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Comment by kjbfojbejib | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm, I work for a company that helps landlords finance the purchase and repair of rental properties.

In certain very LCOL urban areas around NYC and Philadelphia, we have individuals with tens of millions of dollars of property spread out among ~$150k buildings.

They inspect their portfolio with armed bodyguards, and they very often own other businesses in the same neighborhoods that throw off money in small but regular amounts: laundromats, bars, clubs.

An an interesting aside, these individuals are almost all involved with close-knit religious groups to which they contribute great deals of capital.

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I have no idea about Philadelphia or the area "around NYC" that kjbfojbejib was talking about. But for NYC itself, here's the official landlord watchlist (ranked by number of violations and complaints) that was compiled by the public advocate's office: https://landlordwatchlist.com/landlords

Good resource for finding where not to rent, if you have the option.

...certain very LCOL urban areas around NYC and Philadelphia...

That's "Low Cost Of Living", right? That's not a synonym for "poor", so I'm not certain such situations actually exist in those metro areas?

>That's "Low Cost Of Living", right? That's not a synonym for "poor"

It is.

>so I'm not certain such situations actually exist in those metro areas?

Huh?

I don't live there, but I've been to the places we're talking about. They don't have grocery stores, and the few stores that sell food cost a lot more than the stores I'm used to, for food that isn't so nutritious. The people there don't make exorbitant amounts of money, but they'd be better off if they had better access to affordable products. They are poor because the areas they inhabit have high costs of living.

How is it that people don't know this?

They are poor because they don't make enough money. And they can't arbitrarily move, because they can't find jobs just like that, or afford another place, just like that.

They're not some middle class people who because poor because their only store is a Dean and Deluca.

I never suggested that they move; that would have been presumptuous. It's still a fact that their income would go farther if they had access to the wide range of shopping options to which many other Americans have access. To which I and my neighbors have access, and many of them have very low incomes. Nobody here would ever consider any zip code in NYC to have a low cost of living.

I guess I'll just be confused as to why we're so eager ITT to follow the lead of someone who admits to working for these landlords and continue to blur the distinction between "this area has a low cost of living" and "poor people live here". The words we use when discussing such issues matter, and this Overton window should go no further in this direction.

>An an interesting aside, these individuals are almost all involved with close-knit religious groups to which they contribute great deals of capital.

Before an edit, the above comment referred to "close-knit religious groups" surrounded by triple parentheses[0]. These are used by white supremacist and anti-Semitic posters to denote or refer to Jews. They are not, to my knowledge, an idiom commonly used in any other context.

If you're going to go there, "kjbfojbejib," remember that editing your post doesn't also edit people's memories. I assume you were just trying to be funny but that kind of humor is not welcome here. Nor is that kind of prejudice, if you were being sincere.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses

I wrote that comment using a new account to avoid being outed at work. To be very clear: your accusation is false, there was never any special parentheses, and I invite an admin to confirm that if they can.

From HN guidelines:

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

(I'm a bit torn about pointing this out in this case, but I've seen way too many people falsely accused of bigotry because people chose to interpret comments in a way different from intended. Still, this is clearly a throwaway account).

Funny how we have two fresh accounts posting in this discussion, one of which insists that the study authors must have an "agenda", and another of which gives an "aside" that exploitative slumlords "are almost all involved with (((close-knit religious groups)))".

Sounds like the ruling class is a bit agitated that we're noticing what's going on, and wants to misdirect our attention.

I mean, one or both of those accounts could be your own alts, as far as anyone knows.

I don't think the "ruling class" are so concerned about people "noticing what's going on" that they sent shills to create a couple of green accounts to post on Hacker News. That the rich exploit the poor is not exactly a shocking revelation to anyone.

Certainly, you're not helping keep things focused by implying shills and saboteurs are at work here.

On HN, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. In this case it led to a bad misunderstanding elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19470818).

Also, could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You've been breaking them, and we need you to fix that. One thing they ask you not to do is insinuate astroturfing without evidence, as you did in this comment here. Plenty of explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

More seriously, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. A certain amount of politics and ideology is unavoidable with many topics that appear on HN, but when this crosses into being the primary reason why someone uses the site, that user has left the realm of intellectual curiosity and shifted to the battlefield—exactly what we're trying to avoid HN turning into. For that reason, we ban accounts when they cross that line. More explanation on that if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

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