I took a job at a leasing office to learn the industry. And, to be honest, the job has been a sea of red flags so far.
The general business model works like this: rich dude gets a cheap government loan to build fairly nice apartments and offer the bulk of them at a discount to low-income folks. At the end of the loan's life (15 years) he can either refinance his government loan, sell the apartments, or refinance them as traditional apartments with market rent. The latter two will make this dude way more money and he is not required to keep the housing affordable. Unless he is a goddamn philanthropist (he's not), it's a disgustingly clever way to get the government to pay the construction on your gentrification project.
Problem is, the low-income stuff doesn't cash flow, and the owner wants to expand his empire. So he has pumped the “market” rents up hundreds of dollars, which is way higher than anything else in the area, and literally prices out the median household income for the city. Shit rolls downhill at a very steep angle here, so of course the low occupancy rate is the fault of the leasing office for not believing in the prices hard enough.
Last week, my boss got fired. After being harangued in multiple, hours-long meetings, she took an impromptu half personal day, and that was it. I understand why they let her go, but I don't really agree with it. The next day the owner had a teleconference with the office and gave us 20 minute speech about how this is a moment in history and this is our chance to be a part of it.
Like…what? What in the cognitive dissonance did I just listen to? These are pretty nice units for subsidized housing but…who the fuck is stupid enough to fall for this? This is still a scheme to make a rich asshole richer. I still make starvation wages. The salaried employees still ruin their lives working an insane number of hours. Actually maybe the real problem is that the owner wants to employ people stupid enough to fall for this sh*t.
I don't have an ending. Thank you for listening. This has been my tedtalk.