Schumer Calls the Kettle Black

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently denounced a real estate company for its “predatory” practices in buying more than one-hundred apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Speaking to a group of tenants and other disgruntled rabblerousers, Schumer said,

There is nothing more despicable than these predatory real estate equity firms trying to make billions of dollars on the backs of tenants. This is a horrible thing. They’re like bloodsuckers. They have a crisis, and they stick their teeth into it and suck the lifeblood out of so many communities, so many neighborhoods, so many tenants.

Schumer conveniently ignores the fact that the real estate company, unlike Schumer and his colleagues, is actually producing values in exchange for the billions that they will receive.

Schumer told the crowd that he would use his “clout” as majority leader to stop the company. Which means, he will use government force—prohibitions and mandates—to compel the company to act as he believes proper. He will threaten housing producers with fines or jail if they don’t do his bidding.

Schumer and his intellectual allies evade the fact that the housing crisis was caused by him and others who share his political views. Ever eager to command and control, they have shackled and restricted housing producers across the nation. And the results have been the same everywhere—a severe housing shortage.

Rather than acknowledge his own culpability in creating the housing crisis, Schumer is using it to his own political advantage. He complains about housing providers earning billions of dollars while simultaneously holding the power to seize trillions of dollars from those providers and other producers so that he can redistribute the loot to his political supporters.

The “predatory” practice that Schumer is denouncing is common in real estate, and particularly so in New York City. Investors purchase distressed properties, remove the tenants to renovate the property, and then lease the housing for a higher, more profitable rate. In the process, they transform a dilapidated property into something much better.

Of course, it is easier to blame developers rather than admit one’s role in the housing crisis. And it is certainly more politically popular.