What "Radicalized" Me?
Part 1: The Housing Industrial Complex
In the early 2010s, I found myself in the middle of familial upheaval after my grandmother passed away. I had been living with her, assisting in taking care of her after she was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer, while attending college full time. After her passing, in addition to the emotional turmoil I was experiencing, I found myself facing life without a home and without an income.
I am fortunate enough, and privileged enough, to come from an upper-middle class family in one of the wealthiest cities in the country, so I knew that, to an extent, these crises would be fairly short-lived once able to get myself emotionally and mentally collected from her sudden passing, but I still needed to find work, not only for the income, but also to keep my mind occupied.
My family owned shares of some small multifamily properties in the San Fernando Valley, and my grandmother frequently implored me to learn how to manage apartments for when the time came that I would inherit them (this would never come to pass for myriad reasons, but that’s another story for another time). I took this advice to heart and found work with a major REIT (real estate investment trust) that owned and operated apartments in Los Angeles.
Working for a REIT is much like working in finance, high-end sales, or similar; the deadlines are brutal, the quotas are ridiculous, and the pressure from your directors back in their offices at an off-site corporate HQ is suffocating. From my own experiences and observations, as well as those gleaned from talking with former colleagues and supervisors (most of which have since left the industry, a few of whom have stayed), the industry is heavily radicalizing, with the culture and practices turning its employees into either Gordon Gecko (or Donald Bren) or Mao Zedong, with very little in between. The extremely sales-driven culture often forces its employees into hyperindividualistic competition, focused on the kinds of sales-at-all-costs mentalities familiar to anyone who’s watched The Wolf of Wall Street or Boiler Room, or it attracts those who are already in that mindset. Working for a billion dollar REIT did something different to me; instead of being driven into the welcoming embrace of ruthless capital competition, something inside me broke from witnessing the inhuman amounts of neglect and apathy, if not outright contempt, for the people living in these properties.
Behind the scenes of corporate multifamily management
I’ve seen units flood due to maintenance I was instructed to defer “until we have more flood damage, which we expect, so we can meet our $10,000 insurance deductible,” after which a colleague was instructed to stall communications with the agent handling their renter’s insurance claim.
I watched a Senior Vice President lie to a judge about his company’s policy for addressing bedbug abatement in a very dense high-rise apartment building, because the amount the tenant was demanding in their lawsuit was below what the landlord’s insurance covered. 1
Leasing agents were instructed to leave units vacant if it meant never dropping the market rate, no matter how many applications were collected (and how many application fees were charged). 2
Landlords, including ones I worked for, regularly, and in direct defiance of city rent stabilization ordinances, rent to institutional tenants (such as student housing companies, corporate short term rental firms, and insurance companies who need temporary spaces) who not only were illegal tenants under Los Angeles laws, but were allowed to ignore key parts of the landlord’s own lease, specifically the very long, very punitive section regarding subletting. This allowed these corporate tenants to illegally lock in low rental rates in rent stabilized units, while simultaneously depriving families of access to the city’s already limited rent stabilized housing inventory, only to instantly turn around and evict families for doing the same thing (such as renting a room via AirBNB while away for travel or to temporarily fill a room after a roommate leaves to help offset rent). These units were known to have occupancy violations as well, sometimes putting 6-8 international students into 2-bedroom apartments, which are regulated for an occupancy limit of five people for health and safety reasons. I’ve seen (and been instructed to participate in) much more egregious acts, but those stories have been published broadly in various news outlets and would likely reveal my former employer.
Personal anecdotes aside, the practices of highly profit-driven, corporatized housing are inherently exploitative on both the tenants of the units and the housing market itself. Studies show that REITs have similar effects on the housing market as private equity firms (although, many private equity firms now have their own real estate divisions, such as Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust who owns over $100 billion in real estate assets, including single-family homes). REITs are purchasing significant numbers of single-family homes, accounting for over a quarter of all home sales in the first three months of 2025, depleting inventory for first-time homebuyers, families needing to resize (either downsizing, such as after adult children leave the home, or upsizing, such as when a family needs more space after having children or needing to take care of aging or ailing parents), or families needing to relocate. Institutional real estate investors such as REITs are also able to out-leverage individual buyers, offering cash, often above asking price, acquired through asset-backed loans, for purchases of homes where regular individuals may not be able to, often driving up home prices (and their respective price-to-income ratio) to levels out of reach of many individual buyers.
Burnout and exit from corporate life
A friend of mine claimed occupational burnout was predictable, as it always happens after someone works for “a sustained length of time where your original intentions and motivations for accepting work stand in opposition to the expectations of your job.” This simple revelation succinctly explains why I burned out working for corporate landlords; I had joined these companies trying to be “one of the good managers” I’d occasionally hear people praise while simultaneously learning the business, but in the end I was expected to evict single parents for violating the same lease terms the company was illegally violating themselves, defer critical maintenance until a resident’s ceiling caved in from known water damage, and worse. Working in this industry was a radicalizing experience and was one of the first steps toward the realization that capital control of primary human needs (such as shelter, health care, etc.) was only ever going to be detrimental to society.
When I left corporate multifamily management I began to research alternatives to for-profit housing models, starting my journey in housing advocacy and my sprint leftward along the political spectrum. The practices of investors seeking growth for growth’s sake at the expense of all else is creating an intractable crisis. As modern society races to commodify everything, more and more basic necessities will be at risk of being harnessed by the private sector for profit. We already see Nestlé advocating for privatizing water, especially in the global south (.pdf warning). Unless more people become aware of mass privatization efforts by all stripes of corporations, from major international conglomerates to small businesses, we will race toward a Loraxian future, where even the right to clean air comes with a price tag. That should radicalize everyone.
My understanding is that insurance actually denied the claim, (correctly) asserting it was negligence on the part of the landlord, but the landlord was hoping a judgment against the tenant would prove they weren’t negligent in an attempt to have insurance cover the costs of abatement, but what was said privately is what I said before this footnote.
There is some misinformation around this practice. While generally it’s illegal to collect fees for applications for units not on the market, the law, CA Civ Code § 1950.6(c)(1), is vague enough to be understood that a landlord must only have a unit “available” for rent; it would be difficult to prove without diligent (read as: expensive) investigation that vacant units are being held back from the market, especially since often times those units are still actively marketed.