One of the big stories developing in the United States recently is that tenants and activists in cities all over the country have been banding together to fight Capital Realty Group, a New York-based corporate landlord, that owns their buildings. Why? They want, among other things, better living conditions, more transparent rent calculations, and the end of intimidation tactics, and they understand that they need to use strength in numbers to get what they need. With the rise of predatory corporate landlords around the world, it’s a people-power movement that must expand globally.
Only a global people-power movement will successfully push back against billionaire corporate landlords who have the vast economic resources and political connections to run roughshod over tenants. Tenants and activists don’t have their billions, and they don’t have their political connections, but tenants and activists do have something that corporate landlords don’t: the power of hundreds of millions of people unifying for more safe, affordable, and stable housing.
A worldwide people-power movement is needed more than ever, and the time is ripe for such a coalition to exist. As United Nations housing experts pointed out in 2019, tenants are facing a global housing affordability crisis that’s impacting their well-being now and into the future. What’s a major cause of this crisis? The experts pointed to predatory corporate landlords, including Blackstone Group, co-founded by multi-billionaire Stephen Schwarzman.
In fact, the U.N. experts, Leilani Farha and Surya Deva, wrote letters to officials in the U.S., Sweden, Czech Republic, Spain, Denmark, and Republic of Ireland about the life-altering damage caused by the commodification of housing by corporate landlords, who squeeze every last penny out of tenants so they can make bigger and bigger profits.
“We remind all [governments] that while gold is a commodity,” Farha and Deva wrote, “housing is not, it’s a human right.”
Since 2019, the global housing affordability has not improved. In London, tenant groups are pushing hard for rent controls after it was recently revealed that the cost of renting a home is unaffordable in all of the city’s 32 boroughs.
In Ghana, activists organized a mass rally of 500,000 tenants to protest the high cost of rent in that country caused by predatory landlords’ “exploitative rental practices.”
“The situation in Ghana today is alarming,” Reindolph Afrifa-Oware of the National Tenants Union of Ghana told a reporter. “We have young people using 90-100 percent of their salaries for rent, and it is creating a serious crisis for them.”
They, too, want rent controls.
In Spain, tenants are struggling through a massive housing affordability crisis, with thousands of people taking to the streets earlier this year in Madrid and dozens of other cities to protest wildly inflated rents. Who’s Mardrid’s biggest landlord? U.S. investment firms.
And the ongoing RealPage scandal in the United States, involving many of the largest corporate landlords in the nation, shows how Big Real Estate will go so far as to collude so they can charge outrageous rents in cities across America. RealPage, a Big Tech firm based in Texas, offers rent-fixing software to corporate clients — and has offices in countries around the world, including Spain, Philippines, India, England, and Colombia.
There are many more examples.
And it should be noted. YIMBY groups and Big Real Estate, who have worked together in California to kill tenant protections, will say that the global housing affordability crisis is merely the lack of housing production. They completely ignore the role of predatory corporate landlords fueling sky-high rents, and they rarely, if ever, push for the construction of more affordable housing. These are telling, significant omissions on their parts — and activists who work on the frontlines, day in and day out, have seen the widespread damage that’s been caused by the greed of Big Real Estate.
But it’s nearly impossible for a single housing justice group to successfully fight a multi-billion-dollar, politically connected corporate landlord for more reasonable rent increases and healthy living conditions, and tenants and activists understood that when they started organizing to take on Capital Realty Group in the U.S.
It’s time for the rest of the world to band together as well. Only tenant unity has the power to finally rein in corporate landlords through housing policies and tenant protections that put people before profits.
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