2020-10-20, Picking Apart the Blood Cults Litany

(Heads up: this piece is pretty US-centered, but everywhere has real estate so just replace the names with whoever your local kyriarchists are.)

So because I do building maintenance for a “commercial” building, I try and keep up with the wider trends in that market. Which brought me to read this Politico piece, forecasting commercial real estate as the next economic crisis. Great. But what I want to highlight is the hyper-focused zealotry presented through the article’s quotes:

“Sometimes people forget the depth and breadth of what commercial real estate is…What’s at risk here is both the ability for people to stay in their apartments and the ability for people to go to their jobs. So unless there’s a stimulus, there’s a lot less to go back to once we get back to normal times.”

That’s Mike Flood, some sort of high priest for the death cult. What gets me is the implicit threat here. The “risk” Mike mentions isn’t something natural, like heavy winds or slipping in the shower. It’s a threat from real estate investors: if they aren’t given their blood - excuse me, money - then they will kick people out of their apartments and change the locks on businesses. It isn’t that the “ability” of people to have housing and businesses will be lost: it will be actively taken away, by people like Mike. More from Flood:

“The worst-case scenario is you take the shining asset in all of commercial real estate and potentially create a liquidity crisis, and quite frankly, a situation where people are put out on the street… [The unfunded eviction ban] transfers the risk to the borrower and the lender.”

Now, wait a moment. The risk [of the loan] will be between the borrower and lender?

I’m pretty sure that’s how loans are supposed to work! The risk isn’t supposed to be put on some abstract relation (in this case, “customer,” what a gross way to talk about “resident,”) to the borrower!

Mike’s “put out on the street” is stereotypically passive language for a politician, playing into the same deflection his earlier discussion of “risk” did. But this last part, but where the risk is… I think it’s important we all sit and recognize that the person in charge of mortgages for commercial and apartment buildings thinks that the risk of those mortgages should be on tenants.

The people who created the house of cards already blame us for it being unstable. And, speaking for my employer: their blame-game is working.

There’s one more thing from the article I’d like to look at:

Eighty-seven percent of public pension funds and 73 percent of private pension funds hold real estate investments.

That’s the article’s author, who seems to be using this source. I tried digging a little deeper to find out what amount of each of those funds was invested in real estate: of the 87% of public pension funds invested in real estate, what percent of their portfolio was in real estate?

It seems like the answer might be about 11.5%. Something worth considering: I know a fair portion of folk reading this have savings or investments. What percent of your own investments are invested in sheer naked colonialism and the exploitation of, as real estate folk call you, “human capital stock?”

Here in the US, some of us are on the brink of what’s going to be the greatest number of evictions in our national history, during a pandemic. And in a supreme irony, it’ll be our neighbors, sitting safe in isolation, remote-working and living off savings, sharing Instagram posts about the inequalities of capitalism, motivating it, in an act of open colonialism.

(Already in this apartment building, half of the units have emptied because people were unable to pay rent and wanted to avoid eviction during the moritorium window, and of those, half were turned into airbnbs.)

I have concrete plans for how to get involved in my community when the blood cultists come to squeeze these bricks for more money: I strongly encourage y’all to do the same.

(Photo of “0” spraypainted on a concrete barricade.)

By the way: the footer of these emails says “feel free to forward selectively.” I don’t kno how to change that, but please feel free to forward these to whoever you want.