THIS WEEK I WILL TALK ABOUT REAL ESTATE----BEYOND THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD ISSUES----REMEMBER, THE GOAL IS TO ELIMINATE PROPERTY OWNERSHIP FOR ALL BUT THE WEALTHIEST! THAT MEANS YOU MIDDLE-CLASS! THIS ATTACK IS NOT ONLY ON WORKING CLASS!
You won't hear all of this talk in Baltimore because none of these transactions are made public in Baltimore but the same thing has been happening these several years. The FED QE policy----Obama and Congressional foreclosure policy all allowed for this second phase of rebundling and securitizing massive amounts of real estate that was owned for the most part by the American people and in cities. Now they are handing entire communities to these investment firms that are wealthy enough to charge high rent and wait for a decade or two until a Manhattan is born. They are using the money stolen in fraud to fund these huge securitized purchases. Now, these 'landlords' will say-----we are held accountable to our shareholders, we have to maximize profits and it has nothing to do with the city or its needs....these are international investment firms.
THIS IS WHAT WALL STREET'S BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS HAS BALTIMORE'S MAYOR RAWLINGS-BLAKE DOING WHEN SHE IS OFF TO LAS VEGAS TO FIND REAL ESTATE INVESTORS FOR BALTIMORE.
'Instead, all his buyers — every last one of them — were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.“You can’t compete with a company that’s betting on speculative future value when they’re playing with cash,” says Alston. “It’s almost like they planned this.”
The Great Recession of 2016?
These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone’s underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you’re out.
Keep in mind much of this real estate was taken with fraud and these securitized bundles should not have made it to market----they should have been sent back to citizens victimized by fraud. That did not happen because the pols working the fraud are still in office----GET RID OF CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS.
Blackstone is simply a global investment firm of all of the players from Bush and Clinton to Wall Street CEOs......enriched from last decade's massive, systemic frauds. This is for whom your Clinton neo-liberal pols work
Wednesday, Nov 27, 2013 08:12 AM EDT
Wall Street: The empire strikes back How the financial industry has turned housing into a dangerous get-rich-quick scheme -- again
Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch
(Credit: Wikipedia) This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing.
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.
Wall Street’s foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It’s going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it’s devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up — again.
Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.
In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That’s a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.
Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it’s the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation — and of a whole lot of other things, too. It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael’s, Orangina, and dozens of other companies.
Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission annual filing. It’s also a public company with a list of institutional owners that reads like a who’s who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an unprecedented $13 billion fine.
In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these other Wall Street banks — generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place — make money too.
An All-Cash Goliath
In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn’t have to know what Blackstone was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.
Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast — up 20% between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of whack.
The second sign was the buyers themselves.
Click here to see a larger version
About 5% of Blackstone’s properties, approximately 2,000 houses, are located in the Charlotte metro area. Of those, just under 1,000 (pictured above) are in Mecklenberg County, the city’s center. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Symone New.)
“I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers — every last one of them — were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.
Between 2005 and 2009, the mortgage crisis, fueled by racially discriminatorylending practices, destroyed 53% of African American wealth and 66% of Hispanic wealth, figures that stagger the imagination. As a result, it’s safe to say that few blacks or Hispanics today are buying homes outright, in cash. Blackstone, on the other hand, doesn’t have a problem fronting the money, given its $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank. This money has allowed it to outbid families who have to secure traditional financing. It’s also paved the way for the company to purchase a lot of homes very quickly, shocking local markets and driving prices up in a way that pushes even more families out of the game.
“You can’t compete with a company that’s betting on speculative future value when they’re playing with cash,” says Alston. “It’s almost like they planned this.”
In hindsight, it’s clear that the Great Recession fueled a terrific wealth and asset transfer away from ordinary Americans and to financial institutions. During that crisis, Americans lost trillions of dollars of household wealth when housing prices crashed, while banks seized about five million homes. But what’s just beginning to emerge is how, as in the recession years, the recovery itself continues to drive the process of transferring wealth and power from the bottom to the top.
From 2009-2012, the top 1% of Americans captured 95% of income gains. Now, as the housing market rebounds, billions of dollars in recovered housing wealth are flowing straight to Wall Street instead of to families and communities. Since spring 2012, just at the time when Blackstone began buying foreclosed homes in bulk, an estimated $88 billion of housing wealth accumulation has gone straight to banks or institutional investors as a result of their residential property holdings, according to an analysis by TomDispatch. And it’s a number that’s likely to just keep growing.
“Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities,” says Henry Wade, founder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.
But buying homes cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate in value isn’t the only way Blackstone is making money on this deal. It wants your rental payment, too.
Securitizing Rentals
Wall Street’s rental empire is entirely new. The single-family rental industry used to be the bailiwick of small-time mom-and-pop operations. But what makes this moment unprecedented is the financial alchemy that Blackstone added. In November, after many months of hype, Blackstone released history’s first rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. And once investors tripped over themselves in a rush to get it, Blackstone’s competitors announced that they, too, would develop similar securities as soon as possible.
Depending on whom you ask, the idea of bundling rental payments and selling them off to investors is either a natural evolution of the finance industry or a fire-breathing chimera.
“This is a new frontier,” comments Ted Weinstein, a consultant in the real-estate-owned homes industry for 30 years. “It’s something I never really would have dreamt of.”
However, to anyone who went through the 2008 mortgage-backed-security crisis, this new territory will sound strangely familiar.
“It’s just like a residential mortgage-backed security,” said one hedge-fund investor whose company does business with Blackstone. When asked why the public should expect these securities to be safe, given the fact that risky mortgage-backed securities caused the 2008 collapse, he responded, “Trust me.”
For Blackstone, at least, the logic is simple. The company wants money upfront to purchase more cheap, foreclosed homes before prices rise. So it’s joined forces with JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank to bundle the rental payments of 3,207 single-family houses and sell this bond to investors with mortgages on the underlying houses offered as collateral. This is, of course, just a test case for what could become a whole new industry of rental-backed securities.
Many major Wall Street banks are involved in the deal, according to a copy of the private pitch documents Blackstone sent to potential investors on October 31st, which was reviewed by TomDispatch. Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are helping market the bond. Wells Fargo is the certificate administrator. Midland Loan Services, a subsidiary of PNC Bank, is the loan servicer. (By the way, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank are all members of another clique: the list of banks foreclosing on the most families in 2013.)
According to interviews with economists, industry insiders, and housing activists, people are more or less holding their collective breath, hoping that what looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck won’t crash the economy the same way the last flock of ducks did.
“You kind of just hope they know what they’re doing,” says Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “That they have provisions for turnover and vacancies. But have they done that? Have they taken the appropriate care? I certainly wouldn’t count on it.” The cash flow analysis in the documents sent to investors assumes that 95% of these homes will be rented at all times, at an average monthly rent of $1,312. It’s an occupancy rate that real estate professionals describe as ambitious.
There’s one significant way, however, in which this kind of security differs from its mortgage-backed counterpart. When banks repossess mortgaged homes as collateral, there is at least the assumption (often incorrect due to botched or falsified paperwork from the banks) that the homeowner has, indeed, defaulted on her mortgage. In this case, however, if a single home-rental bond blows up, thousands of families could be evicted, whether or not they ever missed a single rental payment.
“We could well end up in that situation where you get a lot of people getting evicted… not because the tenants have fallen behind but because the landlordshave fallen behind,” says Baker.
Bugs in Blackstone’s Housing Dreams
Whether these new securities are safe may boil down to the simple question of whether Blackstone proves to be a good property manager. Decent management practices will ensure high occupancy rates, predictable turnover, and increased investor confidence. Bad management will create complaints, investigations, and vacancies, all of which will increase the likelihood that Blackstone won’t have the cash flow to pay investors back.
If you ask CaDonna Porter, a tenant in one of Blackstone’s Invitation Homes properties in a suburb outside Atlanta, property management is exactly the skill that Blackstone lacks. “If I could shorten my lease — I signed a two-year lease — I definitely would,” says Porter.
The cockroaches and fat water bugs were the first problem in the Invitation Homes rental that she and her children moved into in September. Porter repeatedly filed online maintenance requests that were canceled without anyone coming to investigate the infestation. She called the company’s repairs hotline. No one answered.
The second problem arrived in an email with the subject line marked “URGENT.” Invitation Homes had failed to withdraw part of Porter’s November payment from her bank account, prompting the company to demand that she deliver the remaining payment in person, via certified funds, by five p.m. the following day or incur “the additional legal fee of $200 and dispossessory,” according to email correspondences reviewed by TomDispatch.
Porter took off from work to deliver the money order in person, only to receive an email saying that the payment had been rejected because it didn’t include the $200 late fee and an additional $75 insufficient funds fee. What followed were a maddening string of emails that recall the fraught and often fraudulent interactions between homeowners and mortgage-servicing companies. Invitation Homes repeatedly threatened to file for eviction unless Porter paid various penalty fees. She repeatedly asked the company to simply accept her month’s payment and leave her alone.
“I felt really harassed. I felt it was very unjust,” says Porter. She ultimately wrote that she would seek legal counsel, which caused Invitation Homes to immediately agree to accept the payment as “a one-time courtesy.”
Porter is still frustrated by the experience — and by the continued presence of the cockroaches. (“I put in another request today about the bugs, which will probably be canceled again.”)
A recent Huffington Post investigation and dozens of online reviews written by Invitation Homes tenants echo Porter’s frustrations. Many said maintenance requests went unanswered, while others complained that their spiffed-up houses actually had underlying structural issues.
There’s also at least one documented case of Blackstone moving into murkier legal territory. This fall, the Orlando, Florida, branch of Invitation Homes appeared to mail forged eviction notices to a homeowner named Francisco Molina, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Delivered in letter-sized manila envelopes, the fake notices claimed that an eviction had been filed against Molina in court, although the city confirmed otherwise. The kicker is that Invitation Homes didn’t even have the right to evict Molina, legally or otherwise. Blackstone’s purchase of the house had been reversed months earlier, but the company had lost track of that information.
The Great Recession of 2016?
These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone’s underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you’re out.
Although Blackstone has issued only one rental-payment security so far, it already seems to be putting this strict protocol into place. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the company has filed eviction proceedings against a full 10% of its renters, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.
Click here to see a larger version
About 9% of Blackstone’s properties, approximately 3,600 houses, are located in the Phoenix metro area. Most are in low- to middle-income neighborhoods. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Jose Taveras.)
Forty thousand homes add up to only a small percentage of the total national housing stock. Yet in the cities Blackstone has targeted most aggressively, the concentration of its properties is staggering. In Phoenix, Arizona, some neighborhoods have at least one, if not two or three, Blackstone-owned homes on just about every block.
This inundation has some concerned that the private equity giant, perhaps in conjunction with other institutional investors, will exercise undue influence over regional markets, pushing up rental prices because of a lack of competition. The biggest concern among many ordinary Americans, however, should be that, not too many years from now, this whole rental empire and its hot new class of securities might fail, sending the economy into an all-too-familiar tailspin.
“You’re allowing Wall Street to control a significant sector of single-family housing,” said Michael Donley, a resident of Chicago who has been investigating Blackstone’s rapidly expanding presence in his neighborhood. “But is it sustainable?” he wondered. “It could all collapse in 2016, and you’ll be worse off than in 2008.”
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For those not knowing all of this is simply the next phase of a decades old plan to centralize all real estate ownership to the rich of the world-----creating this International Economic Zone where the American people are not in the picture and there is no Constitutional rights as citizens-----this is it.
The FED QE policy allowed all this on steroids and now we have consolidated ownership by investment firms in cities like Baltimore. Securitized means these buildings are working for world-shareholders and will be predatory for profit. It also means that this real estate is being held and controlled by global investors until they see a Manhattan level of wealth all the while controlling who gets to rent in these communities.
This is happening big time in the South----from Maryland down as these are the Republican-held areas moving these International Economic Zones and global FOXCONN sweat shop policies forward. The South is building corporate plantations this time with the global rich as plantation owners. The 15 black ministers in Baltimore, the fraternity/sorority business owners, and the pols getting all kinds of real estate in this deal to create an International Economic Zone all for their support of the most crony, corrupt, and Wall Street/Neo-conservative Johns Hopkins politicians that are the mayors and Baltimore City council-----
ARE BEING PLAYED AND WILL END UP WITH NOTHING FOR TRYING TO HAND THE CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE TO THESE GLOBAL SOCIOPATHS.
When you hear Obama fans touting a rising economy and stock market---this is what they were touting. This movement by Wall Street of bundled, foreclosed securities was just about the totality of the stock market and housing rise. Historically Black Colleges were the ones touting this the most---and they know where this all leads. Any labor and justice organization that shouts Obama and Congressional neo-liberals have improved the economy while it was all driven by this mass consolidation of real estate-----THEY ARE WORKING FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND NOT ME AND YOU.
Think of where you will be come this next huge economic crash from a collapsing bond market----which was created in part by this Wall Street bundling of securitized foreclosures. If you are the middle-class having bought a home these last several years----look below at Blackstone looking to connect these bundles to the bond market just as the bond market is getting ready to collapse. They are doing it again-----using real estate market to prop up the bond market for a few months of profit before it all falls down. What will happen to rental houses tied to a collapsed bond market? They will go bankrupt and the tenets living there will be forced to move as these houses simply move back to Wall Street banks for the next round of ------THIS IS LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING AT ITS FINEST.
Rental-Home-Backed Securities? Wall Street’s New Money-Making Strategy
Shayla Mars, Posted on Jan 31st, 2014,
For those of you who aren’t a housing industry aficionado, you may have missed it when banks, hedge funds and private equity firms bought up 200,000 single-family homes across the nation. Wall Street firms capitalized on the low housing prices and interest rates in order to secure the properties. But being a landlord doesn’t seem to be the end goal for most firms—the real money is in turning those homes into investment properties and then selling them off to investors. While converting homes into bundled investment properties (mortgage-backed securities) is a legal financial practice, the bundling of rental homes hasn’t been done before. The mass buying and selling of mortgage-backed securities played a major part in the last financial crisis. It is uncertain whether rental-home-backed securities would fare better, but some Wall Street firms plan on making a play for it anyway.
Meet your new landlord Between 2012 and 2013, firms took to buying up foreclosed real estate in distressed markets across the nation—those areas hit hardest by the financial crash. Instead of flipping these properties and transforming them into investments to be sold off, a percentage of homes are being used as rental properties. Firms often contract other companies to maintain their properties, but those companies are sometimes miles away. This could spell potential trouble for renters; be sure you investigate who oversees any rental property you’re interested in and find out what the response time is in emergency situations (e.g., a busted water pipe).
The possibility of rental-home-backed securities It has been widely accepted that Wall Street fueled the growth of the housing bubble by being the supplier of easily attainable mortgage-backed securities. The securities proved toxic and poisoned the economy, causing the downturn. Investors’ planning to buy up large quantities of property hoping to make a profit from rent is a risky endeavor. Rising housing prices is one concern as supply dwindles, because it will become harder for firms to purchase future housing prospects (large quantities of housing) and to keep pace with paying back lenders.
Blackstone Group LP doesn’t seem to be worried. The world’s largest private equity firm is also the largest owner of housing in America with a total of 41,000 home under its supervision. Blackstone, like other firms, is considering bundling some of its properties and selling them off as rental-home-backed securities--bonds tied to rental income. Economists and rating agencies are both skeptical of this strategy for good reason. There is no precedent of how rental-home-backed securities would fare in a revitalizing market, nor is there knowledge on how they would be regulated. The fear of whether these securities would become unregulated, like the mortgage-backed securities that expedited the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, adds to the hesitation around accepting them. Before Blackstone Group LP can move forward with this novel idea, rating agencies must approve it.
Firms are looking at the possibility of renter-back securities as a safer bet than mortgage-back securities, because a few tenants not paying their rent won’t cause the same economic upset as defaulting on a mortgage. Bloomberg created an easy to understand infograph of Blackstone’s rental-home-back securities strategy. The graph points out what could potentially happen in the event of rent defaults, evictions and vacant homes. The scenario is very similar to what happened when people defaulted on their mortgages—investors won’t be paid and overall revenue will drop. Of course there are safeguards but there were also safeguards set-up before the housing collapse.
Renters are the wave of the future The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University produced a study on rental housing entitled “America’s Rental Housing: Evolving Markets and Needs” in 2013. The study discusses the growth of renting over home ownership. It states that myriad factors, such as displacement of homeowners during the crash of 2008, the recession that followed and the high cost of relocating all contributed to the increase in renters.
Unemployment is down but a vast majority of new jobs are lower-paying full-time positions. Wall Street firms are banking on a continued increase of renters as housing prices rise, pushing more people out of the buying market. The New York Times speculates that the bulk-buying by Wall Street firms may be one of the factors contributing to the rapid decline in supply. Sharp decline in supply leads to a significant jump in housing prices.
The rental market and the housing market are intertwined. Historically, there have been more homeowners than renters in America but as the Joint Center points out, a shift is on the horizon. If home-builders start to cater to the middle and upper class coupled with rising prices of present homes, more and more Americans will slip into the renter category. Rental-home-backed securities could be a great way for Wall Street firms to increase their revenue, but the economy can be unstable. Mass lay-offs or a slight rise in rent could negatively impact both a renter’s ability to pay and a return on the securities. If that happens on a large enough scale, it could cause another financial crisis. It will be interesting to see whether or not rental-home-backed securities come to fruition.
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Nowhere in Maryland media does all of this long-term International Economic Zone plan come out. We don't know Rawlings-Blake is looking for these global investment firms to come to Baltimore as a solution to tens of thousands of Baltimore citizens losing their homes to Wall Street subprime mortgage fraud knowing that the securitized property could simply be recovered by enforcing Rule of Law and claiming it for citizens of Baltimore. Rawlings-Blake is being touted in Baltimore for her being lifted to higher positions but she is doing nothing----she simply shows up and Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins and its wheelers and dealers close the deals. Hopkins already has its endowment tied to these securitized real estate deals here in Baltimore.
The middle-class lost big with the 2008 crash and will be the big losers with this coming bond market crash as the working class has all but lost their homes. Remember, these International Economic Zones will have the world's rich in the city center----
The capture of media was very important in moving these policies forward ------and in Baltimore there is silence as these repressive policies are installed. Baltimore should and can be a progressive labor and justice city with Rule of Law, Equal Protection, and citizens building a local economy for its citizens-----AND NOT A NEO--CONSERVATIVE/ NEO-LIBERAL INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE WITH NO SOVEREIGNTY OR RIGHTS FOR CITIZENS.
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We are seeing the exact mortgage fraud as last decade except that this time they are rolling what used to be citizens' homes to Wall Street investment firms to make into rentals with the goal of imploding them right back to Wall Street as bankruptcies minus the tenets renting from these buildings. Wall Street will then simply sell these properties again to the same investment firms. Each time this happens----more and more citizen homeowners are taken out and more and more renters are impoverished and left unable to secure stable housing.
Real Estate
Private equity funds go to Las Vegas looking to bankroll builders
Originally published January 29, 2010 at 10:25 pm Updated January 29, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Mayor heads back to Las Vegas this week
Inside City Hall: Rawlings-Blake set to attend a conference of mayors.
Mark Reutter June 17, 2013 at 6:59 pm
While not yet a fixture like Penn & Teller or Cher, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is getting in her showtime at Las Vegas.
Less than a month after she spent five days at a shopping center convention – and took time out to marry City Hall’s top lobbyists, Lisa Harris Jones and Sean Malone, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel – the mayor will savor the “City of Lights” once more during a weekend-long meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The Board of Estimates is set to approve $4,182 for the travel, meals, registration fee and lodging of Rawlings-Blake and Andrew Smullian, her deputy chief of governmental affairs.
The cost of Police Department security, which accompanies the mayor on out-of-town trips, was not disclosed in the board’s agenda.
Brochure announcing the group's 81th annual meeting, starting on Friday. (U.S. Conference of Mayors)
Brochure announcing the group’s 81st annual meeting, starting on Friday.
Five-Day Trip
The mayor will attend the conference through next Monday, according to her office, and will make appearances at three meetings.
She’ll speak on Baltimore’s food desert strategy (“A Catalyst to Address Health, Employment and Economic Disparities”), chair a session of the Mayors’ Water Council and address how her administration “engages and connects citizens” through the Internet (an event sponsored by Google).
In-between there will be plenty of time to hang out and enjoy the conference’s various activities, including Friday night’s “Surf Party at Mandalay Bay Beach,” Saturday’s excursions to the Fremont Entertainment District, and Sunday’s show by Cirque du Soleil featuring the music of Michael Jackson.
Rawlings-Blake is the only mayor from Maryland registered at the conference. Altogether, 188 mayors, chiefly from mid-sized cities, were registered as of this afternoon.
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Now, call me skeptical -------but I think this drop in lead cases has more to do with the inability of Baltimore citizens to get these cases to court-----and then when the Mayor of Baltimore refuses to pay a Federal lead paint award----sending the message that Baltimore does not take these lead paint cases seriously. It is like saying the Baltimore crime rate decreased the whole time the police department was juking the stats. The truth is Baltimore pols have passed laws these few years making it harder for a family to win these cases opening the ability of investment firms coming into the city to do quick rehabs and placing people in them. I will look more closely at this later in the week. This is how Maryland pretends to be progressive while Baltimore is one of the worst in the world in health outcomes for its citizens.....IF PEOPLE CANNOT ACCESS JUSTICE THE STATS GO DOWN.
As Baltimore City Hall goes to global investment firms to rebuild communities----all of these laws will be ignored as they are in nations from where these investors live. Baltimore had three decades it could have been tearing down and rebuilding safe housing in communities with all kinds of Federal grants and city taxation and instead----it built global Johns Hopkins and its global East Baltimore campus as central to its International Economic Zone plan. Imagine-----investment firms with securitized property they plan to maximize profits caring about lead abatement? REALLY???????
Below you see the number of lead paint tests done in Baltimore was down from what is a relatively small number as it is-----with Baltimore having over 600,000 citizens many living in underserved communities having this problem.
Take a look at the next article to see these Wall Street investment firm landlords are slum landlords who do not care about people. They will be worse than Baltimore slum landlords if that is possible.
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“Through Maryland’s highly successful lead program we have reduced lead poisoning by more than 98 percent. But this disease is completely preventable. We cannot and will not let up in our work to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in our state.”“Working with our partners, including Baltimore City and the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, Maryland has made significant gains to protect our children, particularly those who live in older rental housing. But a significant number of lead poisoning cases in Maryland are linked to newer rental and owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed and signed into law last year will allow us to reach more children who might be affected by lead paint dust – and allow us to prevent more children from being poisoned in the first place.”— Robert M. Summers, Secretary, Maryland Department of the Environment
Lead poisoning cases drop, many cases linked to properties not previously covered by Maryland law
Posted by mdnewsuser on September 25, 2013 in Lead poisoning prevention, Press releases No Comments Department of Environment releases 2012 Childhood Lead Registry report; continued reduction in cases shows impact of Maryland’s 1994 law; legislation addresses cases in newer rental units and owner-occupied housing
BALTIMORE, MD (September 24, 2013) – Childhood lead poisoning in Maryland continued to decrease last year, but a significant number of new lead poisoning cases are linked to homes that had not been covered by Maryland’s 1994 lead law, a report released today by the Maryland Department of the Environment shows.
Legislation passed last year is designed to reduce lead poisoning cases in homes that had not been covered under Maryland law. A key provision of that legislation takes effect in January 2015.
Statewide_2012_Childhood_Blood_Lead_Surveillance
More Information The Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) has released the 2012 Maryland Childhood Lead Registry Annual Surveillance Report. The report shows that the percentage of tested young children with blood levels at or above the level that triggers actions under state law dropped to 0.3 percent. This is the lowest percentage ever recorded in annual surveying that began in 1993, the year before Maryland’s Reduction of Lead Risk in Housing Act was enacted. The figures also represent a decrease of more than 98 percent in the percentage of young children reported to have lead poisoning since 1993. Much of the decline in blood lead levels is the result of implementation and enforcement of Maryland’s lead law.The report also shows that more than 110,000 Maryland children were tested in 2012 – an increase from the previous year.Maryland’s 1994 lead law applies to rental units built before 1950, when lead paint was prohibited in Baltimore City. In Maryland counties outside of Baltimore City, more than eight out of 10 confirmed cases of an initial report of lead poisoning involved children living in post-1949 rental housing or owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed in the 2012 Maryland General Assembly session and signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley is designed to reduce the risk of lead poisoning in these newer rental units and in owner-occupied properties. Core Facts MDE’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program serves as the coordinating agency of statewide efforts to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.Exposure to lead is the most significant and widespread environmental hazard for children in Maryland, and, according to the CDC, there is no safe level of blood lead. Children are at the greatest risk from birth to age six while their neurological systems are being developed. Exposure to lead can cause long-term neurological damage that may be associated with learning and behavioral problems and with decreased intelligence.Among other data, the annual Childhood Lead Registry survey compiles all blood lead tests done on Maryland children up to 18 years of age, and provides blood lead test results to local health departments as needed for case management and planning. Only the data for children under the age of 6 years is used for review of the lead poisoning prevention effort. MDE has compiled this comprehensive assessment on statewide childhood blood lead screening since 1993.Key statistics from the 2012 Childhood Lead Registry annual survey include:
The legislation also allows MDE to seek delegation to administer a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rule that regulates renovations, repairs and painting in homes that were built before 1978, whether they are rental units or owner-occupied, and in pre-1978 facilities with young children. The rule requires contractors who do work on these properties to receive training and use safe work practices. Maryland regulations to allow MDE to administer the federal rule are being drafted.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had, since 1990, maintained the blood lead level of 10 mg/dL as the “level of concern.” In 2012, the CDC adopted its Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention’s recommendation that eliminated the term “level of concern” (since there is no known safe blood lead level) and the recommendation of a new blood lead level “reference level” of 5 mg/dL, based on current lead levels in the population. In 2012, 1,792 Maryland children were identified with a first-time blood lead level in the range of 5 to 9 mg/dL, compared to 2,129 in 2011. MDE, in addition to performing environmental investigations in all cases where blood lead levels are 10 mg/dL or greater has begun opening compliance cases on confirmed levels of 5-9 mg/dL in which a child is identified to live in a pre-1950 rental property. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) has provided guidance to health care providers that children with confirmed levels of 5-9 mg/dL should be retested within three months, in order to ensure that their lead levels are not increasing.
DHMH and MDE are also using data from the new MDE report to revise the State’s requirements for testing of children who live in certain zip codes. DHMH expects to have a draft of the revised testing strategy available for public review in several months.
Quotes “Through Maryland’s highly successful lead program we have reduced lead poisoning by more than 98 percent. But this disease is completely preventable. We cannot and will not let up in our work to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in our state.”“Working with our partners, including Baltimore City and the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, Maryland has made significant gains to protect our children, particularly those who live in older rental housing. But a significant number of lead poisoning cases in Maryland are linked to newer rental and owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed and signed into law last year will allow us to reach more children who might be affected by lead paint dust – and allow us to prevent more children from being poisoned in the first place.”— Robert M. Summers, Secretary, Maryland Department of the Environment
“Lead poisoning can rob children of their potential. Maryland has made tremendous progress over the past two decades, but there is still work to do. We must partner with health care providers to ensure that children are appropriately screened and tested around the State, build on efforts to reduce lead exposure from contaminated housing and help parents prevent low-level exposures from other lead sources. The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will continue to work with MDE and our partners to eliminate lead poisoning in Maryland.”— Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, Secretary, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
“We are heartened to see the ongoing progress being made in the reduction of childhood lead poisoning in Maryland,” said Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative. “We will continue to work closely with MDE on efforts to eliminate this tragic and costly disease and ensure that all of the state’s children are able to grow and thrive in safe and healthy homes.”— Ruth Ann Norton, Executive Director of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (formerly the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning)
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This is what Rawlings-Blake and Wall Street's Baltimore Development and Hopkins is moving into Baltimore in leaps and bounds. Think as well that in Baltimore's city center many of the buildings surrounding Hopkins Homewood are aging co-op buildings home of the middle-class often working for Hopkins. These co-ops are facing major structural repair bills that they cannot often afford and we are seeing Korean and Chinese investors looking at Baltimore's co-ops. Think buildings around Hopkins taken private apartments will be affordable to the middle-class?
“They use us like we’re an ATM machine” is how she describes it. Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers living in rent-regulated buildings controlled by Wall Street investors, she insists that she’d leave if she could, but has found nowhere else to go.
“It feels like I’m being punished,” she says and wonders about her building’s owners: “What did I ever do to you people?”
This is not an experiment with a financial instrument having social good in mind----it is a long-range plan to dismantle all citizen control of real estate and take all their wealth while doing it. If you think this is only hitting the underserved and/or communities of color----it is those young white middle-class being sold homes in cities like Baltimore who will be taken next with this coming bond market crash and recession/depression. This will take the next generation seeking to move into the middle-class and it is all deliberate. Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals and neo-cons are working as hard as they can to end US sovereignty and hand all control of real estate to a few of the world's rich. Then those few of the world's rich with fight and kill each other for further control.
WAKE UP AND SIMPLY GET RID OF CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS OR IN BALTIMORE'S CASE----HOPKINS NEO-CONSERVATIVES AND REVERSE THIS MESS.
New York City with Mayor Bloomberg always lead in installing these Wall Street policies so what happened in NYC last decade is now coming to cities all over America. This is why Bloomberg is going across the nation funding both Republicans and Democrats and why most cities now have Clinton neo-liberal and Bush neo-con mayors. Baltimore is of course home of Bloomberg University----Johns Hopkins.
This is a long article----glance through to see where Baltimore and other US cities are going.
Why Wall Street Firms Make Terrible Landlords The New York real estate market has become a private equity playground, and the result has been a disaster for tenants and the market alike.
By Laura Gottesdiener April 8, 2014
Stellar Management lost ownership of Harlem’s Riverton Houses apartment complex after defaulting on the mortgage. (AP Photos/Bebeto Matthews)
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
Things are heating up inside Wall Street’s new rental empire.
Over the last few years, giant private equity firms have bet big on the housing market, buying up more than 200,000 cheap homes across the country. Their plan is to rent the houses back to families—sometimes the very same people who were displaced during the foreclosure crisis—while waiting for the home values to rise. But it wouldn’t be Wall Street not to have a short-term trick up its sleeve, so the private equity firms are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as “rental-backed securities.” (Remember that toxic “mortgage-backed securities” are widely blamed for crashing the global economy in 2007-2008.)
All this got me thinking: Have private equity firms gambled with rental housing somewhere else before? If so, what happened?
It turns out that the real estate market in my New York City backyard has been a private equity playground for the last decade, and the result, unsurprisingly, has been a disaster for tenants and the market alike.
“They’re Warm Wherever They Are”
In the Bronx, Benjamin Warren fears that he and other residents could burn to death in a fire because management has blocked both sides of the passageways between buildings designed to offer ways out of the massive apartment complex. (Warren has called the city and management multiple times to complain, but the routes remain shut.) Nearby, Liza Ash found herself intimidated by nearly a dozen hired men when she and other residents of her building, which had heat or hot water only sporadically this past winter, attempted to organize a tenants’ meeting in the lobby. A little farther south, Khamoni Cooper and her neighbors receive a constant stream of fake eviction notices ordering them to vacate their apartments within five days, even though all of them have paid their rent.
These three tenants—and nearly 1,600 more families in forty-two buildings—are living through one of the largest single foreclosures to hit New York City since the financial crisis began seven years ago. But here’s the twist. The owner of these buildings is far from a traditional landlord. It’s actually a conglomerate of private equity firms that bet it would be able to squeeze more money out of these buildings than it ultimately could—and ended up unable to pay back the $133 million mortgage.
The problem is that, when things go bust, the tenants, far more than these private equity owners, end up shouldering the costs.
“They don’t care if we freeze,” said Khamoni Cooper, speaking of the owners, Normandy Real Estate Partners, Vantage Properties, Westbrook Partners and Colonial Management, who have consistently failed to pay for even basic necessities, including heat and hot water, throughout the winter. Cooper had just learned from a neighbor that management cut off all the water in her building, a move she and others believed was retaliation for a protest they had helped to organize at City Hall earlier that day. “They’re warm wherever they are,” she added bitterly.
Around 2005, private equity firms began amassing real estate mini-empires across the city, chasing outlandish projections of future profit. And when these deals started to fall apart, it was tenants, public pension funds, or the city that took the hit, while the private equity owners sometimes succeeded in walking away from the financial wreckage with cash in hand. The story of how those private equity players bet so wrong on housing in New York City is one that, despite the quirks of real estate in the Big Apple, is important to understand now that private equity has taken its rental market show on the road nationwide, and may soon be coming to a town near you.
The Buying Frenzy
Today, private equity firms like the Blackstone Group, now the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation, believe the money to be made in the housing market lies in snapping up cheap homes in the cities where housing prices crashed most spectacularly. Back in the early 2000s, in the eyes of private equity, New York City’s comparable corner of the market was “affordable housing.”
In that city, hundreds of thousands of apartment units were still designated as “rent regulated,” meaning that landlords were prohibited from dramatically raising the rent. The only significant way around that constraint for a landlord was to wait for a long-time tenant to move out. Then the rent could be raised to whatever the market would bear.
To private equity firms, this dynamic seemed to offer a profit opportunity. All they had to do was buy up rent-regulated buildings and replace the current tenants with higher paying ones. (In industry-speak, this was called “transitioning” the building.) About a decade ago, private equity firms or private equity-backed developers began gobbling up rent-regulated buildings across the city at extraordinarily overvalued prices. One of the most aggressive players in the game was the private equity-backed firm Vantage. Between 2006 and 2007, it spent about $2 billion buying 125 buildings city-wide, including a share of the forty-two-building portfolio in which Khamoni Cooper, Lisa Warren, and Benjamin Ash live. Within three years, private equity firms or developers backed by private equity money had scarfed up 90,000 rent-regulated apartments, a full 10 percent of the total stock, according to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.
In their spreadsheets, everything looked good. The buildings were saddled with huge mortgages, but the companies also calculated big rental income increases once they were “transitioned.” In some cases, the projections reported on corporate filings were downright extraordinary. In 2005, for instance, the Rockpoint Group, a private equity real estate firm, bought a complex of apartment buildings in Harlem known as the Riverton Houses. To justify the whopping $225 million mortgage, the company projected that it would be able to more than triple the rental income from $5.2 million to $23.6 million by forcing out half of the rent-regulated tenants within five years.
Get a FREE PDF copy of our 150th anniversary issue. Sign Up There was only one big miscalculation, not just in the Riverton deal, but in almost all of them. Inside the apartment buildings were actual, live tenants who didn’t want to be “transitioned” out and fought like hell to stay.
Complete Criminality
Big money and cutthroat landlords have never been strangers to New York’s real estate market. But the descent of private equity firms on the city in the early years of this century was so striking that housing advocates dubbed the practice “predatory equity.” The name refers to the tactics these companies resorted to once it became clear that longtime tenants weren’t going to leave.
Generally, the average turnover rate for rent-regulated apartments is close to 5 percent a year. Landlords whose business plan depends on tripling that figure soon find themselves orchestrating a host of harassment tactics, some of them quite illegal, to get people to move, including mailing fake eviction notices, cutting off the heat or water, and allowing vermin infestations to take hold.
“You don’t get 30 percent of tenants to move out without harassing them and committing some type of fraud,” explained Desiree Fields, an assistant professor of urban studies at Queens College. As an example, she points out how Vantage sent out so many fake eviction notices to the tenants at a collection of buildings in Queens that the borough court gave the company its own day on the housing court docket. Vantage was later sued by the New York Attorney General’s office for illegally harassing tenants in what The New York Times called “a systematic effort to force their departure to create vacancies for higher-paying tenants.”
For tenants, these private equity purchases were essentially a lose-lose situation. For the deal to succeed, tenants had to be forced out. If, on the other hand, the deal failed and tenants got to stay, landlords immediately disinvested from the buildings, making the living conditions worse than ever.
The most infamous case of this type of predatory equity abuse was perpetrated by a real estate company named Ocelot Capital Group. In 2007, backed by an Israeli private equity firm, it bought twenty-five rent-regulated apartments in the Bronx. Deutsche Bank issued the $29 million in financing, later purchased by Fannie Mae. Soon after, the situation started to deteriorate. The buildings had only sporadic heat or hot water. Pipes burst. Ceilings caved in. As Ocelot realized it wasn’t going to make any money, it only withdrew further.
In a 2011 article for Shelter Force magazine, Dina Levy, former director of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board who now works with the Attorney General’s office, described one visit to the buildings:
Organizers found a single mother caring for three small children who had been living without a working bathroom for more than three months. Her makeshift toilet consisted of a bucket and a hose she managed to connect to the leaky kitchen sink. She explained that she had not moved out because the local housing authority that provided her monthly rental assistance subsidy would not approve her for a transfer to a new apartment.
Housing advocates suggest that the aggressive level often employed by private equity players in these years has set the tone for the broader market, especially in neighborhoods where the rents are rising fastest. In February, a landlord of a rent-regulated building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick made headlines by hiring construction workers to take sledge hammers into the bathrooms and kitchens of his tenants’ apartments and just start tearing them apart.
“It’s complete criminality,” said Adam Meyers, a lawyer with Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A who works with the tenants at one of this landlord’s other buildings, where the boiler and pipes in the basement were recently destroyed. As far as Meyers knows, this landlord doesn’t have private equity backing, but he is typical in believing that the level of harassment reflects the entry of private equity money and manners into the rental marketplace. “You don’t have to go through many steps to see Wall Street financiers driving this process,” Meyers says.
Fantasy and Greed
As early as 2008, it became clear that there was something seriously wrong with the financial calculations underneath these private equity purchases, not just for the tenants, but for the broader market.
“The entire predatory equity enterprise is a house of cards built on a foundation of fantasy and greed,” Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced in December 2008.
By that time, the private equity owner of Riverton Houses was already in danger of falling into default. Other deals would soon sour. The biggest was the unprecedented $5.4 billion purchase of two Manhattan complexes, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, by private equity giant BlackRock Realty and real estate company Tishman Speyer Properties in 2006. By 2010, BlackRock and Tishman had defaulted on the mortgage and walked away from the properties.
As the financial crisis set in, it became clear how significant the role lenders played in the whole predatory equity scheme had been. None of these overly aggressive deals would have been possible without the easy access private equity firms had to mortgage loans, which in turn was enabled by the process of securitization (the banks’ practice of bundling and selling off these loans to investors in order to reduce their own risk).
Looking back, nothing may be more striking than the fact that when these predatory equity purchases blow up, the private equity firms themselves rarely seemed to lose all that much. In the collapse of the Stuyvesant Town deal, for example, Black Rock lost only $112 million. In other cases, the firms appear to have made money even though the deals failed.
In 2006, Vantage and its financial partner AREA Property Partners bought a complex of seven buildings in Manhattan called Delano Village for $175 million. (Its current name is Savoy Park.) Most of the price was covered by a $128.7 million mortgage. The following year, Vantage refinanced it, securing $367.5 million in new loans. While the bank bundled the majority of this loan into a security and sold it off to investors, Vantage used the financing to pay off the first mortgage, repaid itself for the original investment, and put aside some money for reserves. At the end of the day, however, Vantage and AREA Property Partners were left holding about $105 million in cash, according to The New York Times. What they did with that money, no one is quite sure. By 2010, the loan was delinquent. In 2012, Vantage sold off the complex for enough to pay off the outstanding mortgage.
Writing in the Times in 2011, a year before Vantage unloaded the complex to cover the outstanding mortgage, Charles Bagli summarized the Delano Village deal and another similar one: “In each case, they have not exactly suffered: despite plunging the buildings into financial despair, each has been able to take tens of millions of dollars in cash out of the properties.”
But that doesn’t mean some players didn’t lose big, even if these aren’t always the high-flying, risk-taking investors that you might expect. In the Stuyvesant Town deal, for instance, the California public employees’ pension fund lost more than $500 million. The California teacher’s retirement fund lost $100 million, and a Florida pension fund lost $250 million.
To Kerri White, director of organizing and policy at the non-profit housing organization the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, what’s questionable about public pension funds investing in these types of doomed deals is not just the losses they suffer. It’s also the fact that these pension funds are sometimes actively financing deals that will fuel the possible displacement of some of their own members from their apartments.
She remembers the first time she and her co-workers ran across a predatory equity scheme. Tenants were complaining of harassment and abuse at a collection of buildings in upper Manhattan that had long been part of the city’s Mitchell-Lama affordable housing program. In 2007, at the height of the bubble, a management company backed by a Morgan Stanley-created investment firm bought the buildings for $918 million, one of the largest Manhattan real estate deals in history. Following the purchase, the management company sent out a barrage of eviction notices--633 in one building alone.
But what really caused controversy was that both the city and state pension funds had money wrapped up in the deal, and city workers were often residents of Mitchell-Lama-designated buildings. “Their own pension funds were going to finance deals that were hoping to push them out,” says White.
Things Fall Apart
Today, private equity firms are playing a different game in the national single-family rental market. But some housing advocates believe that private equity’s disastrous decade in New York can offer a test case of what might happen across the country. In both cases, aggressive Wall Street investors quickly buy up an enormous number of rental properties with projections of short-term profits that, to economists and housing advocates, seem more than a little optimistic. In New York, they assumed that they could flip rent-regulated buildings. Nationally, they’re betting that they can profit off buying and renting out homes in cities hardest hit by the housing crisis—a plan that relies on their ability to repair, manage and lease tens of thousands of houses nationwide and on a scale far larger than anyone or any company has ever attempted in the United States. In both cases, if projected profit margins aren’t met, the deals collapse, threatening the stability of tenants’ lives and the success of complex financial products that impact the broader market (even if the private equity firms are able to escape with relatively little of their own money lost).
There are already signs of storm clouds on the horizon for these new rental empires. The private equity giant Blackstone, the leader of the new industry, saw its collected rents decrease 7.6 percent in the last quarter of 2013. As with the predatory equity deals in New York City, the key for Blackstone is being able to collect the necessary amount of rent. Otherwise, the whole plan crumbles.
Back in the Bronx, Khamoni Cooper is continuing to pay her monthly $1,300 rent check, even as her group of private equity owners is being foreclosed on and her building falls apart. Her neighbors say that they can’t drink the tap water because the pipes are so old that the water sometimes comes out black. Others report thick, black mold or mushrooms growing in their bathrooms. Cooper herself is glad to have hers working at all. This winter, management destroyed her bathroom, while tearing up her floors. For two months, she had to use a bathroom in a vacant apartment and greeted her downstairs neighbors each morning by simply waving through the gaps in her kitchen floor.
“They use us like we’re an ATM machine” is how she describes it. Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers living in rent-regulated buildings controlled by Wall Street investors, she insists that she’d leave if she could, but has found nowhere else to go.
“It feels like I’m being punished,” she says and wonders about her building’s owners: “What did I ever do to you people?”
To Kerim Odekon, who spent seven years working as a policy analyst for New York’s Department for Housing Preservation and Development, Cooper’s is the type of story he heard about inside the agency on almost a daily basis.
“It’s a crisis,” he says. “There should be a truth and reconciliation commission for the tenants of New York.”
You won't hear all of this talk in Baltimore because none of these transactions are made public in Baltimore but the same thing has been happening these several years. The FED QE policy----Obama and Congressional foreclosure policy all allowed for this second phase of rebundling and securitizing massive amounts of real estate that was owned for the most part by the American people and in cities. Now they are handing entire communities to these investment firms that are wealthy enough to charge high rent and wait for a decade or two until a Manhattan is born. They are using the money stolen in fraud to fund these huge securitized purchases. Now, these 'landlords' will say-----we are held accountable to our shareholders, we have to maximize profits and it has nothing to do with the city or its needs....these are international investment firms.
THIS IS WHAT WALL STREET'S BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS HAS BALTIMORE'S MAYOR RAWLINGS-BLAKE DOING WHEN SHE IS OFF TO LAS VEGAS TO FIND REAL ESTATE INVESTORS FOR BALTIMORE.
'Instead, all his buyers — every last one of them — were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.“You can’t compete with a company that’s betting on speculative future value when they’re playing with cash,” says Alston. “It’s almost like they planned this.”
The Great Recession of 2016?
These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone’s underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you’re out.
Keep in mind much of this real estate was taken with fraud and these securitized bundles should not have made it to market----they should have been sent back to citizens victimized by fraud. That did not happen because the pols working the fraud are still in office----GET RID OF CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS.
Blackstone is simply a global investment firm of all of the players from Bush and Clinton to Wall Street CEOs......enriched from last decade's massive, systemic frauds. This is for whom your Clinton neo-liberal pols work
Wednesday, Nov 27, 2013 08:12 AM EDT
Wall Street: The empire strikes back How the financial industry has turned housing into a dangerous get-rich-quick scheme -- again
Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch
(Credit: Wikipedia) This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing.
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.
Wall Street’s foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It’s going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it’s devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up — again.
Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.
In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That’s a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.
Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it’s the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation — and of a whole lot of other things, too. It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael’s, Orangina, and dozens of other companies.
Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission annual filing. It’s also a public company with a list of institutional owners that reads like a who’s who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an unprecedented $13 billion fine.
In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these other Wall Street banks — generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place — make money too.
An All-Cash Goliath
In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn’t have to know what Blackstone was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.
Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast — up 20% between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of whack.
The second sign was the buyers themselves.
Click here to see a larger version
About 5% of Blackstone’s properties, approximately 2,000 houses, are located in the Charlotte metro area. Of those, just under 1,000 (pictured above) are in Mecklenberg County, the city’s center. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Symone New.)
“I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers — every last one of them — were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.
Between 2005 and 2009, the mortgage crisis, fueled by racially discriminatorylending practices, destroyed 53% of African American wealth and 66% of Hispanic wealth, figures that stagger the imagination. As a result, it’s safe to say that few blacks or Hispanics today are buying homes outright, in cash. Blackstone, on the other hand, doesn’t have a problem fronting the money, given its $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank. This money has allowed it to outbid families who have to secure traditional financing. It’s also paved the way for the company to purchase a lot of homes very quickly, shocking local markets and driving prices up in a way that pushes even more families out of the game.
“You can’t compete with a company that’s betting on speculative future value when they’re playing with cash,” says Alston. “It’s almost like they planned this.”
In hindsight, it’s clear that the Great Recession fueled a terrific wealth and asset transfer away from ordinary Americans and to financial institutions. During that crisis, Americans lost trillions of dollars of household wealth when housing prices crashed, while banks seized about five million homes. But what’s just beginning to emerge is how, as in the recession years, the recovery itself continues to drive the process of transferring wealth and power from the bottom to the top.
From 2009-2012, the top 1% of Americans captured 95% of income gains. Now, as the housing market rebounds, billions of dollars in recovered housing wealth are flowing straight to Wall Street instead of to families and communities. Since spring 2012, just at the time when Blackstone began buying foreclosed homes in bulk, an estimated $88 billion of housing wealth accumulation has gone straight to banks or institutional investors as a result of their residential property holdings, according to an analysis by TomDispatch. And it’s a number that’s likely to just keep growing.
“Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities,” says Henry Wade, founder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.
But buying homes cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate in value isn’t the only way Blackstone is making money on this deal. It wants your rental payment, too.
Securitizing Rentals
Wall Street’s rental empire is entirely new. The single-family rental industry used to be the bailiwick of small-time mom-and-pop operations. But what makes this moment unprecedented is the financial alchemy that Blackstone added. In November, after many months of hype, Blackstone released history’s first rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. And once investors tripped over themselves in a rush to get it, Blackstone’s competitors announced that they, too, would develop similar securities as soon as possible.
Depending on whom you ask, the idea of bundling rental payments and selling them off to investors is either a natural evolution of the finance industry or a fire-breathing chimera.
“This is a new frontier,” comments Ted Weinstein, a consultant in the real-estate-owned homes industry for 30 years. “It’s something I never really would have dreamt of.”
However, to anyone who went through the 2008 mortgage-backed-security crisis, this new territory will sound strangely familiar.
“It’s just like a residential mortgage-backed security,” said one hedge-fund investor whose company does business with Blackstone. When asked why the public should expect these securities to be safe, given the fact that risky mortgage-backed securities caused the 2008 collapse, he responded, “Trust me.”
For Blackstone, at least, the logic is simple. The company wants money upfront to purchase more cheap, foreclosed homes before prices rise. So it’s joined forces with JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank to bundle the rental payments of 3,207 single-family houses and sell this bond to investors with mortgages on the underlying houses offered as collateral. This is, of course, just a test case for what could become a whole new industry of rental-backed securities.
Many major Wall Street banks are involved in the deal, according to a copy of the private pitch documents Blackstone sent to potential investors on October 31st, which was reviewed by TomDispatch. Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are helping market the bond. Wells Fargo is the certificate administrator. Midland Loan Services, a subsidiary of PNC Bank, is the loan servicer. (By the way, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank are all members of another clique: the list of banks foreclosing on the most families in 2013.)
According to interviews with economists, industry insiders, and housing activists, people are more or less holding their collective breath, hoping that what looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck won’t crash the economy the same way the last flock of ducks did.
“You kind of just hope they know what they’re doing,” says Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “That they have provisions for turnover and vacancies. But have they done that? Have they taken the appropriate care? I certainly wouldn’t count on it.” The cash flow analysis in the documents sent to investors assumes that 95% of these homes will be rented at all times, at an average monthly rent of $1,312. It’s an occupancy rate that real estate professionals describe as ambitious.
There’s one significant way, however, in which this kind of security differs from its mortgage-backed counterpart. When banks repossess mortgaged homes as collateral, there is at least the assumption (often incorrect due to botched or falsified paperwork from the banks) that the homeowner has, indeed, defaulted on her mortgage. In this case, however, if a single home-rental bond blows up, thousands of families could be evicted, whether or not they ever missed a single rental payment.
“We could well end up in that situation where you get a lot of people getting evicted… not because the tenants have fallen behind but because the landlordshave fallen behind,” says Baker.
Bugs in Blackstone’s Housing Dreams
Whether these new securities are safe may boil down to the simple question of whether Blackstone proves to be a good property manager. Decent management practices will ensure high occupancy rates, predictable turnover, and increased investor confidence. Bad management will create complaints, investigations, and vacancies, all of which will increase the likelihood that Blackstone won’t have the cash flow to pay investors back.
If you ask CaDonna Porter, a tenant in one of Blackstone’s Invitation Homes properties in a suburb outside Atlanta, property management is exactly the skill that Blackstone lacks. “If I could shorten my lease — I signed a two-year lease — I definitely would,” says Porter.
The cockroaches and fat water bugs were the first problem in the Invitation Homes rental that she and her children moved into in September. Porter repeatedly filed online maintenance requests that were canceled without anyone coming to investigate the infestation. She called the company’s repairs hotline. No one answered.
The second problem arrived in an email with the subject line marked “URGENT.” Invitation Homes had failed to withdraw part of Porter’s November payment from her bank account, prompting the company to demand that she deliver the remaining payment in person, via certified funds, by five p.m. the following day or incur “the additional legal fee of $200 and dispossessory,” according to email correspondences reviewed by TomDispatch.
Porter took off from work to deliver the money order in person, only to receive an email saying that the payment had been rejected because it didn’t include the $200 late fee and an additional $75 insufficient funds fee. What followed were a maddening string of emails that recall the fraught and often fraudulent interactions between homeowners and mortgage-servicing companies. Invitation Homes repeatedly threatened to file for eviction unless Porter paid various penalty fees. She repeatedly asked the company to simply accept her month’s payment and leave her alone.
“I felt really harassed. I felt it was very unjust,” says Porter. She ultimately wrote that she would seek legal counsel, which caused Invitation Homes to immediately agree to accept the payment as “a one-time courtesy.”
Porter is still frustrated by the experience — and by the continued presence of the cockroaches. (“I put in another request today about the bugs, which will probably be canceled again.”)
A recent Huffington Post investigation and dozens of online reviews written by Invitation Homes tenants echo Porter’s frustrations. Many said maintenance requests went unanswered, while others complained that their spiffed-up houses actually had underlying structural issues.
There’s also at least one documented case of Blackstone moving into murkier legal territory. This fall, the Orlando, Florida, branch of Invitation Homes appeared to mail forged eviction notices to a homeowner named Francisco Molina, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Delivered in letter-sized manila envelopes, the fake notices claimed that an eviction had been filed against Molina in court, although the city confirmed otherwise. The kicker is that Invitation Homes didn’t even have the right to evict Molina, legally or otherwise. Blackstone’s purchase of the house had been reversed months earlier, but the company had lost track of that information.
The Great Recession of 2016?
These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone’s underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you’re out.
Although Blackstone has issued only one rental-payment security so far, it already seems to be putting this strict protocol into place. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the company has filed eviction proceedings against a full 10% of its renters, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.
Click here to see a larger version
About 9% of Blackstone’s properties, approximately 3,600 houses, are located in the Phoenix metro area. Most are in low- to middle-income neighborhoods. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Jose Taveras.)
Forty thousand homes add up to only a small percentage of the total national housing stock. Yet in the cities Blackstone has targeted most aggressively, the concentration of its properties is staggering. In Phoenix, Arizona, some neighborhoods have at least one, if not two or three, Blackstone-owned homes on just about every block.
This inundation has some concerned that the private equity giant, perhaps in conjunction with other institutional investors, will exercise undue influence over regional markets, pushing up rental prices because of a lack of competition. The biggest concern among many ordinary Americans, however, should be that, not too many years from now, this whole rental empire and its hot new class of securities might fail, sending the economy into an all-too-familiar tailspin.
“You’re allowing Wall Street to control a significant sector of single-family housing,” said Michael Donley, a resident of Chicago who has been investigating Blackstone’s rapidly expanding presence in his neighborhood. “But is it sustainable?” he wondered. “It could all collapse in 2016, and you’ll be worse off than in 2008.”
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For those not knowing all of this is simply the next phase of a decades old plan to centralize all real estate ownership to the rich of the world-----creating this International Economic Zone where the American people are not in the picture and there is no Constitutional rights as citizens-----this is it.
The FED QE policy allowed all this on steroids and now we have consolidated ownership by investment firms in cities like Baltimore. Securitized means these buildings are working for world-shareholders and will be predatory for profit. It also means that this real estate is being held and controlled by global investors until they see a Manhattan level of wealth all the while controlling who gets to rent in these communities.
This is happening big time in the South----from Maryland down as these are the Republican-held areas moving these International Economic Zones and global FOXCONN sweat shop policies forward. The South is building corporate plantations this time with the global rich as plantation owners. The 15 black ministers in Baltimore, the fraternity/sorority business owners, and the pols getting all kinds of real estate in this deal to create an International Economic Zone all for their support of the most crony, corrupt, and Wall Street/Neo-conservative Johns Hopkins politicians that are the mayors and Baltimore City council-----
ARE BEING PLAYED AND WILL END UP WITH NOTHING FOR TRYING TO HAND THE CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE TO THESE GLOBAL SOCIOPATHS.
When you hear Obama fans touting a rising economy and stock market---this is what they were touting. This movement by Wall Street of bundled, foreclosed securities was just about the totality of the stock market and housing rise. Historically Black Colleges were the ones touting this the most---and they know where this all leads. Any labor and justice organization that shouts Obama and Congressional neo-liberals have improved the economy while it was all driven by this mass consolidation of real estate-----THEY ARE WORKING FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND NOT ME AND YOU.
Think of where you will be come this next huge economic crash from a collapsing bond market----which was created in part by this Wall Street bundling of securitized foreclosures. If you are the middle-class having bought a home these last several years----look below at Blackstone looking to connect these bundles to the bond market just as the bond market is getting ready to collapse. They are doing it again-----using real estate market to prop up the bond market for a few months of profit before it all falls down. What will happen to rental houses tied to a collapsed bond market? They will go bankrupt and the tenets living there will be forced to move as these houses simply move back to Wall Street banks for the next round of ------THIS IS LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING AT ITS FINEST.
Rental-Home-Backed Securities? Wall Street’s New Money-Making Strategy
Shayla Mars, Posted on Jan 31st, 2014,
For those of you who aren’t a housing industry aficionado, you may have missed it when banks, hedge funds and private equity firms bought up 200,000 single-family homes across the nation. Wall Street firms capitalized on the low housing prices and interest rates in order to secure the properties. But being a landlord doesn’t seem to be the end goal for most firms—the real money is in turning those homes into investment properties and then selling them off to investors. While converting homes into bundled investment properties (mortgage-backed securities) is a legal financial practice, the bundling of rental homes hasn’t been done before. The mass buying and selling of mortgage-backed securities played a major part in the last financial crisis. It is uncertain whether rental-home-backed securities would fare better, but some Wall Street firms plan on making a play for it anyway.
Meet your new landlord Between 2012 and 2013, firms took to buying up foreclosed real estate in distressed markets across the nation—those areas hit hardest by the financial crash. Instead of flipping these properties and transforming them into investments to be sold off, a percentage of homes are being used as rental properties. Firms often contract other companies to maintain their properties, but those companies are sometimes miles away. This could spell potential trouble for renters; be sure you investigate who oversees any rental property you’re interested in and find out what the response time is in emergency situations (e.g., a busted water pipe).
The possibility of rental-home-backed securities It has been widely accepted that Wall Street fueled the growth of the housing bubble by being the supplier of easily attainable mortgage-backed securities. The securities proved toxic and poisoned the economy, causing the downturn. Investors’ planning to buy up large quantities of property hoping to make a profit from rent is a risky endeavor. Rising housing prices is one concern as supply dwindles, because it will become harder for firms to purchase future housing prospects (large quantities of housing) and to keep pace with paying back lenders.
Blackstone Group LP doesn’t seem to be worried. The world’s largest private equity firm is also the largest owner of housing in America with a total of 41,000 home under its supervision. Blackstone, like other firms, is considering bundling some of its properties and selling them off as rental-home-backed securities--bonds tied to rental income. Economists and rating agencies are both skeptical of this strategy for good reason. There is no precedent of how rental-home-backed securities would fare in a revitalizing market, nor is there knowledge on how they would be regulated. The fear of whether these securities would become unregulated, like the mortgage-backed securities that expedited the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, adds to the hesitation around accepting them. Before Blackstone Group LP can move forward with this novel idea, rating agencies must approve it.
Firms are looking at the possibility of renter-back securities as a safer bet than mortgage-back securities, because a few tenants not paying their rent won’t cause the same economic upset as defaulting on a mortgage. Bloomberg created an easy to understand infograph of Blackstone’s rental-home-back securities strategy. The graph points out what could potentially happen in the event of rent defaults, evictions and vacant homes. The scenario is very similar to what happened when people defaulted on their mortgages—investors won’t be paid and overall revenue will drop. Of course there are safeguards but there were also safeguards set-up before the housing collapse.
Renters are the wave of the future The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University produced a study on rental housing entitled “America’s Rental Housing: Evolving Markets and Needs” in 2013. The study discusses the growth of renting over home ownership. It states that myriad factors, such as displacement of homeowners during the crash of 2008, the recession that followed and the high cost of relocating all contributed to the increase in renters.
Unemployment is down but a vast majority of new jobs are lower-paying full-time positions. Wall Street firms are banking on a continued increase of renters as housing prices rise, pushing more people out of the buying market. The New York Times speculates that the bulk-buying by Wall Street firms may be one of the factors contributing to the rapid decline in supply. Sharp decline in supply leads to a significant jump in housing prices.
The rental market and the housing market are intertwined. Historically, there have been more homeowners than renters in America but as the Joint Center points out, a shift is on the horizon. If home-builders start to cater to the middle and upper class coupled with rising prices of present homes, more and more Americans will slip into the renter category. Rental-home-backed securities could be a great way for Wall Street firms to increase their revenue, but the economy can be unstable. Mass lay-offs or a slight rise in rent could negatively impact both a renter’s ability to pay and a return on the securities. If that happens on a large enough scale, it could cause another financial crisis. It will be interesting to see whether or not rental-home-backed securities come to fruition.
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Nowhere in Maryland media does all of this long-term International Economic Zone plan come out. We don't know Rawlings-Blake is looking for these global investment firms to come to Baltimore as a solution to tens of thousands of Baltimore citizens losing their homes to Wall Street subprime mortgage fraud knowing that the securitized property could simply be recovered by enforcing Rule of Law and claiming it for citizens of Baltimore. Rawlings-Blake is being touted in Baltimore for her being lifted to higher positions but she is doing nothing----she simply shows up and Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins and its wheelers and dealers close the deals. Hopkins already has its endowment tied to these securitized real estate deals here in Baltimore.
The middle-class lost big with the 2008 crash and will be the big losers with this coming bond market crash as the working class has all but lost their homes. Remember, these International Economic Zones will have the world's rich in the city center----
The capture of media was very important in moving these policies forward ------and in Baltimore there is silence as these repressive policies are installed. Baltimore should and can be a progressive labor and justice city with Rule of Law, Equal Protection, and citizens building a local economy for its citizens-----AND NOT A NEO--CONSERVATIVE/ NEO-LIBERAL INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE WITH NO SOVEREIGNTY OR RIGHTS FOR CITIZENS.
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We are seeing the exact mortgage fraud as last decade except that this time they are rolling what used to be citizens' homes to Wall Street investment firms to make into rentals with the goal of imploding them right back to Wall Street as bankruptcies minus the tenets renting from these buildings. Wall Street will then simply sell these properties again to the same investment firms. Each time this happens----more and more citizen homeowners are taken out and more and more renters are impoverished and left unable to secure stable housing.
Real Estate
Private equity funds go to Las Vegas looking to bankroll builders
Originally published January 29, 2010 at 10:25 pm Updated January 29, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Mayor heads back to Las Vegas this week
Inside City Hall: Rawlings-Blake set to attend a conference of mayors.
Mark Reutter June 17, 2013 at 6:59 pm
While not yet a fixture like Penn & Teller or Cher, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is getting in her showtime at Las Vegas.
Less than a month after she spent five days at a shopping center convention – and took time out to marry City Hall’s top lobbyists, Lisa Harris Jones and Sean Malone, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel – the mayor will savor the “City of Lights” once more during a weekend-long meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The Board of Estimates is set to approve $4,182 for the travel, meals, registration fee and lodging of Rawlings-Blake and Andrew Smullian, her deputy chief of governmental affairs.
The cost of Police Department security, which accompanies the mayor on out-of-town trips, was not disclosed in the board’s agenda.
Brochure announcing the group's 81th annual meeting, starting on Friday. (U.S. Conference of Mayors)
Brochure announcing the group’s 81st annual meeting, starting on Friday.
Five-Day Trip
The mayor will attend the conference through next Monday, according to her office, and will make appearances at three meetings.
She’ll speak on Baltimore’s food desert strategy (“A Catalyst to Address Health, Employment and Economic Disparities”), chair a session of the Mayors’ Water Council and address how her administration “engages and connects citizens” through the Internet (an event sponsored by Google).
In-between there will be plenty of time to hang out and enjoy the conference’s various activities, including Friday night’s “Surf Party at Mandalay Bay Beach,” Saturday’s excursions to the Fremont Entertainment District, and Sunday’s show by Cirque du Soleil featuring the music of Michael Jackson.
Rawlings-Blake is the only mayor from Maryland registered at the conference. Altogether, 188 mayors, chiefly from mid-sized cities, were registered as of this afternoon.
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Now, call me skeptical -------but I think this drop in lead cases has more to do with the inability of Baltimore citizens to get these cases to court-----and then when the Mayor of Baltimore refuses to pay a Federal lead paint award----sending the message that Baltimore does not take these lead paint cases seriously. It is like saying the Baltimore crime rate decreased the whole time the police department was juking the stats. The truth is Baltimore pols have passed laws these few years making it harder for a family to win these cases opening the ability of investment firms coming into the city to do quick rehabs and placing people in them. I will look more closely at this later in the week. This is how Maryland pretends to be progressive while Baltimore is one of the worst in the world in health outcomes for its citizens.....IF PEOPLE CANNOT ACCESS JUSTICE THE STATS GO DOWN.
As Baltimore City Hall goes to global investment firms to rebuild communities----all of these laws will be ignored as they are in nations from where these investors live. Baltimore had three decades it could have been tearing down and rebuilding safe housing in communities with all kinds of Federal grants and city taxation and instead----it built global Johns Hopkins and its global East Baltimore campus as central to its International Economic Zone plan. Imagine-----investment firms with securitized property they plan to maximize profits caring about lead abatement? REALLY???????
Below you see the number of lead paint tests done in Baltimore was down from what is a relatively small number as it is-----with Baltimore having over 600,000 citizens many living in underserved communities having this problem.
Take a look at the next article to see these Wall Street investment firm landlords are slum landlords who do not care about people. They will be worse than Baltimore slum landlords if that is possible.
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“Through Maryland’s highly successful lead program we have reduced lead poisoning by more than 98 percent. But this disease is completely preventable. We cannot and will not let up in our work to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in our state.”“Working with our partners, including Baltimore City and the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, Maryland has made significant gains to protect our children, particularly those who live in older rental housing. But a significant number of lead poisoning cases in Maryland are linked to newer rental and owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed and signed into law last year will allow us to reach more children who might be affected by lead paint dust – and allow us to prevent more children from being poisoned in the first place.”— Robert M. Summers, Secretary, Maryland Department of the Environment
Lead poisoning cases drop, many cases linked to properties not previously covered by Maryland law
Posted by mdnewsuser on September 25, 2013 in Lead poisoning prevention, Press releases No Comments Department of Environment releases 2012 Childhood Lead Registry report; continued reduction in cases shows impact of Maryland’s 1994 law; legislation addresses cases in newer rental units and owner-occupied housing
BALTIMORE, MD (September 24, 2013) – Childhood lead poisoning in Maryland continued to decrease last year, but a significant number of new lead poisoning cases are linked to homes that had not been covered by Maryland’s 1994 lead law, a report released today by the Maryland Department of the Environment shows.
Legislation passed last year is designed to reduce lead poisoning cases in homes that had not been covered under Maryland law. A key provision of that legislation takes effect in January 2015.
Statewide_2012_Childhood_Blood_Lead_Surveillance
More Information The Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) has released the 2012 Maryland Childhood Lead Registry Annual Surveillance Report. The report shows that the percentage of tested young children with blood levels at or above the level that triggers actions under state law dropped to 0.3 percent. This is the lowest percentage ever recorded in annual surveying that began in 1993, the year before Maryland’s Reduction of Lead Risk in Housing Act was enacted. The figures also represent a decrease of more than 98 percent in the percentage of young children reported to have lead poisoning since 1993. Much of the decline in blood lead levels is the result of implementation and enforcement of Maryland’s lead law.The report also shows that more than 110,000 Maryland children were tested in 2012 – an increase from the previous year.Maryland’s 1994 lead law applies to rental units built before 1950, when lead paint was prohibited in Baltimore City. In Maryland counties outside of Baltimore City, more than eight out of 10 confirmed cases of an initial report of lead poisoning involved children living in post-1949 rental housing or owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed in the 2012 Maryland General Assembly session and signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley is designed to reduce the risk of lead poisoning in these newer rental units and in owner-occupied properties. Core Facts MDE’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program serves as the coordinating agency of statewide efforts to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.Exposure to lead is the most significant and widespread environmental hazard for children in Maryland, and, according to the CDC, there is no safe level of blood lead. Children are at the greatest risk from birth to age six while their neurological systems are being developed. Exposure to lead can cause long-term neurological damage that may be associated with learning and behavioral problems and with decreased intelligence.Among other data, the annual Childhood Lead Registry survey compiles all blood lead tests done on Maryland children up to 18 years of age, and provides blood lead test results to local health departments as needed for case management and planning. Only the data for children under the age of 6 years is used for review of the lead poisoning prevention effort. MDE has compiled this comprehensive assessment on statewide childhood blood lead screening since 1993.Key statistics from the 2012 Childhood Lead Registry annual survey include:
- Statewide, 110,539 children under the age of 6 were tested, which is an increase from the 2011 figure of 109,534. In Baltimore City, 18,717 children were tested, a decrease from 19,049 in 2011.
- Statewide, 364 children (or 0.3 percent of those tested) had a blood lead level of 10 micrograms per deciliter (mg/dL) or above. This is lower than the analogous figure of 452 (0.4 percent) for 2011. In Baltimore City, 219 children (1.2 percent of those tested) had a blood lead level of 10 mg/dL or above, which is down from 258 (1.4 percent) in 2011.
- Of the 364 cases statewide for 2012, 255 were new cases. Of the 219 cases in Baltimore City, 148 were new cases.
- Of the children in Maryland counties outside of Baltimore City with a first test through the more reliable venous method showing a blood lead level of 10 mg/dL or above, 84 percent lived in homes other than pre-1950 residential rental units. The analogous figure for Baltimore City for 2012 was 32 percent.
The legislation also allows MDE to seek delegation to administer a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rule that regulates renovations, repairs and painting in homes that were built before 1978, whether they are rental units or owner-occupied, and in pre-1978 facilities with young children. The rule requires contractors who do work on these properties to receive training and use safe work practices. Maryland regulations to allow MDE to administer the federal rule are being drafted.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had, since 1990, maintained the blood lead level of 10 mg/dL as the “level of concern.” In 2012, the CDC adopted its Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention’s recommendation that eliminated the term “level of concern” (since there is no known safe blood lead level) and the recommendation of a new blood lead level “reference level” of 5 mg/dL, based on current lead levels in the population. In 2012, 1,792 Maryland children were identified with a first-time blood lead level in the range of 5 to 9 mg/dL, compared to 2,129 in 2011. MDE, in addition to performing environmental investigations in all cases where blood lead levels are 10 mg/dL or greater has begun opening compliance cases on confirmed levels of 5-9 mg/dL in which a child is identified to live in a pre-1950 rental property. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) has provided guidance to health care providers that children with confirmed levels of 5-9 mg/dL should be retested within three months, in order to ensure that their lead levels are not increasing.
DHMH and MDE are also using data from the new MDE report to revise the State’s requirements for testing of children who live in certain zip codes. DHMH expects to have a draft of the revised testing strategy available for public review in several months.
Quotes “Through Maryland’s highly successful lead program we have reduced lead poisoning by more than 98 percent. But this disease is completely preventable. We cannot and will not let up in our work to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in our state.”“Working with our partners, including Baltimore City and the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, Maryland has made significant gains to protect our children, particularly those who live in older rental housing. But a significant number of lead poisoning cases in Maryland are linked to newer rental and owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed and signed into law last year will allow us to reach more children who might be affected by lead paint dust – and allow us to prevent more children from being poisoned in the first place.”— Robert M. Summers, Secretary, Maryland Department of the Environment
“Lead poisoning can rob children of their potential. Maryland has made tremendous progress over the past two decades, but there is still work to do. We must partner with health care providers to ensure that children are appropriately screened and tested around the State, build on efforts to reduce lead exposure from contaminated housing and help parents prevent low-level exposures from other lead sources. The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will continue to work with MDE and our partners to eliminate lead poisoning in Maryland.”— Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, Secretary, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
“We are heartened to see the ongoing progress being made in the reduction of childhood lead poisoning in Maryland,” said Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative. “We will continue to work closely with MDE on efforts to eliminate this tragic and costly disease and ensure that all of the state’s children are able to grow and thrive in safe and healthy homes.”— Ruth Ann Norton, Executive Director of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (formerly the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning)
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This is what Rawlings-Blake and Wall Street's Baltimore Development and Hopkins is moving into Baltimore in leaps and bounds. Think as well that in Baltimore's city center many of the buildings surrounding Hopkins Homewood are aging co-op buildings home of the middle-class often working for Hopkins. These co-ops are facing major structural repair bills that they cannot often afford and we are seeing Korean and Chinese investors looking at Baltimore's co-ops. Think buildings around Hopkins taken private apartments will be affordable to the middle-class?
“They use us like we’re an ATM machine” is how she describes it. Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers living in rent-regulated buildings controlled by Wall Street investors, she insists that she’d leave if she could, but has found nowhere else to go.
“It feels like I’m being punished,” she says and wonders about her building’s owners: “What did I ever do to you people?”
This is not an experiment with a financial instrument having social good in mind----it is a long-range plan to dismantle all citizen control of real estate and take all their wealth while doing it. If you think this is only hitting the underserved and/or communities of color----it is those young white middle-class being sold homes in cities like Baltimore who will be taken next with this coming bond market crash and recession/depression. This will take the next generation seeking to move into the middle-class and it is all deliberate. Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals and neo-cons are working as hard as they can to end US sovereignty and hand all control of real estate to a few of the world's rich. Then those few of the world's rich with fight and kill each other for further control.
WAKE UP AND SIMPLY GET RID OF CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS OR IN BALTIMORE'S CASE----HOPKINS NEO-CONSERVATIVES AND REVERSE THIS MESS.
New York City with Mayor Bloomberg always lead in installing these Wall Street policies so what happened in NYC last decade is now coming to cities all over America. This is why Bloomberg is going across the nation funding both Republicans and Democrats and why most cities now have Clinton neo-liberal and Bush neo-con mayors. Baltimore is of course home of Bloomberg University----Johns Hopkins.
This is a long article----glance through to see where Baltimore and other US cities are going.
Why Wall Street Firms Make Terrible Landlords The New York real estate market has become a private equity playground, and the result has been a disaster for tenants and the market alike.
By Laura Gottesdiener April 8, 2014
Stellar Management lost ownership of Harlem’s Riverton Houses apartment complex after defaulting on the mortgage. (AP Photos/Bebeto Matthews)
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
Things are heating up inside Wall Street’s new rental empire.
Over the last few years, giant private equity firms have bet big on the housing market, buying up more than 200,000 cheap homes across the country. Their plan is to rent the houses back to families—sometimes the very same people who were displaced during the foreclosure crisis—while waiting for the home values to rise. But it wouldn’t be Wall Street not to have a short-term trick up its sleeve, so the private equity firms are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as “rental-backed securities.” (Remember that toxic “mortgage-backed securities” are widely blamed for crashing the global economy in 2007-2008.)
All this got me thinking: Have private equity firms gambled with rental housing somewhere else before? If so, what happened?
It turns out that the real estate market in my New York City backyard has been a private equity playground for the last decade, and the result, unsurprisingly, has been a disaster for tenants and the market alike.
“They’re Warm Wherever They Are”
In the Bronx, Benjamin Warren fears that he and other residents could burn to death in a fire because management has blocked both sides of the passageways between buildings designed to offer ways out of the massive apartment complex. (Warren has called the city and management multiple times to complain, but the routes remain shut.) Nearby, Liza Ash found herself intimidated by nearly a dozen hired men when she and other residents of her building, which had heat or hot water only sporadically this past winter, attempted to organize a tenants’ meeting in the lobby. A little farther south, Khamoni Cooper and her neighbors receive a constant stream of fake eviction notices ordering them to vacate their apartments within five days, even though all of them have paid their rent.
These three tenants—and nearly 1,600 more families in forty-two buildings—are living through one of the largest single foreclosures to hit New York City since the financial crisis began seven years ago. But here’s the twist. The owner of these buildings is far from a traditional landlord. It’s actually a conglomerate of private equity firms that bet it would be able to squeeze more money out of these buildings than it ultimately could—and ended up unable to pay back the $133 million mortgage.
The problem is that, when things go bust, the tenants, far more than these private equity owners, end up shouldering the costs.
“They don’t care if we freeze,” said Khamoni Cooper, speaking of the owners, Normandy Real Estate Partners, Vantage Properties, Westbrook Partners and Colonial Management, who have consistently failed to pay for even basic necessities, including heat and hot water, throughout the winter. Cooper had just learned from a neighbor that management cut off all the water in her building, a move she and others believed was retaliation for a protest they had helped to organize at City Hall earlier that day. “They’re warm wherever they are,” she added bitterly.
Around 2005, private equity firms began amassing real estate mini-empires across the city, chasing outlandish projections of future profit. And when these deals started to fall apart, it was tenants, public pension funds, or the city that took the hit, while the private equity owners sometimes succeeded in walking away from the financial wreckage with cash in hand. The story of how those private equity players bet so wrong on housing in New York City is one that, despite the quirks of real estate in the Big Apple, is important to understand now that private equity has taken its rental market show on the road nationwide, and may soon be coming to a town near you.
The Buying Frenzy
Today, private equity firms like the Blackstone Group, now the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation, believe the money to be made in the housing market lies in snapping up cheap homes in the cities where housing prices crashed most spectacularly. Back in the early 2000s, in the eyes of private equity, New York City’s comparable corner of the market was “affordable housing.”
In that city, hundreds of thousands of apartment units were still designated as “rent regulated,” meaning that landlords were prohibited from dramatically raising the rent. The only significant way around that constraint for a landlord was to wait for a long-time tenant to move out. Then the rent could be raised to whatever the market would bear.
To private equity firms, this dynamic seemed to offer a profit opportunity. All they had to do was buy up rent-regulated buildings and replace the current tenants with higher paying ones. (In industry-speak, this was called “transitioning” the building.) About a decade ago, private equity firms or private equity-backed developers began gobbling up rent-regulated buildings across the city at extraordinarily overvalued prices. One of the most aggressive players in the game was the private equity-backed firm Vantage. Between 2006 and 2007, it spent about $2 billion buying 125 buildings city-wide, including a share of the forty-two-building portfolio in which Khamoni Cooper, Lisa Warren, and Benjamin Ash live. Within three years, private equity firms or developers backed by private equity money had scarfed up 90,000 rent-regulated apartments, a full 10 percent of the total stock, according to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.
In their spreadsheets, everything looked good. The buildings were saddled with huge mortgages, but the companies also calculated big rental income increases once they were “transitioned.” In some cases, the projections reported on corporate filings were downright extraordinary. In 2005, for instance, the Rockpoint Group, a private equity real estate firm, bought a complex of apartment buildings in Harlem known as the Riverton Houses. To justify the whopping $225 million mortgage, the company projected that it would be able to more than triple the rental income from $5.2 million to $23.6 million by forcing out half of the rent-regulated tenants within five years.
Get a FREE PDF copy of our 150th anniversary issue. Sign Up There was only one big miscalculation, not just in the Riverton deal, but in almost all of them. Inside the apartment buildings were actual, live tenants who didn’t want to be “transitioned” out and fought like hell to stay.
Complete Criminality
Big money and cutthroat landlords have never been strangers to New York’s real estate market. But the descent of private equity firms on the city in the early years of this century was so striking that housing advocates dubbed the practice “predatory equity.” The name refers to the tactics these companies resorted to once it became clear that longtime tenants weren’t going to leave.
Generally, the average turnover rate for rent-regulated apartments is close to 5 percent a year. Landlords whose business plan depends on tripling that figure soon find themselves orchestrating a host of harassment tactics, some of them quite illegal, to get people to move, including mailing fake eviction notices, cutting off the heat or water, and allowing vermin infestations to take hold.
“You don’t get 30 percent of tenants to move out without harassing them and committing some type of fraud,” explained Desiree Fields, an assistant professor of urban studies at Queens College. As an example, she points out how Vantage sent out so many fake eviction notices to the tenants at a collection of buildings in Queens that the borough court gave the company its own day on the housing court docket. Vantage was later sued by the New York Attorney General’s office for illegally harassing tenants in what The New York Times called “a systematic effort to force their departure to create vacancies for higher-paying tenants.”
For tenants, these private equity purchases were essentially a lose-lose situation. For the deal to succeed, tenants had to be forced out. If, on the other hand, the deal failed and tenants got to stay, landlords immediately disinvested from the buildings, making the living conditions worse than ever.
The most infamous case of this type of predatory equity abuse was perpetrated by a real estate company named Ocelot Capital Group. In 2007, backed by an Israeli private equity firm, it bought twenty-five rent-regulated apartments in the Bronx. Deutsche Bank issued the $29 million in financing, later purchased by Fannie Mae. Soon after, the situation started to deteriorate. The buildings had only sporadic heat or hot water. Pipes burst. Ceilings caved in. As Ocelot realized it wasn’t going to make any money, it only withdrew further.
In a 2011 article for Shelter Force magazine, Dina Levy, former director of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board who now works with the Attorney General’s office, described one visit to the buildings:
Organizers found a single mother caring for three small children who had been living without a working bathroom for more than three months. Her makeshift toilet consisted of a bucket and a hose she managed to connect to the leaky kitchen sink. She explained that she had not moved out because the local housing authority that provided her monthly rental assistance subsidy would not approve her for a transfer to a new apartment.
Housing advocates suggest that the aggressive level often employed by private equity players in these years has set the tone for the broader market, especially in neighborhoods where the rents are rising fastest. In February, a landlord of a rent-regulated building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick made headlines by hiring construction workers to take sledge hammers into the bathrooms and kitchens of his tenants’ apartments and just start tearing them apart.
“It’s complete criminality,” said Adam Meyers, a lawyer with Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A who works with the tenants at one of this landlord’s other buildings, where the boiler and pipes in the basement were recently destroyed. As far as Meyers knows, this landlord doesn’t have private equity backing, but he is typical in believing that the level of harassment reflects the entry of private equity money and manners into the rental marketplace. “You don’t have to go through many steps to see Wall Street financiers driving this process,” Meyers says.
Fantasy and Greed
As early as 2008, it became clear that there was something seriously wrong with the financial calculations underneath these private equity purchases, not just for the tenants, but for the broader market.
“The entire predatory equity enterprise is a house of cards built on a foundation of fantasy and greed,” Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced in December 2008.
By that time, the private equity owner of Riverton Houses was already in danger of falling into default. Other deals would soon sour. The biggest was the unprecedented $5.4 billion purchase of two Manhattan complexes, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, by private equity giant BlackRock Realty and real estate company Tishman Speyer Properties in 2006. By 2010, BlackRock and Tishman had defaulted on the mortgage and walked away from the properties.
As the financial crisis set in, it became clear how significant the role lenders played in the whole predatory equity scheme had been. None of these overly aggressive deals would have been possible without the easy access private equity firms had to mortgage loans, which in turn was enabled by the process of securitization (the banks’ practice of bundling and selling off these loans to investors in order to reduce their own risk).
Looking back, nothing may be more striking than the fact that when these predatory equity purchases blow up, the private equity firms themselves rarely seemed to lose all that much. In the collapse of the Stuyvesant Town deal, for example, Black Rock lost only $112 million. In other cases, the firms appear to have made money even though the deals failed.
In 2006, Vantage and its financial partner AREA Property Partners bought a complex of seven buildings in Manhattan called Delano Village for $175 million. (Its current name is Savoy Park.) Most of the price was covered by a $128.7 million mortgage. The following year, Vantage refinanced it, securing $367.5 million in new loans. While the bank bundled the majority of this loan into a security and sold it off to investors, Vantage used the financing to pay off the first mortgage, repaid itself for the original investment, and put aside some money for reserves. At the end of the day, however, Vantage and AREA Property Partners were left holding about $105 million in cash, according to The New York Times. What they did with that money, no one is quite sure. By 2010, the loan was delinquent. In 2012, Vantage sold off the complex for enough to pay off the outstanding mortgage.
Writing in the Times in 2011, a year before Vantage unloaded the complex to cover the outstanding mortgage, Charles Bagli summarized the Delano Village deal and another similar one: “In each case, they have not exactly suffered: despite plunging the buildings into financial despair, each has been able to take tens of millions of dollars in cash out of the properties.”
But that doesn’t mean some players didn’t lose big, even if these aren’t always the high-flying, risk-taking investors that you might expect. In the Stuyvesant Town deal, for instance, the California public employees’ pension fund lost more than $500 million. The California teacher’s retirement fund lost $100 million, and a Florida pension fund lost $250 million.
To Kerri White, director of organizing and policy at the non-profit housing organization the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, what’s questionable about public pension funds investing in these types of doomed deals is not just the losses they suffer. It’s also the fact that these pension funds are sometimes actively financing deals that will fuel the possible displacement of some of their own members from their apartments.
She remembers the first time she and her co-workers ran across a predatory equity scheme. Tenants were complaining of harassment and abuse at a collection of buildings in upper Manhattan that had long been part of the city’s Mitchell-Lama affordable housing program. In 2007, at the height of the bubble, a management company backed by a Morgan Stanley-created investment firm bought the buildings for $918 million, one of the largest Manhattan real estate deals in history. Following the purchase, the management company sent out a barrage of eviction notices--633 in one building alone.
But what really caused controversy was that both the city and state pension funds had money wrapped up in the deal, and city workers were often residents of Mitchell-Lama-designated buildings. “Their own pension funds were going to finance deals that were hoping to push them out,” says White.
Things Fall Apart
Today, private equity firms are playing a different game in the national single-family rental market. But some housing advocates believe that private equity’s disastrous decade in New York can offer a test case of what might happen across the country. In both cases, aggressive Wall Street investors quickly buy up an enormous number of rental properties with projections of short-term profits that, to economists and housing advocates, seem more than a little optimistic. In New York, they assumed that they could flip rent-regulated buildings. Nationally, they’re betting that they can profit off buying and renting out homes in cities hardest hit by the housing crisis—a plan that relies on their ability to repair, manage and lease tens of thousands of houses nationwide and on a scale far larger than anyone or any company has ever attempted in the United States. In both cases, if projected profit margins aren’t met, the deals collapse, threatening the stability of tenants’ lives and the success of complex financial products that impact the broader market (even if the private equity firms are able to escape with relatively little of their own money lost).
There are already signs of storm clouds on the horizon for these new rental empires. The private equity giant Blackstone, the leader of the new industry, saw its collected rents decrease 7.6 percent in the last quarter of 2013. As with the predatory equity deals in New York City, the key for Blackstone is being able to collect the necessary amount of rent. Otherwise, the whole plan crumbles.
Back in the Bronx, Khamoni Cooper is continuing to pay her monthly $1,300 rent check, even as her group of private equity owners is being foreclosed on and her building falls apart. Her neighbors say that they can’t drink the tap water because the pipes are so old that the water sometimes comes out black. Others report thick, black mold or mushrooms growing in their bathrooms. Cooper herself is glad to have hers working at all. This winter, management destroyed her bathroom, while tearing up her floors. For two months, she had to use a bathroom in a vacant apartment and greeted her downstairs neighbors each morning by simply waving through the gaps in her kitchen floor.
“They use us like we’re an ATM machine” is how she describes it. Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers living in rent-regulated buildings controlled by Wall Street investors, she insists that she’d leave if she could, but has found nowhere else to go.
“It feels like I’m being punished,” she says and wonders about her building’s owners: “What did I ever do to you people?”
To Kerim Odekon, who spent seven years working as a policy analyst for New York’s Department for Housing Preservation and Development, Cooper’s is the type of story he heard about inside the agency on almost a daily basis.
“It’s a crisis,” he says. “There should be a truth and reconciliation commission for the tenants of New York.”
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