I interviewed author Aaron Glantz two years ago about his 2020 bestseller Homewreckers for my internet radio show on our website Itstheempirestupid.com. Glantz put tons of research into his book, and it boggles the mind as to how far down the rabbit hole our nation has fallen. Having spent most of my baby boomer life as a renter, or child of renter parents, until I finally bought my own home but 25 years ago, I know about landlords… especially absentee ones.
The Brooklyn, NYC of my younger years had mostly two family homes with the landlord living below and the renter above. Yes, there were lots of apartment buildings with obviously absentee landlords. Yet, in most residential neighborhoods the former was true. Then, perhaps in the 1970s one could see the shift into more and more absentee landlords for those two family homes. The landlord of the Brooklyn two family home we moved into after our wedding resided in New Jersey. Matter of fact, I don’t think I ever met the guy, as my soon to be wife met him when she and her Mom were shopping for a place for us. I made the deal over the phone. There was a family living upstairs, and we had the walk- in apartment. One day, when I came home from work, my wife was upset that she found giant bugs coming out of the bathtub drain as she was giving our one year old son a bath. I immediately called Frank, our landlord. He said ‘ No problem, I’ll come by over the weekend and put Chlordane in the drains to kill them.’ OK, sounds good I thought. Then my wife called her uncle, who knew everything about just about everything. He said Chlordane was carcinogenic and illegal to use in New York State. When I called Frank back he told me don’t worry, and I said No, I will worry, and you are not going to put that in a bathtub that we use… period!
Absentee Landlord #2 was when I remarried twenty years later. We rented an upstairs apartment on Long Island in a rather old house. There was no banister for the stairs, so my elderly parents could never come visit us. The refrigerator was so Ooh! that I joked that it had arthritis. The bathtub had tiles on the walls which were loose, threatening to fall into the damn tub. So, no baths without caution. Our landlord was a guy who owned 19 such homes in the area. He had a garage on the rear side of the house that he kept locked up, refusing to let his tenants use it. The rent was pretty high, and the only reason why we even took the place was because Long Island rentals were an owner’s market… and this joker knew that. Our first winter there we had a giant snowfall, over two feet. I called him up and told him we needed to have the stoop shoveled. He said ‘ Go ahead’. I said well the code enforcement came by and told me the stoop and sidewalk needed to be cleared ASAP or else. The landlord had his son drive over with a big snow blower within a half hour.
When we moved to Indianapolis, Indiana where my son was going to start college, we decided to rent and see how we liked things. The main reason why we left Long Island was that there was no way we could afford to buy a home. The prices were going up like crazy. In Indianapolis we found this pretty rustic rental complex. The model apartment by the main office looked like out of a Norman Rockwell painting. We signed the shortest lease available, 6 months, and moved in. This was right after Thanksgiving. A few weeks before Christmas my wife was at the kitchen sink when the whole faucet just flew off with the water running all over! I called the office and they promised to send someone to fix things. That took two days. Then, the week before Christmas there was a heavy rainstorm. My son and I were sitting in the living room watching television when water was coming down from the ceiling… really coming down, not just dripping! This was also happening in our master bedroom as well. I was pissed! I called the office and asked who ran this place. They told me that our complex was owned by a Chicago company and the manager for our place was up there and could be reached by phone. I left him a pretty nasty voicemail and to his credit he did show up the next day. I found out later that his visit wasn’t just to satisfy me, as there were countless apartments that had similar ceiling leaks. We found a home to buy within a month and they let us out of our lease when I threatened to go to every damn source I could think of.
Anyone who rents nowadays obviously realizes how terrible absentee landlords are.. especially the corporate predators. Those hedge fund and private equity owned monsters have thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions of renters under their thumb. Go and read Aaron Glantz’s book Homewreckers and learn just how horrific this housing system is. We need local communities to own those buildings and not private entities, with only earning minimum profit. Funny how many MAGA supporters of Trump and viewers of Fox News who live in low income AKA Slum properties not realizing that Sean Hannity and Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner own thousands of such places . Check it out. Glantz did.
PA Farruggio
February 2025