Ah, my first rent increase in the new house. Lovely. The letter said it was prompted by a review of prevailing rents in my area and, darn it, my rent was just too low. All I can see in my future is an upward spiral, a kind of a chase, just TRY and keep up. Once a year, every year, up goes the rent. Sooner or later, a letter will show up that pushes me beyond what I can do to keep up. What then?

Do you think I’ll ever see a letter in which “prevailing market rates went down” so my rent has been reduced $100.00? Here, let me help: NO EFFING WAY! Rents go down, mine will, at best, remain the same. More likely, just a smaller increase. And, really, more to the point, when is the last time you heard about rents going down in Santa Rosa, California? Not since 2014, for certain, I’d wager.

It’s not like I blame my landlord entirely. On the one hand, he’s just a cog in the brutal free market, doing the same thing most everyone else does these days: squeeze the market, grab every dime, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. But, on the other hand, I’m also keenly aware there’s no rule that requires a landlord to raise rents annually, no matter what. I’ve had several landlords through the years that seemed to reward the fact that I take good care of the homes I rent by NOT raising my rent year after year after year.

I got on Zillow and used one of the down and dirty calculators, how much house payment could I afford in my situation? It should be noted, it’s a generalized calculator that only takes into account basic financial situations but it’s still a solid indicator, if not a perfect predictor. Turns out, I’m ALREADY paying more in rent than the calculator says I’d be “comfortable” paying for my own house. That’s before the increase kicks in. Oh, that’s not an option, though. Just TRY to find a house priced at a point where that might be the payment amount. (Full disclosure, there ARE a few mobile homes I could get into but then I have the rent problem for the space and those landlords are actively more vicious than others.)

I listen closely whenever some politician or group announces some new plan to “address the housing crisis.” Money for this, money for that. Mostly, that money is a funnel from the government to rich people. They build a few tiny homes – at $300,000 dollars? EACH? HOW?!? Well, that’s $90,000 for the tiny and $210,000 to “grease the wheels.” Meanwhile, we’ll pass laws making it illegal to sleep on the sidewalk.

There IS a solution, though. One. Earlier, I mentioned 2014. That’s the year corporations started buying single family homes in earnest. In response to the Wall Street created “housing crisis” and economic crash brought to you by the derivatives market in 2008, the law changed in 2011, now allowing them to buy single family homes. They had been limited to apartment buildings and commercial ventures before that. They were a little slow to jump on the new opportunity but when they did, they did aggressively.

2014. Not quite ten years ago. Now, ONE pooled money investor owns enough single family homes to house the entire population of Iceland. Sure, the population of Iceland isn’t huge but that’s only ONE COMPANY. There are hundreds of them out there, now, each buying everything in sight. More and more, private buyers simply cannot compete. Those who do manage the feat, though, would be loathe to see the value of their new investment go down, so they’re not on board with any fixes. In fact, everybody in the sequence makes huge money on the artificially overpriced houses so there’s nobody in a position to do so who will ever even try to interrupt the process. After all, the only people who suffer is…well, every human being in our increasingly destabilized society – even the profiteers.

The solution is simple: return to the regulation that prevented pooled money investors from buying single family homes. That’s it. That, alone, would eventually fix the problem, assuming more building. But just building won’t do anything to correct the artificially inflated housing values so won’t start putting, say, first time buyers back into the market very quickly. It IS a solution, but it’s not the BEST solution. The BEST solution is to require the corporations that HAVE cornered the market in housing to divest, as well. That would help return pricing closer to actual value. Sure it would stabilize, likely SAVE, society but a few people might not make as much money. Heaven Forbid!

So there’s your answer, the ONE THING, I guaran-damn-tee you, would fix the problem but will never happen; require corporations to, at the very least, STOP consuming housing, especially in view of their unfair advantages. (Until 2014, you NEVER heard of offers over asking, no inspections, any condition, you choose your escrow length. How can a private buyer compete with that?)

In the meantime, this is a CHOICE, so S.T.F.U. about homeless people. Despite the rhetoric, they don’t want to be homeless, either. They didn’t create the problem. They have no power to correct the problem. They’re not going to dry up and blow away just because they lost their housing. They still need to eat. They still need to…um…eliminate waste. They still exist. They are, by and large and for the most part, victims of the unfettered greed of our once-great nation.

And can we PLEASE stop pretending that we might just build our way out of the problem? So long as the pooled money investors (rich people) can buy up any house that shows up on the market, how does building more help the victims? Sure, it helps the predators – they get more houses. But you build 1,000 houses and NOT ONE goes to a private buyer? How did you help solve the problem?

I’ll tell you this: There’s a bit of hyperbole in the above. I’m prone. But the numbers are merely exemplars to make the larger point and the point is sound – and the bit about one company being able to house all of Iceland is true and correct and, again, they’re only one company. So when you hear somebody claim they have a “solution” and their solution doesn’t involve stopping the pooled money investors? It’s not a “solution.” It’s window-dressing that will make a few rich people a little bit richer. We get a little, tiny bit closer to needing the guillotines every day…