US guru method revealed in political humour book

Sometimes descriptions of investment (or in this case shady dealing) methods preached by property gurus find their way into books about completely different topics.

An example is the following from PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores published in 1991 (another $2 op-shop bargain).

{description of 1960s welfare apartment housing in the Bronx with the author walking around bad 'hoods accompanied by Guardian Angels}

The building's landlord had offered tenants cheap apartments in return for help repairing the building, a so-called sweat-equity deal. But the leases the tenants signed weren't legally binding because the corporation that actually owned the building hadn't paid property taxes in ten years.

Then the city took over. New York has so many laws about rent control, occupancy permits, real estate transfers, co-op conversions and so forth that a special housing court is needed to sort it all out.

A housing court judge appointed an administrator to run the building. the tenants went to another city agency, the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, which promised them that in return for an enourmous amount of bureaucratic frog-walking, they'd be able to buy the building themselves. But while the tenants tried to repair the building they thought they were buying, the court-appointed administrator went into cahoots with a real esate speculator who obtained the building's mortgage, paid off the back taxes and got the tenants (now squatters) evicted by the same housing-court judge who'd appointed the administrator.

If you've ever been to New York and wondered how a city where a decent apartment is almost impossible to find got mile after mile of abandoned semi-abandoned and eminently abandonable apartment buildings, this is one of the ways it's done.

(p130)

Note that PJ is no leftie bleeding heart; rather he's a capitalist small-government libertarian.

Peter
 
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