What My Renting Experience Taught Me About Who Really Owns My City

 

I have been working on my Colorado Springs housing study for the past few months, in between mini-dramas next door and property management harassment. I have learned that much of my renting experience is explained by foreign entity ownership of rental housing: their use of apps to increase rent (not based on amenities or improvements to the property, just plain greed), hiding ownership behind LLCs, using ratio utility billing to hide other unrelated expenses, polluting the ground water with products related to illegal auto repair work, manipulating app features to generate fees & change lease dates/terms, and harass and bully anyone who challenges their extraction scheme. Actually, one-hundred percent of my experience is explained by foreign LLCs owning rental housing.

I framed my examination of Colorado Springs housing policy and developers’ websites through the lens of financialization/neoliberal economic theory to better understand decision-makers’ perception of housing needs. Next, I searched the same source documents for other participants in the decision-making and found the rest of us were not included. We were spoken about but not asked what we needed or what our vision was for our city and neighborhoods. Long story short: when I looked at household characteristics and housing type, I found renters were bearing the heaviest housing cost burden, meaning paying more than 30% of household income on housing alone. No other basic needs, just the roof over our heads. And yet, no one asked us. That is not a democratic process, it is a hierarchical paternalistic entity.

How can Colorado Springs justify to its residents that building more apartment complexes for foreign entity owners to use to extract as much profit for themselves and as little safety and security for us? I say it cannot. Yet Colorado is among the 10 states with the highest number of private equities draining our pockets, and not just in housing. Private equities run our health care, public pensions, and private sector workforce. I can’t share my study here yet, but here’s a report about private equities in Colorado: https://privateequityrisk.org/state/colorado/

If you open the link you can find your state in the drop-down and learn how equities are shaping affordability in your home. Does my experience sound familiar to your own? Please share your story.