I may need another day or two to finish off the promised piece on how mobbing can undermine the due process rights of victims who wind up defending themselves in court. But in addition to the blog entry I posted today on tactics that could have been used in the “sonic attack” of American diplomats in Cuba, I wanted to get this article out that the San Francisco Tenants’ Union was kind enough to share on Twitter.

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“House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers” (https://qz.com/1064061/house-flippers-triggered-the-us-housing-market-crash-not-poor-subprime-borrowers-a-new-study-shows/) shouldn’t come as a surprise to any who’ve observed the appalling greed and unsavory practices of real estate speculators in the aggressive pursuit of property. In a nutshell, Gwynn Guilford’s piece elaborates on “a new NBER working paper arguing that it was wealthy or middle-class house-flipping speculators who blew up the bubble to cataclysmic proportions, and then wrecked local housing markets when they defaulted en masse.” As cited in the article, “the rise in mortgage delinquencies is virtually exclusively accounted for by real estate investors.”

These speculators were financially positioned to buy, and buy they did, an increasing number of them picking up homes with the intention of playing house flipper after holding their secondary properties for a few years or even just a few months. This is the same dynamic that appears to be occurring in my northeast Seattle neighborhood, and in Seattle as a whole. In some keynote articles about the local real estate market these last months, The Seattle Times noted that a 1940s house is being torn down every day by speculators in Seattle, and that these days your next door neighbor might just be a limited liability corporation (LLC) buying up properties considered good investments. Perhaps not coincidentally, The Seattle Times has spoken of fears of a Seattle housing bubble, a calamity that is the end result of the same runaway speculation which has affected my neighborhood.

The incidence of small-time speculators trying to play with the big boys and grab a piece of the real estate pie may also have bearing on how tenants in a gentrifying neighborhood are regarded and treated. Based on my experiences here in northeast Seattle, I suspect that as small-time builders and speculators flock to an area, criminal practices such as real estate mobbing and other “shadow services,” to use the words of the real estate mobbers themselves, also increase. Tenant buyouts like those seen in New York City and San Francisco, even though they may be forced, probably reflect at least a mild interest in avoiding wrongdoing. When allied house flippers position themselves around a tenant and attempt to bully her out of her legal home—a residence the owners do not wish to sell—this is probably the result of the kind of cronyism that comes with a nasty neighborhood watch, egged on by small-time speculators and the real estate agents who profit from them, and convinced of its right to carve up the street and divide up the spoils.

The greed of small-time house flippers who already have homes is another reason why housing speculation should be restricted and neighborhoods like mine scrutinized for racketeering instigated and supported by a dysfunctional neighborhood watch. If there was a proper investigation including neighborhood interviews by the FBI or a grand jury, I’m pretty sure that the racketeering and the criminal bid to force renters like me from their homes wouldn’t take long to be aired. In my neighborhood, the complicity of at least some real estate agents who’ve attached themselves to the small-time builders and flippers—agents representing a large northwestern company—has been obvious in their willingness to join in the harassment of renters like me and threaten us and our landlords, probably with the expectation that they can force home owners who rent out their homes to relinquish their properties to speculators. The real estate agents can then profit again and again as the same houses are flipped up and down the street. And in my own neighborhood, there are new homes built after the Great Recession abated that have been flipped two and three times already. If you want to see what this looks like, take a look at some lakeside addresses in northeast Seattle on Zillow and select the option to show recent sales. In my neighborhood, that selection produces a map of yellow dots up and down the street. If you look more closely, using King County property records, for example, you’ll see that houses changing hands every few years in such neighborhoods is commonplace.

We all need housing. When your neighbors are speculators who believe they have the right to push others out of the neighborhood in favor of bigger and more expensive houses in their drive to create a million dollar row before they flip their homes, it is an indicator that the real purpose of a housing “market” has become corrupted. The purpose of the housing market should be to provide affordable homes for as many as possible.