Editor,
You would think that feudalism is a thing of the past, when land-owning lords rented out to peasants who did all the work and the landlords just sat back rubbing their fat bellies while counting out their money. You would be wrong.
Today there is a resurgence of feudalism in all but name, and it is right here in the U.S. of A., and it is people who to this day call themselves “landlords.” The only difference is they rent out apartments and houses and parking lots, and where they are making their killing is around college campuses.
For one thing, they serve a transient population of students who would rather not take the landlord to court because they are going to leave sometime soon, and they are young and are looking forward, however illusorily, to a materially successful future after graduation.
This is especially true of foreign students, who regularly get ripped off by the most predatory of capitalist landlords who take advantage of their naiveté, coupled with their laying low from all the intimidation of being in an aggressive country where capitalism rules like no other.
So take the case of a landlord who comes into town and buys up a big old building teeming with foreign students because 1) they huddle together with others from the same country because they are new here and help each other with survival skills and 2) most of them are graduate students who need to go to campus at odd hours of the day or night to the lab for their round-the-clock experiments, etc.
Said landlord does not care to do much maintenance, blames problems such as bed bugs on “these dirty third-world foreigners” even though these students are clean and hygienic. He rips them off regularly by unfairly keeping their deposit when they leave. After all, who has heard of a foreign student come back from their country after graduation just to complain?
Another scenario that inflates rent is when a slumlord who himself is poor buys a single rental “property” with no money down, uses the tenant’s rent to pay the mortgage, then buys another in the same neighborhood using the same illegal immigrant as the maintenance man, then another ... until he has a monopoly on rental housing around campus.
He then jacks up the median rental price with impunity. In doing this he hides the fact that he is the sole owner behind a very generic name with only a telephone number to call, both stamped on a banner on all his buildings and always saying “MOVE IN SPECIAL!” (Keeps the tenants behind the banner’s wall on their toes).
Just one person getting filthy rich off the backs of a horde of starving students. Such rent inflation is compounded where the building has been flipped repeatedly prior to purchase by the current landlord.
All these layers of middlemen wedging themselves into the supply of rentals act to burden the student, who has to go out and work long hours with cheap wages to keep a roof over their head.
They pay for the BMW of some Wall street mortgage bundler keeping everybody else deliberately confused as to who the real landlord of your humble shack really is. So who do you point your finger at if you want to complain to the BBB?
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Another trick such profiteering slumlords use in campus ghettos: the first question prospective tenants get asked even before being shown the apartment: What is your current income? The rent demanded is adjusted accordingly. Convenient!
Or take the case of the elderly landlady living alone who puts out an innocuous looking ad in the campus newspaper saying, “Detached room for rent.”
Then the student arrives to find an unused garage, but worse still, after having paid “just cash!” and moved in, the lady starts demanding that the tenant “just help me, please” with this and that, till the tenant is effectively a servant boy actually paying for the privilege to serve.
The student’s tenancy is always on shaky ground sans contract and subject to eviction if the landlady just does not like him anymore as a person.
One way to get him to leave on his own (without having to hire a lawyer to evict him) is to simply shut off his Wi-Fi access, which she may not be using herself anyway.
Then there is the lead tenant with that singular qualification: “I got here first!” He lives free because he charges his housemates collectively the entire rent on the place.
This is an example of a middleman jamming himself into what is euphemistically called the supply chain — a practice that is especially common where housing around campus is in short supply.
That was the case in Berkeley, California and that has become one of many tricks to do an end run around rent control in that college town. But most campuses have no rent control today, and tenants get jerked around with the vagaries of the market place at the macro level. Thus, the landlord could be a young addict whose Mom or Dad owns the house.
Still, don’t sigh with relief if you discover that you have an absentee landlord. Their sole incentive to own your property could be that, in today’s tight housing market, rental property is being pushed as a “wise investment.” Such owners typically have a property manager who is yet another middleman whose salary is dropped on the shoulders of the tenant.
Such situations are enabled by the ugly extreme of capitalism. But non-profit (read tax exempt) churches struggling from dwindling congregations are also renting secondary buildings to student tenants.
Not to mention the bonanza reaped where such a Church has a parking lot alongside a college campus and extorts rent from students needing to park in a hurry to make it on time to class.
But students too are complicit in capitalistic shenanigans because way too many students go into debt compulsively. Then, upon graduation, they become effectively indentured servants to banks and loan companies to pay off what today is huge debt on the average.
Or they shift over first to a business major, where they learn to “work smarter, not harder” by preying upon those who are still students, just as they were preyed upon themselves.
So students need to first stop feeding this seductive monster by abstaining from all unsecured debt, then organize to shrug off the yoke of these self-proclaimed modern-day landlords.
Sincerely,
Arun Anand Ahuja
UNM student
