PHOTO: Occupywallstreet.net
Millions face eviction from homes by landlords demanding higher rents
“I am being drove out of the county,” Marie Leal told the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat as she struggled with being turned out of her apartment by a landlord who wants to rent it to higher-paying tenants. Once on the street in Santa Rosa, she would face rapidly rising rents and the tightest housing market in decades.
To find a place she could afford, she might indeed have to move out of the county, an hour or more away.
The newspaper listed the management agent as a faceless partnership named FF Properties. But the company hiding behind that name is Brookfield Asset Management, a major international conglomerate that oversees $200 billion in real estate. Besides buying London’s swank Canary Wharf recently, Brookfield also owns Zucotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street once camped out.
Over the last decade, Brookfield has delivered to its wealthy investors an average profit of almost 20 percent per year — including the rent paid by Leal and her neighbors. Brookfield is “a perfect predator,” a Canadian business magazine has written approvingly. “It waits for the right opportunity, and then it pounces.”
Leal and the 30 other low-income families that Brookfleld told to get out of their apartments were among the predator’s newest targets. But as real estate is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist oligarchy, there will be many more.
Since 2007, 7.5 million families in the United States have lost their homes to foreclosure and short sales — forced out largely by the five biggest U.S. banks. Now economists predict that the oligarchs will be kicking literally millions more people out of rented homes and apartments. Real-estate conglomerates like Brookfield are raising rents and buying up even more properties to renovate and rent out at higher rates.
The situation is bad all over the United States. Nationwide, rents rose more than 7 percent last year alone. But wages have not kept pace, and a squeeze is on. A quarter of renters say they are at the end of their rope financially. Half of them say they couldn’t come up with extra money to cover an emergency. Estimates of how much of their income is getting eaten up by rent run from 30 to 40 percent, with many paying 50 percent or more.
The situation is worst in California, which contains seven of the 10 metropolitan areas where real-estate moguls take the biggest bite of renters’ incomes. California is no longer the land of milk and honey; when the cost of living is taken into account, it has the highest rate of poverty in the United States.
Los Angelenos are the hardest hit by housing costs. They are being forced to pay an average of almost half of their income in rent. Renters in the Bay Area are close behind, turning over an average of about 40 percent of income to their landlords.
Rents are also going up faster in the Bay Area than elsewhere. In Santa Rosa, landlords have pushed rents up more rapidly than almost anywhere else in the U.S. — more than 30 percent over the past three years, 12 percent last year alone. Rents in San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Peninsula were up by nearly as much.
When a reporter for the Press Democrat contacted Brookfield about Marie Leal’s pending explusion, the company did an about face and said that she and the other low-income tenants could stay on. “Boy, that’s huge,” she told the reporter. “At least we know we’re not going to be out on the street.”
That lasts as long as it lasts. And the other millions facing potential eviction are not likely to be so lucky.
