These last two entries have been single, human villains, someone who could be written off as a creep or a psychopath, a failure in individual human morals. However, if these are small, episodic nightmares, there exists a forever looming Big Bad behind the entire housing market, that’s only growing, fueled primarily off of the future of the population. This is specifically the boom of private-equity landlords, national corporations that purchase foreclosed and available single-family homes with dregs of their limitless liquidity, and then rent them while holding on to them as valuable investments. The mortgage is covered by the tenants and often the responsibility for repairs and upkeep is left on their shoulders under threat of eviction.
If you ever wanted a prime example of rampant capitalism spitting directly in the face of the classic American Dream, this is it. You might get a white picket fence, but you’ll never own the house behind it, and if you don’t paint it regularly, you’ll be summarily kicked out for the next supplicant they can find. These firms buy up the middle-class, single family homes that used to be the end goal of the American family or exist as generational homes. Private-equity firms too, unlike human owners, do not sell and they do not die. These houses will likely never hit the open market again, and their share of the nation’s family real estate is only growing.
For the single families renting these homes, if you thought regular landlords had a penchant for dehumanizing tenants, imagine when there’s no human brain or morality to appeal to at all. Your personal life is now a fluctuating figure in a private-equity firm’s earnings report, one cell in a spreadsheet that makes a spider web look like a tic-tac-toe board. Anyway, this one wasn’t very funny, so here’s a YouTube compilation of people getting hit in the nuts.