Tidy profit
When the Kushner Cos. bought three apartment buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens in 2015, most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit.
But that’s exactly what the company then run by Jared Kushner did, and with remarkable speed. Two years later, it sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid.
Now a clue has emerged as to how President Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s firm was able to move so fast: The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.
Of course it did. Isn’t that just Trumpworld all over – fuck the underlings who aren’t rich enough to buy Luxury Condos™, we’re here to make even more millions so we’ll lie to the city and get them all bounced out. They can live ten to a room like the good old days.
“It’s bare-faced greed,” said Aaron Carr, founder of Housing Rights Initiative, a tenants’ rights watchdog that compiled the work permit application documents and shared them with The Associated Press. “The fact that the company was falsifying all these applications with the government shows a sordid attempt to avert accountability and get a rapid return on its investment.”
And to do it by shafting hundreds of people.
In all, Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed at least 80 false applications for construction permits in 34 buildings across New York City from 2013 to 2016, all of them indicating there were no rent-regulated tenants. Instead, tax documents show there were more than 300 rent-regulated units. Nearly all the permit applications were signed by a Kushner employee, including sometimes the chief operating officer.
Ticking that box left them free to hassle sitting tenants out.
“It was noisy, there were complaints, I got mice,” said mailman Rudolph Romano, adding that the Kushner Cos. tried to increase his rent by 60 percent. “They cleaned the place out. I watched the whole building leave.”
Mailman, you see. Prince Jared doesn’t trouble himself about people like mail carriers and their need for somewhere to live.
Jail time. We really need to give execs who do these things, or who oversee people who do these things, some time in jail. It doesn’t actually have to be incredibly harsh jail, or even super long (but some years, followed by strict probation with violating probation receiving years of regular prison as the stick). Fines (generally a fraction of what is stolen) aren’t going to do it, unless the execs are all impoverished and owing money as a result of said fines. Right now there is essentially no downside to a really big crime like this.
But then, in the USA moral hazard is only valid for non-rich people.
JDM, they could move out some of the non-rich, non-white people doing time for minor possession offenses, and give their cells to the execs. They could also divvy the illicit gains among the people who were victims of these predatory practices.
So, what seemed to me to be hyperbole in the pursuit of a nice story, in the film ‘Batteries Not Included’ was actual practice, right up to the current decade? Damn.