Thread by @doctorow

One of the original sins of the modern economy was sidelining unions and social programs as a path to upward mobility and installing property speculation in their place. 1/

Converting the distribution of shelter (a human right and necessity) into a speculative asset had far-reaching consequences, and an eventual violent rupture was baked in from the start. 2/

A path to prosperity runs through the appreciation of your family home (not through wage-gains and access to education, health-care and pensions) recruits a vast army of everyday wage-earners who will fight for any policy that pushes up real-estate values. 3/

That's true even when those policies are bad for the people who live in homes, rather than gambling on them.

For example, the more protections we have for tenants, the less the homes they live in will be worth. 4/

Even if you sell your home to someone who plans on living in it, they'll be bidding against people who might turn it into rental property, and their top offer is based on how much they think they can get from their tenants. 5/

Rent control lowers property values. Easy eviction raises property values. Obligations on landlords to maintain their rentals lower property values. The right to extract high surcharges from tenants raises property values. 6/

Even if you own a home, this is bad news. 7/

Remember, we swapped good wages and social supports for property speculation, which means that you will need to tap into your home's equity to pay for your health care and retirement, as well as your kids' sky-high tuition and down-payments. 8/

You and/or your kids will almost certainly become tenants in the long run, and then you'll all have to live under the abusive, tenant-hostile system you supported in the name of increasing your home's value.

gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-… 9/

That's because the real action in property markets doesn't come from owner-occupiers or even people who own a rental property - the end-game is all about Wall St landlords, who acquire whole portfolios of homes and "securitize" rent from them, turning it into bonds. 10/

Wall Street doesn't have mortgages, it has corporate debt - the income from those bonds, as well as access to the capital markets and bank loans on preferential terms. 11/

That means that even though owner-occupiers and mom-and-pop landlords will go to bat for policies that benefit Wall Street landlords, Wall Street can screw over mortgage holders without hurting themselves. 12/

That means that as it gets easier to evict tenants (because homeowners support loose eviction rules to protect their largest asset), it also gets easier to evict homeowners (because Wall Street supports mortgage-default evictions so they can buy more houses for cheap). 13/

This is where the eventual rupture comes in. Long before the majority of homeowners liquidated their homes to pay for retirement, health-care, and kids' tuition and down-payments, a sizable number of them will lose their homes to foreclosure and eviction. 14/

That's what happened in 2008, when the whole world saw waves of foreclosure evictions, under rules that were so loose that they can only be called "fraud-tolerant." 15/

Banks - the largest banks in the world - ran foreclosure mills in which forged documents and perjury allowed them to seize homes around the world, irrespective of whether they had a legal right to do so. 16/

That was bad enough in the USA, but the Eurozone countries that were hardest hit by the one-two punch of the housing crash and austerity really felt it. One of those countries is Spain, where the drama is still unfolding. 17/

Spain experienced a foreclosure epidemic that dwarfed the American crisis, which allowed offshore private equity firms to snap up huge portfolios of homes. The most notorious of these is @CerberusCapital, which has inspired a popular uprising.

nytimes.com/2021/11/21/wor… 18/

Cerebus sold its global investors on residential rental portfolios by promising to be hard on its tenants - minimizing its upkeep of its properties and maximizing its rental income by using eviction threats to ensure that tenants prioritized rent over other expenses. 19/

That's a key element of all debt markets: when you invest in a share of someone's debt repayments, it doesn't merely matter whether they can sustain their payments long enough to retire those debts. 20/

What matters more is what priority they'll assign to servicing their debts - which is linked to the consequences of default. 21/

Loan-sharks know that their marks won't ever retire their debts, but they also know that if they employ terrifying arm-breakers, the marks will go to extraordinary lengths (stealing from family, embezzling, mugging strangers) to keep up payments. 22/

Likewise, investors in rental property markets know that a credible threat of eviction will prompt tenants to deprioritize adequate nutrition, health-care, child-support payments and other necessities.

pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/inn… 23/

Cerebus's business fortunes are inextricably linked to its ability to abuse and evict its tenants, and Spainards have had enough. 24/

In Spain, Cerebus has taken advantage of the 15% unemployment rate and loopholes in the country's eviction moratorium to throw tenants into the streets. 25/

Historically, this would be a no-brainer: Cerebus could rely on an army of "normal" homeowners and mom-and-pop landlords to provide cover for its cruelty. 26/

But Spain was so hard-hit by the great financial crisis that there just aren't enough true believers in asset appreciation to run interference for private equity ghouls like Cerebus. 27/

Instead, cops who show up to evict Cerebus tenants confront huge mobs of anti-eviction activists who physically interpose their bodies between the cops and the tenants, preventing evictions. 28/

These same activists systematically target empty Cerebus properties - often empty thanks to evictions - for break-and-enter squatter occupations. They've also occupied the offices of a Cerebus real-estate servicer in Barcelona. 29/

The anti-Cerebus activists are organized under the banner of #WarAgainstCerebus, and they've gained sufficient notoriety that Cerebus tenants are turning to the group for assistance when their situation turns dire. 30/

Now, local and national elected officials in Spain are contemplating legislation that will make it harder for Cerebus to extract high profits from peoples' human right to shelter. 31/

For example, Barcelona is on its way to passing rent caps on properties owned by corporate landlords. 32/

Cerebus is fighting back through the Association of Rental Housing Owners, which claims to represent mom-and-pop landlords but gets its marching orders from Wall Street landlords, who own 40,000+ properties in Spain. 33/

But even with an astroturf group on its side, the Spanish mood is so hostile to offshore corporate landlords that they face an uphill battle. 34/

If I were them, I'd be shitting bricks, especially after the people of Berlin voted to expropriate the city's corporate landlords and put those homes in public ownership:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die… 35/

Things are lagging in America. Dems are fighting like mad for the SALT tax repeal, which requires scrapping much of Build Back Better's spending. The overwhelming beneficiary of that move will be wealthy Americans, especially *very* wealthy Americans:

theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 36/

SALT tax repeal means a BBB that gives a tax cut to Americans earning more than $1m/year, at the expense of Medicare expansion and lower drug prices. 37/

Of course, a SALT repeal *will* have an indirect effect on all house prices: the less property tax homeowners pay, the more corporate speculators will bid for houses when they go on the market. 38/

So middle-class people who liquidate their home to pay those health bills that BBB might have helped them with will see a dividend from SALT repeal.

All they have to do to realize that dividend is give up their home. 39/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-…