Big Rent
How Landlords Conquered America
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Big Rent
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Summary
Every morning, millions of Americans sit down at desks, or put on hardhats, or step behind counters and start working for their landlords. If you’re a renter and you’re lucky, you work the first couple hours of your day so that you can pay the owner of the home you live in. Around noon, you’re then free to earn money for food and health insurance, to pay down your car loan or save for a vacation. Or maybe you’re one of the unlucky ones. You live in Phoenix, Miami, Dallas, New York, or any of the other cities big real estate investors have swooped in on. Your rent has doubled, but your wages have hardly risen at all. You toil for your landlord until late in the afternoon.
You’d be forgiven for thinking things were always like this. But they weren’t.
This is the story of how your monthly rent became big business. It’s a tale of shifting tax incentives and loosened regulations, of a leather-clad, weed-smoking rebel who decided that apartments belong on Wall Street, and the retired Superbowl winner who, baseball bat in hand, built a rental empire out of the foreclosure crisis. It’s the story of a small but feisty (and growing) tenant rights movement, and an investment craze that’s hooked thousands of desperate ordinary Americans who see rent collection as their best (or even their only) path to financial freedom.
A deviously entertaining, only-in-America yarn, Big Rent is the outrageous story of how the rent got so damn high, who really profits from it, why the golden age of the American landlord may only be getting started… and what it just might take to stop it.
Critic Reviews
“Once every decade or so, a book comes along that illuminates the hidden forces that drive our world. This is one of those books. Each page is more stunning than the last. This urgent exposé reveals the hidden force shaping our lives and economy — Big Rent — and pulls back the curtain on the people and profits behind it. It’s a truly groundbreaking, brave and thoughtful masterpiece of journalism that must be read.”
— Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of The Lords of Easy Money
— Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of The Lords of Easy Money
“The surprising origin story of America’s landlords. With crisp prose and colorful storytelling, Putzier and Parker take us on a journey from small-time dirty tricksters to titans of Wall Street, from inventive finance strategies to government interventions gone wrong, tracking how the country’s housing market was created and why it has resulted in today’s dire affordability crisis. A fascinating read!”
—Julie Satow, New York Times bestselling author of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue
—Julie Satow, New York Times bestselling author of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue
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