New Investors Rapidly Push To Achieve Market Rate Returns On Housing Investments, Some Say Destroying Working Class Neighborhoods.

The New York Times has another article about US internal displacements today, "
Tenants Roiled by Challenges on Residency" - as the alleged harassment of rent stabilized tenants in some of New York City's largest apartment complexes moves to a new level of complexity and organization. Millions of homes and trillions of dollars are at stake in changes that could dramatically change US cities, driving away millions of working people from apartments they can no longer afford as urban rents continue to respond to rising gas prices.

Apparently, the new investor/owners of some of these huge building complexes have been hiring firms to conduct computerized searches of the nations homeowners and renters for other people who share the same names as tenants, elsewhere. When they find a name match, such as another person who shares the same name (Mary Jones, for example - even if initials are different) they send the rent-protected tenant an eviction notice claiming that they live elsewhere and hence are disqualified from rent protection. Often, these claims are unfounded, but they force the tenant to hire an expensive lawyer (typically at a cost of $300/hr or more) to defend themselves against the false charges or they lose their tenancy's rent protection by default, which results in their rent being increased to market rate, increases that can amount ot thousands of dollars (for example, monthly rent is $1,241 for rent-stabilized units and $2,767 for - often smaller - market rate units - well over 200% of the stabilized rent!)

This is an example of the kind of increases California communities with rent stabilization laws will face under June's 6th
Proposition 98, if the well-organized and well funded slumlord lobby can succeed in driving the existing tenants out, rent controls on each unit will end, FOREVER.

As gas prices go up, and trillions of dollars in real estate profits at stake, it is clear that this is only the beginning of this war, which threatens to turn our cities into huge, exclusive theme parks for the ultra rich.