#leaving the UC

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Scared of Leaving?

HWDYKYM got this in our ask box about seven years ago:

“I’m a second gen from Australia, and I’m currently questioning the beliefs and customs of the unification church. I just wanted to ask, when you left the church, did you feel scared at all? Did the thought of ‘what if all they taught was right’ ever cross your mind? I’m currently stuck between leaving the church or staying, and am currently exploring other more ‘normal’ religions. Many thanks.”

I decided to share this with some other second generation who left the church and here are some of their responses:

I legitimately wondered if I was going to get struck by lightening or run over by a car for the first year or so. My mom had had a spiritual child that left and then drowned a few months later, so as a kid she drilled into me that that’s what happens when you leave. Plus I was terrified to tell people about where I “came from” because I thought I would be judged or thrown out (like in so many establishments on STF) so it took me a long time to develop my family of choice.

When I was younger I had told my parents that I wanted to explore other religions, and they all but forbid me from doing it. They explained that since they knew that following the church was the right path, there was no point in me exploring others. My response was, “Well if it’s right, then there’s no harm in looking elsewhere, because I’ll obviously find my way back,” but they wouldn’t have it. Whether out of fear or just plain stubbornness I still don’t know. To me that is evidence of the total control the church exerts over its members. It forbids them to have empathy or open-mindedness, and it prevents them from experiencing all the goodness this world has to offer. The Divine Principle teaches that the purpose of life is to attain happiness, and I was anything but happy in the church. Yes I terrified for months before and after I “left,” although I can’t pinpoint an exact event or time. It was more of a series of lifestyle changes that gradually brought me away, but also made me happier and improved my quality of life. As things got better, my fear eventually subsided. My advice? Go explore! Committing to a life of faith is a big decision and should be taken seriously. Land in a place where you are comfortable to be free, express yourself, and explore your unique potential.

I always come back to this answer to the original question: ‘If your parents got to choose their own faith that their parents probably didn’t agree with, why can’t you?’ Isn’t that part of growing? Would they have discovered the UC if they didn’t explore other religions, different from their own parents’? Also the “pure blood lineage” scenario runs through some sects of the Jewish, Muslim, and basically Judeo-Christian teachings, so the UC is not special in that sense. That’s how the church kept me in fear of disbanding. It’s a false-privileged old way of controlling someone, and it’s the very definition of conditional love. I would let this person know that practically all of 2nd gens I know have left the church, because we found that the world is bigger than the narrow confines of the UC. It’s okay to question things just like Martin Luther did with starting the Protestant Church, and Rev. Moon did with the UC, and what the Pope is doing right now.

Something I find comfort in is the idea that good people are good people, that goodness is goodness, regardless of affiliation or belief. It’s  your character and your actions that matter, that determine the quality of your life and the impact you can have on the world, much more than your creed. Even the DP teaches that people with good hearts are the ones actually closest to God, rather than “whitewashed tombs” of people who claim the truth. Even if it turns out that you’re “wrong” in what side of the fence you decide to jump down on, it doesn’t really matter as long as you live your life well. It’s hard to know or sure what’s true. We just have to do our best with whatever knowledge and certainty we do have. If there is a Heaven, I think all the people who are truly loving, generous, and courageous are the ones who will end up there – be they atheists, Hindus, Mormons, or even Unificationists.

From a young age, I knew the cost of being a Unificationist was big, especially if you really believed in it. I’m not one to half-ass anything, and if Moon was the messiah, I wanted to get matched by him, do at least two years of STF, convert all my friends, make the Principle known, create a perfect heteronormative family under the reign of Cheon Il Guk, and pay indemnity for my Japanese sins. But for some reason, I was always suspicious of it all. I felt like I didn’t have enough reasons to believe. I would do conditions of 210 bows for 40 days, cold showers, fasting, etc., to receive an undeniable confirmation that Moon was truly the Lord of the Second Advent, like the myths we heard from early UC history. Nothing ever came. What kept me in for so long was the fact that I never experienced a love like I did among church members. That was my testimony and the reason I put my faith in Moon. Eventually, when I discovered the atrocities done in the name of Moon and by Moon, especially after I read Nansook Hong’s book “In the Shadow of the Moons” I knew I couldn’t stay much longer. I was scared of leaving because of my parents, of course, but also because I thought I’d never have friends like I did in the UC. We constantly heard that rhetoric that friendships outside the Church are pointless and what BCs share is unique, etc. After I left, though, I developed deeper friendships than I had in the church. I had friends who loved me no matter what my views on spirituality were and loved me when I fucked up and I found out what true love—that unconditional love we were told about at camp—was really about. I somehow ending up forming convictions in God, Jesus, etc., that I couldn’t ignore, and despite my cynicism and fear of organized religion, I ended up in a progressive Christian community that could support me in my faith (and me with theirs) and live out these convictions presented by Jesus together. All that to say, it may be really hard leaving, but it will be worth it. Explore your convictions, your ideas, and be the best you. It fucks with Moonies’ heads when they see somebody so clearly living out true love and not buying into their crap—and outright rejecting it.

First I would tell he or she that “religion” should not be perceived as a social group that one just joins. Even though, that’s basically what it is on the surface. You should look deeper inside yourself. Find something you truly believe in. For me it’s God. I’m not religious. I’m spiritual. Which is something all religions can help you discover within your self. But you should not have to need/depend on a religious group to find/keep your spirituality. I mean that’s just my perspective. Just be an open person. Be infinite. Take everything in. And live your life. I was horrified at the beginning. But then you’re just free. And that’s awesome.

I was afraid whenever I’d go against the church’s rules, but I found that more often than not I wouldn’t feel the repercussions of sin that were promised. The more I went against the church, ultimately the less afraid I became. There was a lot of questioning and doubt, I certainly wondered what would happen to me, and what if they were right. I think it’s good to seek out truth for yourself. Ultimately if you find the church is your answer then you can go back. They’re desperate for more members anyway.

While I was questioning my beliefs, I felt a lot of shame and guilt about being ungrateful for TP, and doubting them so much. I feared God would be disappointed in my lack of faith. But the more evidence I found that the faith itself was inconsistent and false, the more boldly I was able to think for myself and discover who I am. It’s terrifying at first to think that everyone you know and all the adults you’ve looked up to are wrong. But it also gives you freedom, when you can ascertain your own beliefs instead of just checking in with what “Father says”.

There are a million and one religions that purport that they are “right” and “the one”. I don’t think God (if you believe in God) would screw the rest of the groups based on what religion they belong to or what specific traditions they encourage, but rather the love we offer to others. Isn’t that unconditional love?

For me leaving the church was a very big deal. I would say that the fear was more to do with losing something I had invested my time, energy and person into. Eventually the cognitive dissonance becomes too strong and the overwhelming conclusion that what the UC teaches is not true just becomes your new normal. The process is real, it takes time though. Joining other religions can help as a kind of a ‘step down’. I’ve explored a few Christian churches and found that in some circles, having been part of another religion that I believed in and left, has made me far more skeptical than most of the congregation. In others I’ve met people who have had a similar journey from conservative faith into something more complex (and liberal).

Not so much fear for me. Maybe little fleeting twinges of it early on. But it was a slower transition and more gradual over time which I’m sure made it easier. Two points to remember: 1)  I’ve never seriously considered that I could permanently lose my relationship with my mother. We’re related by blood. We disagree at times, but if anything threatened my life. She’d only be closer to me, no matter what had divided us. She’s my mother. She loves me. How much more would that apply to my father in heaven. Who not only gave me physical life, but a spiritual nature as well. 2)   Would it make sense, if you invested in my business, that I would tell you…  "Don’t trust information from anyone else but me. Because only my information will help you understand my stock and make the right choice about investing in it. The more you trust my information, and ignore all other information, the better financial decisions you will make!” That doesn’t work for ANYTHING you can name in life! The more diverse information you receive, the more thoroughly you will understand something, and the better decisions you will then make. So why is it that the ones who claim to have the highest, most important truth want to prohibit you from getting information from anyone but them? What are they afraid of? People that have FACTS on their side, never fear any information that would seem to contradict them, because if they have enough facts on their side, they can easily handle any challenge offered. But the UC fears such challenges, and wants you to believe that being fully informed is even “evil” and can undermine the supposed greatest truth there is! But that is ridiculous of course, seeing as how, in ANY question in life—finances, house purchasing, medical issues, intimate relationships, science…  ANYTHING…  the more informed I am, the more thoroughly I understand something, the more I can make the best informed decision!   Hope this helped.  God bless!

Fear is not a good reason to stay in the UC

Indemnity is a Moon Trap

conformity

Bending Truth – Cognitive Dissonance

Sun Myung Moon’s theology used to control members

Fear and Loathing at Cheongpyeong

Where Sun Myung Moon got his theology

The Korean background of Sun Myung Moon’s church

The Moon church is unequivocally not Christian

[synthaphone]

finished the chocolate and custard centibytes- the dessert brothers

with that, every color i've finished converted art for that existed pre-conversion now has a UC counterpart. Hooray!

[hsslilly-blog]

What kind of things do Hunt and Claire agree on as they plan to have a kid?

Like hypothetically, if your parents are a famous movie star and director, you’re gonna naturally be curious about film and tv. So maybe they say, like, you can be in the school play if you really want to, but we’re not letting you work as a child star

i think most of their conversations about it revolve around this exact topic. this ended up too long, i'm so sorry.

claire has lots of anxieties about being a mother: it is something she wants to be ("eventually... one day... in the future") but she feels very insecure about it. sometimes she thinks she's not cut for it. i think claire just fears repeating what both her parents did to her when she was a child. "planning" a child feels very weird to her, and i think it is a topic of conversation she Avoids (just like she Avoided the topic of marriage.) this is a theme in claire's character: for someone who demands clarity from her partners, she sure likes avoiding topics she finds uncomfortable. and, well, hunt does not.

so these conversations are not something she can escape from. i think it takes a while for hunt to figure out if: 1. claire wants to marry; 2. claire wants to have a child; and then, finally 3. how this is going to happen. at first claire says they shouldn't plan at all, that things are going to work out just fine. hunt tells her this is absurd. she says it's not fair to the child to have everything set in place before they're even here! hunt asks her if bringing a child into the world without any preparation is any fairer. as always, conflict moves them, so this is when they start having a productive discussion.

(it takes her a while but claire eventually understands that "planning for a child" is different from "planning their entire life ahead" and that her parents were complex individuals.)

as a former child star, claire would be terrified of putting her children in the same situation. the stress and pressure of it all, plus her dynamics with her parents (and her mother's fixation on her acting career) greatly defined her person. and she's a bit weirder because of it. i believe hunt shares her sentiment; he's more than aware how ruthless the industry can be for adults, let alone for children.

there are two things they agree very early on: their children may be interested in any art form (or whatever else they may like), but they're not going to pursue it professionally until they're old enough to understand what it means; and that the less exposition the better. the public wouldn't know grace's face until her 10th birthday. does baby #2 have a name? who knows. i think this is true of their relationship prior engagement as well.

most of all, i think they just want the kids to have a normal childhood. neither of them had one. they want the kids to explore who they are, try things out, make mistakes, etc, without fearing judgement (from them, or from others.) <- these are two overly critical people, and they know what criticism does to your soul. they don't want that to their children. so being kinder and accepting the babies as they are is also something hunt and claire agree on. learning experience.

i also believe they'd try to be present for their children. claire had her whole situation with her parents (one was Not There, the other one was only there when she was acting), and hunt had a very lonely childhood. so they agree on trying to be less weird about work. not easy for either of them! this is when claire has her... crisis. it does work out in the end. i think they're a happy little family.

[dailyfatefigures]

Mega Cat Project - Nyantomo Ookina Nyandam Mobile Suit Gundam SEED - Kira Yamato by MegaHouse

[candyredterezii]

praying and crying pl decent job with decent pay come back to me and or be listed i cant work at this arcade anymore LOL

[arytha]

The Flower, for the draw prompt :3c

The flower!

[ID from ALT: A portrait of my OC, Rowana, with the title 'The Flower' next to her. End ID]

Rowana!! I got obssessed with that name sometime in fourth grade and when I made this Embodiment I decided she gets to have a name aside from her Law (Vitality)!! Because I can.

Rowana is actually incarnated physically as the second known instance of Rian's species!! Which is a kind of parasitic plantlife that assimilates life around it to make its own livable biome. She finds it incredibly funny that she's in hot water with the Universal Commission because Rian exists. Its not her fault evolution decided to be terrifying :3

[mikurulucky]

They literally just be like "peace out, y'all. if you need me, i'll still be here as a ghost of some sort"

[xhanisai]

Ah, you know what’s kinda depressing?

Obviously as you can see, fandom interaction has died down so much because of people wanting to avoid leaks and spoilers and are probably waiting till this season is complete before they watch it. People who create are getting less and less traction and are getting discouraged.

Imagine how much worse it will get for the seasons to come?

What made the ML fandom so fun is how it’s full of amazing fan-content and how everyone is so interactive and fun. That’s not gonna last if people are gonna have the anxiety of being spoiled and if people aren’t interacting with the posts they like. 

Such a shame.

[little-eye-guy]

well i guess i’m awake now

[bittwitchy]

see the reality is i post on my rps usually when nobodys been there a bit and nobody is probably online, but the mental illness in me keeps saying its bc everyone secretly hates me and i dont deserve love, and when i tell a gov doctor that, they basically just say ‘take your antidepressant’s and shut up’ which is also funny when said gov doctor wont refill my fucking antidepressants in the first place

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

https://youtu.be/vpnxd31y0Fo

Julia Galef   Big Think   September 25, 2013

The sunk cost fallacy means making a choice not based on what outcome you think is going to be the best going forward but instead based on a desire not to see your past investment go to waste.

___________________________________

Julia Galef is a New York-based writer and public speaker specializing in science, rationality, and design. She serves on the board of directors of the New York City Skeptics, co-hosts their official podcast, Rationally Speaking, and co-writes the blog Rationally Speaking along with philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci. She has moderated panel discussions at The Amazing Meeting and the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, and gives frequent public lectures to organizations including the Center for Inquiry and the Secular Student Alliance. Julia received her B.A. in statistics from Columbia in 2005.

TRANSCRIPT: So I want to introduce you to a concept known as the sunk cost fallacy.  Imagine that you’re going to the store and you’re halfway there when you realize, “Oh wait, the store is actually closed today.”  But you figure, “Well, I’ve already come ten blocks.  I might as well just go all the way to the store, you know, so that my ten blocks of walking won’t have been wasted.  Well, this is a transparently silly way to reason and I doubt that any of us would actually go all the way to a store that we knew was closed just because we’d already gone ten blocks.

But this pattern of thinking is actually surprisingly common in scenarios that are a little bit less obvious than the store example.  So, say you’re in a career and it’s becoming more and more clear to you that this isn’t actually a fulfilling career for you.  You’d probably be happier somewhere else.  But you figure I’ll just stick with it because I don’t want my past ten years of effort and time and money to have been wasted.  So the time and money and effort and whatever else you’ve already spent is what we call the sunk cost.  It’s gone no matter what you do going forward.  And now you’re just trying to decide given that I’ve already spent that money or time or whatever, what choice is going to produce the best outcome for my future.

And the sunk cost fallacy then means making a choice not based on what outcome you think is going to be the best going forward but instead based on a desire not to see your past investment go to waste.

Once you start paying attention to the sunk cost fallacy you’ll probably notice at least a few things that you would like to be doing differently.  And maybe those will be small scale things like, in my case, I now am much more willing to just abandon a book if a hundred pages in I conclude that I’m not enjoying it and I’m, you know, not getting any value out of it rather than trudging through the remaining 200-300 pages of the book just because I don’t want, you know, my past investment of a hundred pages, the time that I spent reading those hundred pages to go to waste.

And you might notice some large things, too.  For example, I was in a Ph.D. program and started realizing, “Gee, this really isn’t the field for me.”  And you know, it’s a shame that I have spent the last several years preparing for and working in this Ph.D. program but I genuinely predict going forward that I’d be happier if I switched to another field.  And sometimes it really does take time to fully acknowledge to yourself that you don’t have any good reason to stick with the job or Ph.D. or project that you’ve been working on so long because sunk costs are painful.  But at least having the sunk cost fallacy on your radar means that you have the opportunity at least to push past that and make the choice that instead will lead to the better outcomes for your future.

[cleocatrablossy]

Y’know what fuck UC Santa Cruz if I can’t figure out what fucking careers are linked to a course without it getting so confusing and overwhelming I start to fucking Cry I have very little interest in that school

[humanspaceflightday]

NEW ZEALAND - Yuri’s Night 2024 International Space Event at the Air Force Museum.

Yuri’s Night 2024 at the Air Force Museum of NZ, an International Space Celebration; Come along and see Canterbury’s Aerospace on display, completely free; Turn up any time throughout the day (below for some workshop times)

– Planetarium tours – Mars Rover display – Build-Your-Own-Rocket workshops – Static Rocket displays – Giveaways (from stickers to aerospace collectibles) – Astronomical displays – Wind Tunnel exhibit – Build a Shuttle – Send a postcard to space (Really!) – watch a rocket launch (weather dependant) – Touch a piece of rocket that’s returned from Space! – Spot Prizes of cool aerospace swag! – and so much more!

Yuri Gagarin became the first human in Space on April 12th 1961. Fast forward 40 years and “Yuri’s Night” was created as an international space party, celebrating everything aerospace!

– Rocket Workshops at 10am and 2pm (spaces limited) – Rocket Launch at 1pm weather dependant – Planetarium tour numbers subject to space constraints

– Therese Angelo Wing of the Museum (hang a left and go past the cafe upon entering)

Proudly brought to you by the Christchurch Rocketeers, Royal Aeronautical Society of NZ, and the Air Force Museum of New Zealand

Event displays volunteered by: – Christchurch Rocketeers – Royal Aeronautical Society of NZ – Air Force Museum of NZ – Canterbury Astronomical Society – Aerospace New Zealand/ Aotearoa Aerospace Academy – House of Science – UC Aerospace Club – SpacewardBoundNZ – Canterbury Astronomical Society

Yuri’s Night 2024 International Space Event WHERE: 2024-Apr-13 @ 09:30 AM - 2024-Apr-13 @ 04:00 PM WHEN: Air Force Museum of New Zealand Harvard Avenue, Wigram, Christchurch, New Zealand

[adhdclownfromhell]

Uh oh...

[chungledown-bimothy]

I cannot overstate how much I love Tom Lehrer's story. It sounds so fake but is entirely real.

He's a goddamn genius- he started studying mathematics at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated magna cum laude. He worked at Los Alamos for a few years before being drafted and working for the NSA, where he claims to have invented jello shots to get around alcohol bans.

He then went back to Harvard for a couple years before starting to teach political science at MIT.

Through all of that, he was writing and performing both some of the funniest shit you'll ever hear (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango) and absolutely scathing political satire (Who's Next, Wernher von Braun, Send the Marines). Until the mid/late 60s counterculture gained momentum. He didn't like their aesthetic, so he stopped making music.

Shortly after, he moved to California and started teaching math and musical theater history at UC Santa Cruz for the next 30 years.

I don't know if non-Californians understand just how goddamn funny that is. It's where stoners and math (and now computer science) kids who couldn't get into Berkeley go. Leaving Harvard/MIT for UCSC is peak academic phoning it in. And by all accounts he had a blast.

Plus the whole putting all of his music in the public domain thing. That fucked.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street’s Internet of Shit slumlords

The American Dream, such as it is, used to be two dreams, one based on work and solidarity, the other on asset appreciation and disconnected individualism. We killed the first one.

As the New Deal gave way to the post-war social safety net, Americans discovered two paths to social mobility: they could join a union, and they could buy a home. Joining a union meant that your wages would rise with productivity, and that the democratic ideal that you were meant to approach once every two years at the ballot-box could follow you into the building you spent more waking hours in than any other: your jobsite.

Labor unions used their political power to win labor rights, so that even workers who weren't a union couldn't be arbitrarily fired, or maimed on the job with impunity, or harassed or abused. And while the labor movement was mired in the same racist legacy that every American institution brought forward out of genocide and slavery, where racialized people started unions of their own or demanded representation from the unions who nominally represented them, they thrived.

Then there were houses. On the one hand, owning your home insulated you from the petty tyranny of the landlord, the threat of eviction, rent hikes, indifferent or dangerous building maintenance, and all the other miseries that arise when you think of a building as your home and someone else thinks of it as an asset, and the board is tilted so that they win every argument.

But homeownership wasn't just sold as a way to get out from under scumbag landlords: it was primarily sold as a way to build intergenerational wealth. Your house wasn't just a place to live: it was an asset, and it appreciated.

And if the dividends of labor protection were unevenly distributed between white people and racial minorities, the dividends of home ownership were almost entirely hoarded by white families. Federal policies – redlining – combined with racist lending at the local level, meant that Black families and other racialized groups were stuck in tenancy, while white families build wealth thanks to federal subsidies:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170220005558/https://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Asset%20Value%20of%20Whiteness.pdf

Those were the two American dreams: a good job and your own home. We killed the first one, and the second one devoured us whole.

Without a strong labor movement, wages stagnated. Corporate power waxed, and with it, the power to pollute, to poison, to maim and to defraud. The labor movement wasn't strong enough to stop Reagan from killing free UC tuition when he was governor of California. It wasn't strong enough to hold back spiraling health care prices. It wasn't strong enough to block the business lobby from neutering antitrust and ushering in four decades of market concentration, market capture and corruption. Workers couldn't save their defined benefits pension and were railroaded into market-based 401(k)s, forcing them to play the stock casino against their bosses, ever the sucker at the poker table.

With stagnant wages and out of control medical, educational and end-of-life bills, homeownership – the thing you do as an individual, where your gain is someone else's loss – became the American secular religion. Your house wasn't just a place to sleep and keep your photo albums: if it appreciated enough, you might be able to liquidate it on your deathbed and pay off your eldercare, your healthcare, your kids' college debt, and leave enough left over for your kids' downpayments.

And so every American who had a home became the enemy of every American who didn't – including one another's children. Every home built threatened your own property values. The racist, batshit American school funding formula, which sees schools funded out of property taxes, meaning the richest kids get the best schools, turned out to be a great way to increase your property values.

Protections for tenants, meanwhile, threatened the entire American way of life – the American dream itself. Every protection a tenant got – protection from eviction or rent hikes, the legal right to a safe and well-maintained home – reduced the value of every home in town.

After all, the better a landlord has to treat their tenants, the less money a landlord can make from a rental property. The less money a landlord can make from a rental property, the less they'd bid on a house like yours if it went up for sale.

And since anyone planning to buy your house to live in it has to outbid a landlord who might want to rent it out, giving tenants any protection threatened everything – the one asset you owned, which was your plan a, b and c for paying off all that health, education, and assisted living debt:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Today, the house-as-asset scam is breathing its last. There are millions more people who need homes than there are homes available. Sure, homelessness is a fantastically complex problem, but you could address every aspect of it – addiction, mental illness, joblessness – and millions of people would still be homeless, because there aren't enough homes for them to live in:

https://headgum.com/factually-with-adam-conover/myths-about-homeless-people-with-dr-margot-kushel

70% of all inflation in 2024 came from the cost of housing; a quarter of that came from illegal collusive behavior by landlords to hike rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental-inflation

Wall Street landlords have raised gigantic war-chests and are buying up homes at a rate never before seen, converting every available single-family home in many cities from an owner-occupied home to a rental. Private equity and hedge fund landlords have elevated charging junk fees to an absurdist theater project: you pay a "convenience" charge for paying your rent in cash. But also for paying your rent by direct transfer. Oh, and also for paying in cash. When Wall Street is your landlord, your home is a slum, dangerously undermaintained, sometimes lethally so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Capitalists hate capitalism. The best thing to sell is something your customer can't live without, and that no one else has for sale. That's why "the market" loves private prisons so much:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

The vast sums Wall Street is putting into buying up all of America's available housing stock is a bet that they can establish regional monopolies over having a home, and charge all the market can bear.

That's the plan at Invitation Homes, a company that was just targeted by the FTC for a slate of eye-watering crimes against the tenants in the 80,000 single-family homes they've acquired:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-takes-action-against-invitation-homes-deceiving-renters-charging-junk-fees-withholding-security

Invitation Homes purchases homes as they come on the market, and they're also a leading customer of the "build-to-rent" housing industry, a fast-growing segment of new housing starts.

Writing about the FTC's enforcement action against Invitation Homes, Matt Soller brings in Starwood Capital Group, who manage Invitation Homes properties, and own 14,000 more homes in the sunbelt. Invitation and Starwood hate the anti-monopoly movement, and Barry Sternlicht, Starwood's billionaire CEO, really hates FTC Chair Lina Khan:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corporate-slumlords

The FTC complaint lays out a suite of just comically sleazy things ways that Invitation abuses its tenants, starting with false advertising. The company lists its houses at relatively low rents, then charges a large fee to apply to live there. When you pass the application process, you're told the rent is actually much higher, and if you walk away from the deal, you forfeit your application fee. That scam's netted Invitation $18m since 2019.

Stoller really hates junk fees, calling them "convenience fees without any convenience, service charges without any service performed." He lays out Invitation's long list of junk fees, which honestly sound like a list that Chatgpt would spit out if you prompted it for fifty junk fees that wouldn't pass the giggle-test: "utility management fees" "Lease Easy bundle fees," "air filter delivery fee," "smart home technology fees," etc etc.

"Smart home technology fee?" Yeah, Invitation's gone in hard for Internet of Shit smart home tech. The SVP who oversees Invitation's smart home fee program was ordered to "juice this hog" (you guys, juice doesn't come from hogs).

After decades of recruiting everyday American homeowners to demand anti-tenant policies that benefit giant corporations, American tenants have few rights on paper and even fewer in practice. That's left the door wide open for Invitation to abuse their tenants in a myriad of dismal and unimaginative ways: stealing their deposits, trashing their credit reports to retaliate against complaints, illegal evictions, busted appliances, mold, vermin, insects – the whole slumlord playbook.

As Stoller writes, there's a twist: "this landlord isn’t just a random slumlord, it’s one of the biggest Wall Street players in housing."

There are vast fortunes to be made in converting the human right to housing into an asset class, but those fortunes end up in the hands of a very small number of billionaires. On their own, they wouldn't have the political power to dismantle protections for tenants.

Realistically speaking, most kids who grew up in their parents' owner-occupied homes are going to end up tenants, thanks to undersupply and housing inflation. But those kids' parents have spent decades demanding policies to make their homes as valuable as possible – including mortgage tax breaks (but not rent tax breaks!), looser eviction laws, and less enforcement of what few protections tenants have.

Middle class homeowners are the useful idiots and human shields of the billionaires who are determined to force every American under 40 raise their kids in a rented slum full of spiders, ratshit and black mold, which will still cost 60% of their take-home salary.

That's why the FTC's action against Invitation Homes is such a big deal. And as Stoller points out, Chair Khan is really just implementing Kamala Harris's campaign promise to get Wall Street out of the landlord business.

Wall Street's raid on your bedroom and kitchen has inspired a generation of "finfluencer" copycats who buy and flip apartment buildings, sucking ever-larger amounts of cash out of them until they're unfit for human habitation, with mountains of rat-infested garbage ringing their crumbling walls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Any future worth living in is going to get housing right. We need to stop thinking of housing as an asset and realize that it is, first and foremost, a human right. That's the premise of my 2023 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which just came out in paperback:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause

You can't protect yourself from rising seas or rising healthcare bills through individual home-ownership. Solidarity – the kind of solidarity that once powered the union movement, and that is powering it again – is the only way to defeat the housing profiteers. The New Deal wasn't perfect, which is why whatever we do next has to be bigger, further reaching, and more inclusive than what FDR did almost a century ago.

The only minority that should be excluded from the next New Deal is billionaires.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/#rentier-tech

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

Carlos Delgado (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_-_New_York_Stock_Exchange.jpg

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/