New York City’s 100 worst landlords

Gotta catch ’em all.

Treating shelter — a human right and necessity that sits just above food on the hierarchy of needs — as a commodity inevitably pits the creation and maintenance of wealth against the survival of the people for whom a home is a place to live, not an asset.

American prosperity has historically come from two sources — intergenerational wealth accumulation through family homes; and gains made by organized labor that increased wages and improved working conditions.

Both kinds of mobility were unevenly distributed on racial lines, but of the two, the more universal was always labor protections, not extreme measures to increase property prices. For 40 years, we’ve been whittling away at labor rights and going all in on property prices.

Convincing middle-class people to accept extreme measures to drive up the prices of housing (and thus the value of their single major asset) rather than labor rights — including adequate pensions, affordable education, and universal health care — was a clever gambit.

It split working people, convincing those who’d bought their homes with their labor gains to betray the next generation of workers, in the name of defending their kids’ futures, which were riding on huge gains from property prices, not employment.