only $880 billion from the healthcare program that serves low-income Americans, but also $230 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. Elected Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House, want to gut safety net programs to fund an expansion of tax giveaways to the rich that GOP lawmakers passed and President Donald Trump signed in 2017.
"Republicans are already funneling our tax dollars out of programs our communities need and into pockets of private corporations and billionaires," Peterson said. "We deserve a government that uses our money to fund our care, not one that uses our money to line the pockets of corporations."
As Medicare for All advocates often highlight, although the United States has Medicaid and Medicare, which serves seniors, it is the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare. Instead, the U.S. has a for-profit system that often leaves patients unable to access or afford necessary care, including because of denials from insurance companies.
"To the folks at UnitedHealthcare... if you really care about people's health, why don't you publicly come out and oppose the cuts to Medicaid?" asked Citizen Action of New York's Amelia Bittel—who has dysautonomia, a disorder that led to a heart surgery at age 35 and requires weekly blood draws.
"In my city of Syracuse, New York, 48% of the population relies on government-funded programs to get their insurance," said Bittel. "You don't need the $1.3 billion that you stand to profit from these cuts. Your company routinely reports the highest profits. Why not give back to the patients?"
At the American Gas Association, Gloria de Graves from Citizen Action of Wisconsin explained that in the Midwestern state, "if you're not familiar, we hit negative 30°F sometimes, and that means that people can freeze to death in their homes if they do not have a way to heat their homes."
"So all I'm saying is We Energies and Xcel Energy, who I have paid plenty of money to over the years, need to stop charging us so much money so that we can afford to feed ourselves, we can afford to stay housed, and when we are fleeing domestic violence, that there is a safe, electrified, and heated home to go into so that we are warm and safe in the winter," de Graves said.
Celebrating the multisite protest on Wednesday, progressive Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said that "I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, because there are people in my community that can't afford to come up here."
"It is so important to understand corporate greed and how it is embedded in environmental injustices, embedded in environmental racism," she said. "They want the federal government to continue to literally fund poisoning us, while we get sick here in our country. So they're making us sick, and we're subsidizing the fact that we don't have access to healthcare that supports our families."
In a dispatch earlier this week, People's Action executive director Sulma Arias wrote that her group "refuses to give up. We believe ordinary people have the power to rise and meet this and every moment, if we act together. We believe in the fundamental dignity of every person, without exception, and we believe government exists to serve all people—We the People—not the wealthy few."
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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.
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