Blackstone is a major player in the asset management industry’s presence in the housing sector, but it still is a very small %. Most analyses put private equity at about 10% of rental units, but a significant portion of that is ownership stakes in actual rental companies like Camden rather than by acquiring the individual properties. And for blackstone specifically it is at <1% of the rental units and a lower % of total housing units (including houses). When you see stats on corporate ownership of housing units that typically includes mom and pop operations who own 2-5 unites and they make up the majority of the “corporate” ownership.
This is a popular argument for those for whom “end stage capitalism” is the answer to every problem
Hmmm, maybe not the most coherent argument in the original post then. But using immigrants as the scapegoat for lack of affordable housing is still taking the piss.
Yeah that’s a completely gross argument, no doubt.
Are you aware of what people might call the “abundance discourse”? Ezra Klein came out with a book after the election arguing that local government has become too stodgy for anything to get done. Where a progressive government may have great intentions to develop more affordable housing, green energy, better public transport etc, the processes that Dem governments put in place before actually makes it really hard to get any of that done even with the best of intentions. Too much red tape, and too much of an opportunity for interest groups (often funded by corporations) to block things. The book was not written as a theory on why Dems lost the election but he accepts that is now a reasonable prism through which you can view his arguments and it’s become a popular view on the left.
The relevance is the online left have reacted with all the intellectual honesty you’d imagine and have decided that every argument made is wrong because to them every answer to every question is “its the oligarchy”. The result is the “blackrock have destroyed US housing” was a hobby horse for them before, but with the popularity of “abundance” it has become an even more popular argument. It has the advantage of not just fighting the oligarchy, but fighting people who want the same outcomes they say they want (for firefighters to be able to afford to live in the city they work in) but have a different argument for how to get there.
I’ve been thinking about this since yesterday, and despite every day for several years being more unbelievable than the last, I can’t quite believe this needed to be said.
I’m not saying everyone MUST HAVE an academic understanding of authoritarianism, but I’m just a little bit bewildered that the country that has ‘kicking Nazi asses in WW2’ as part of its cultural narrative doesn’t quite get how Nazism managed to take hold by a process, rather than by some swift action.
Gil Scott-Heron sang about the revolution not being televised. Well , the day before yesterday , in the Cabinet Office , in the White House, in the United States of America , it was.
The average American, fuck even the 75th percentile american, has a terrible understanding of this history. But no part more than the fact that we did NOT go to war to beat Fascists. We went to war and found ourselves fighting fascists. There is a big difference and there were large segments of the country sympathetic to the Nazi’s argument. Alternative histories like Roth’s are so compelling because they do speak to a real part of our history we try to sweep away. But the reality is Hitler sent party officials to the Jim Crowe south to learn how to implement their Aryan first objectives.
The reality there has always been a non-trivial segment of the country who are fine with this approach, assuming that they are the in group who will be prioritized by it. The percentage of people that applies to waxes and wanes between “this isnt very socially acceptable so I should probably not speak about it” and “jesus, these fucking nazis might actually win the election.”
Things are starting to accelerate in the Public Health departments Kennedy oversees
The White House have publicly declared they have fired the only recently appointed CDC director after she pushed back on several Kennedy directives, but she claims no such action has been taken and is refusing to leave. She already taken on Abbie Lowell for her legal defense, a lawyer previously very intertwined with the Trump admin in term 1
Following that Demetre Daskalakis, the head of National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases resigned publicly claiming that Kennedy is trying to purposefully undermine trust in low risk vaccines.
In the US, charging someone with a federal felony crime requires the state go before a grand jury and get them to agree that the case they have put together is reasonable. Indictment rates are so high though that there is a saying in the field that a grand jury would vote to indict a ham sandwich. This figure from WaPo shows that in a typical year grand juries only failed to indict a defendant 11 times out of 193,000 cases.
Janine Pirro has lost 2 since she was appointed as US attorney for DC in May. It’s kind of funny, but this is what this government is now. There is no governing, just retribution.
