For the last years it’s been increasingly clear to me that cities like Seattle, Washington and Albany, California placate tenants and the homeless while cutting deals that give “investors” carte blanche in the neighborhoods. Single-family homes are increasingly the focus of interest by online investment companies. For example, Oakland’s Roofstock, a company whose employees might just live in the single-family home next door.
Roofstock touts their “scientific” approach to the rental of single-family homes: “Build your SFR portfolio with Roofstock’s expert buy-box analysis, off-market sourcing, underwriting technology, and executional support.” I can’t help but wonder what they mean by “off-market sourcing.” Is this why I’ve heard of tenants living in single-family homes in Seattle who have people actually coming to the door and inquiring if the property is for sale?
With investors running free in the neighborhoods, home owners become tenants, and tenants are shunted off to live in apartments of ever-increasing rent. Cities like Albany host and support events that demonstrate a social conscience more style than substance. One of these events falls on Friday, the free shower day at Albany Pool. This is when another of those who lives nearby and appears to be aware of and involved in this continued effort to do whatever it takes to mob me out of my childhood home, shows up to staff a table and give the homeless treats. You’d think it’s about nothing more than public relations. They’re not helping people, they’re “managing” them.
While I haven’t talked about it since I try to protect what I can, the mobbing harassment over at least speaker-enabled access points follows me to Albany Pool, right next door to Albany High School and a public park. I don’t know whether the mobbing scum next door just dial up an access point when I leave the house to swim, or whether I’m followed by someone in a car or even into the building. I don’t think I’ve made it plain enough, so I will mention that I’ve also considered that running bandwidth and radio frequency close to HVAC — and there’s going to be a lot of HVAC in any institutional setting — increases carrier current transmission or the sound potential of “noisy” devices. See the AARL document I referenced in the post, Mobbing HVAC: Sources of RFI in furnaces and air conditioning. Accessing equipment by radio, for example, appears to be easy when part of the physical plant is in a side yard, as at Albany Pool, or in a parking garage as at the Albany senior living apartment where my mother lived her last years. At any rate, so far as I know, engaging in this kind of criminal harassment close to a school makes the crime even more serious.
It’s not just in Albany where tenants and the homeless are left to eat cake. Tenants in my situation in Seattle can look forward to seeking help from tenants organizations who suggest that the solution to being mobbed by rogue neighborhood watch groups is moving. Tenants in places like Seattle think they’re getting a seat at the table because tenants are seated on the City Council or because of the passage of protective codes and laws. But when you enter into a legal agreement to rent a single-family dwelling, you learn that the policy, and even the law, has nothing to do with the practice.
