Sam Zell was doing the same shit in the '00s (and still is) and even in the same area https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-05-27-0705260052-story.html this one ended up with my grandmother losing her retirement plans she financing.
There’s always scams and they often target those most vulnerable who can’t fight back. You’d think there should be some protections or safety nets but gods of capitalism require blood sacrifices
I’m not sure if you read the article, or if your grandma was fabulously wealthy, but everyone involved here is rich as shit.
People like French paid a few hundred thousand dollars upfront to live in the community, then taxes, utilities, and a maintenance fee every month. In recent years, that maintenance fee has risen above $1,300.
“We thought that was outrageous,” French said. “Little did we know what was coming.”
What was coming was $6,150 a month, a more than 300% increase from new property owner, Jaybird Senior Living.
These are wealthy people who paid hundreds of thousands upfront to a place they still technically rent from. They can easily move, and they absolutely have the money to fight back.
Senior living is often fraught with bullshit but these people are just angry that their gated community got more expensive. They weren’t priced out, they were annoyed.
Going by the first sentence of your link, these are two very different situations
The head of Illinois’ mobile home owners association, Terry Nelson, is elated.
The homes in the article we’re commenting on are quite different from mobile homes.
Same area, st Charles and Elgin are one town apart. It’s been a while since I checked but I think $100k-200k would be the average house price in the area. I’m a little closer to the city than those burbs and tiny foreclosures that aren’t even up to code can be 200k.
So yeah that might be rich compared to some areas but for this area it’s not but all surprising.
This news are actually quite similar. You’ll find in both people investing heavily, most of their retirement savings, to establish themselves and then the management company or property owner jacking up the rent to the point where people can no longer live there and have to abandon their investment/retirement fund. Not too complicated of a comparison really.
If $200k is the average house price, now you can begin to see that
A) these are not average houses
B) these people are not struggling, at all, to make ends meet
Because these are very different situations
These are retirees who likely have pensions and 401Ks built up over half a century.
If you want to talk about wealthy people, what about the people who likely spent tens of millions of dollars to buy out the community and then jacked up fees by $50k per year overnight? Why can’t they be the ones suffering rather than some 95 year old woman who now needs to move and leave everyone she knows behind?
So old people should never have contracts that expire? That doesn’t seem like it would benefit the old people much.
Like I just don’t understand the outrage. They’re inconvenienced and old?
