[edit: to be clear, this is tongue in cheek, though the circumstances where a bank made this loan seem unusual to me]
You’re referring to Gao, I’m referring to Won. Different people.
Let us closely examine the text.
>Take Won, a Chinese immigrant landlord who asked that we only use her last name. She owns a two-family house in Queens and works as a home health aide caring for an elderly couple. Her husband is a waiter at a restaurant in Manhattan's Chinatown, though he's barely been able to work since the pandemic began. Won says her tenant owes her more than $80,000 in back rent. "I just want the government to open the court," she tells Reason.
She owns a house in New York City. To put it mildly, NYC real estate is not cheap. How did she do it? Cash transaction? Is it mortgaged? Those are two very different types of ownership... but Reason makes no distinction between the two. Why? If she was on the hook for a mortgage payment, surely they would have brought it up, since it would have made her case much better. But they didn't.
The tenants owe $80,000 over a year? $6,666 a month? How big is this house? When did Won buy it? How much did she pay?
It would be two very different stories if Won had bought the place in 1970 for ten grand, versus a $2 million straw buy for a PRC upper party member. Reason doesn't want to tell us which, because it is an explicitly ideological publication, funded to promote a specific view of the world. I don't blame Reason for wanting to be the NYT of Libertarianism, but you do need to apply a degree of critical thinking to what they say.
There is absolutely zero chance a home health aide bought a house in New York City by "being frugal" any time in the 21st century. Either she bought it many decades ago, or the money came from somewhere else.
Double 3/1 duplexes in Queens go for about $1M; the monthly payments on this are about $5200/month [1]. Each unit will rent for about $2700/month [2][3], so you're making a profit of about $200/month and paying down the principal steadily. You just need to cover a $200K down-payment. Minimum wage in NYC is $15/hour, so a two-earner couple working 40-hour weeks makes about $60K/year; it could be up to $90K if they each have work 12 hour days, as many Chinese immigrants do. Live in a 1BR apartment and you're spending about $15K/year on rent, maybe $25-30K/year on all expenses. You can save up for that down payment in about 4 years.
I don't have too much sympathy for them because the risk of being unable to find a tenant and hence unable to make your mortgage payment is precisely why not everybody levers up as much as possible to buy a rental property. But that's how the numbers work out. Most people on HN could probably do it, if they had the savings habits and risk tolerance of that couple.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/17520-Baisley-Blvd-Jamaic...
[2] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/131-19-134th-St-South-Ozo...
[3] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/180-05-90th-Ave-FLOOR-1-J...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...
A few years ago I was visiting Vancouver and living in an AirBnB (private room in a house) when prices were dropping, and the owner (a school teacher) was crying about how over-leveraged she was with her million-dollar-plus house, and how she was trying to get sell it, even at a loss.
You don't get handed a random job by the job fairy and then that's the only thing you ever get to do for the rest of your life.
One reason why the housing market is such a shitshow is that there is antagonism between both sides. Tenants hate landlords, landlords hate tenants. Nobody will ever consider doing favors because the other side betrayed them.