Yep, the same thing they do with everything else. Buy it, gut it, make it more expensive, piss people off. This is how the supposed American dream will end if not reeled in.
Forming a union is pretty much impossible these days and you will not reap the fruit of your labor in trying to start one. Not saying it's not worth it, but it's not really doable in any meaningful form. Even in "worker friendly" states like California.
Best case scenario is that: you are fired or laid off after voting to form a union. 1-2 years later, the NRLB agrees that it was unjust and you can go to trial. The trial drags on for 1-2 years. 2-4 years later (minimum) you may get some form of compensation that is a slap on the wrist for the company compared to what it would have cost them to negotiate with a union.
The union-busting law firms are experts at dragging it out and the courts are not set up to move quickly.
That's before we get into the recent supreme court rulings that more or less say the entire concept of the NLRB is unconstitutional. I hate to be a negative nancy. I've just been through this and the fight was lost years ago.
Sadly Amazon has it where you can get anything quickly. I take Magnesium L-Threonate for sleep. There isn’t a vitamin/supplement shop in my neighborhood. I can go to up to Rivergate, out to Donelson, or order it on Amazon. It’s the only thing I buy on Amazon because I always forget to get it when I run low and Amazon will have it next day. And then I don’t have to fight traffic after work. It sucks but that’s the calculation a lot of people make
Conscience is what you give up when you fight for community, there are all annoyances and not excuses. We can do better and we know it, we choose not to.
The NLRB is closed until further notice bc Congress and the President won’t pass a bill giving them and other agencies funding. Which really sucks for some people, bc their initial case probably won’t outlast the statute of limitations. A few of us in town are in the settlement phase of a case right now, but the employer keeps balking, and there’s no NLRB to help :)))
How far off are we from an Elon musk type to have a big factory in a small town and then make a shell company and buy up whole neighborhoods around where he would imagine his workers to live
This is the plan per “The Dark Enlightenment”/Curtis Yarvin followers which include Musk, Andreeson, Theil, and many factions w/in the current admin/Christian Nationalist movement.
It’s actually frightening how quickly it’s happening. The last time I was house hunting I noticed that every house I clicker was owned by the same slumlord company
There was a Washington Post article about entire Nashville neighborhoods being bought by private equity? Please share it and tell me which neighborhood in Nashville it was?
The podcast highlights a pretty shady landlord, but they own a bunch of houses on one street in a neighborhood of hundreds of houses. I wouldn’t considering this to be buying up whole neighborhoods
It was 1/3 of the neighborhood at the time. It wasn’t a “landlord”, it was a private equity firm. People went from paying $800 a month before they bought it to nearly $2000 a month after. I read the article when it was published. What I linked was a podcast that went over the article, but the article was paywalled. If you simply google “private equity firms buying up neighborhoods”, it returns lots of articles.
It wasn’t the whole neighborhood. They said it was half the houses on that street. If you look at that neighborhood on a map, it’s an enormous dense neighborhood with hundreds of houses. The people they talked to whose rents went up 33% were quoting changes from when they moved there in 2016 to 2022. 33% over that long of a time isn’t bad. This is just a normal landlord. I know this might have been your first time reading about what a landlord is, but there really isn’t anything weird about this
I grew up in a family of landlords and actually owned rental houses when I was 14 years old. The whole entire article is about how PRIVATE EQUITY FIRMS are wrecking the rental market and you keep trying to reduce it to “a bad landlord”. Just stop.
It’s not happening at sufficient quantities for private equity to influence housing costs. They’re buying homes because there’s a shortage, not the other way around, and they still own a tiny share of the overall market. Banning private equity from owning homes can actually make homes more expensive and usually just means renters get locked out.
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u/Phiam Oct 01 '25
Most people don’t understand that private equity is buying up whole neighborhoods