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corporate landlords
Landlord Doublespeak and the Rise of the 'Housing Provider'
What drives the preference of landlords to call themselves “housing providers” is a desire to euphemize the landlord-tenant relationship and to obscure some of its basic and most important features.
Jul 30, 2025
Landlords want to be called “housing providers.” Industry organizations in California, Washington, Rhode Island, and elsewhere are proudly claiming the label. Equal to this craving to be called “housing providers,” it seems, is the wish among landlords to no longer be called landlords. The term is antiquated, they say, and has a negative stigma that doesn’t reflect reality. The industry is not particularly secretive about these desires or the reasons behind them, which have to do with image and narrative.
The dictionary definition of landlord is precise enough, however, and, in fact, couldn’t be plainer: “The owner of property (such as land, houses, or apartments) that is leased or rented to another,” according to Merriam-Webster.com. The definition identifies the essential feature of any residential landlord—that they engage in a financial transaction to lease living space. This seems straightforward enough and noncontroversial. The motivation of the industry is thus not related to any mismatch between our common understanding of the word and its most essential attribute.
Instead, what drives the preference of landlords to call themselves “housing providers” is a type of Orwellian doublespeak intended to euphemize the landlord-tenant relationship and to obscure some of its basic and most important features. What does the phrase obscure? For one, it elides the basic extractive nature of landlording, the fact that landlords expect, in fact, rely upon the relationship to be monetarily profitable to them. This is the critical fact of landlording, that it is done in the main to make a profit.
Granted there are some instances of landlords renting to family members or others without expectations of profit, but these exceptions are merely that—exceptions. The English language routinely makes distinctions between services rendered for a fee and those provided on other bases. The difference between “housing provider” and landlord is the difference between a date and a paid escort or sex worker, it is the difference between the volunteer and the mercenary, between a financial gift and an interest-bearing loan. The English language is not unique in containing words that make clear the monetary exchange and profit that define some relationships. We use these words because the information they contain is consequential.
If the landlord industry truly wants to do something to burnish its public image, it might consider publicly rejecting or sanctioning members of its community who hiked rents in Los Angeles County by 20% in the aftermath of the fires of January 2025.
This attempt to obscure the profit motive in landlording is all the more problematic because those who would call themselves “housing providers” in one breath, will, in the next, argue against rent stabilization, tenant protections, and other regulations on the basis that these policies make their business unprofitable, or less profitable than they would prefer. This is wanting it both ways—attempting to hide the profit motive while simultaneously insisting on it.
“Housing provider” is also meant to conceal the power dynamics of the landlord-tenant relationship, one in which landlords hold the privileges associated with property ownership, the ability to define the terms of acceptable behavior and limits of property use available to tenants, and the ultimate power of eviction. Moreover, at a time when corporate landlords are extending their reach into the market, and we see the spread of price-fixing algorithms to maximize rents and profit, AI-driven tenant screening algorithms to perform background checks, and greater concentration and market power at the industry scale, the insistence on the phrase “housing provider” is an obvious attempt at happy-faced distraction.
Just as important as the attempt to disguise profit motive and landlord power is the effort to dodge whatever negative connotations attach to the term landlord. “Housing provider” is meant to avoid images of rapaciousness and greed, or to conjure images of benevolence and even charity, or to do both. The use of the phrase is, in other words, an attempt, acknowledged by the industry, to control a narrative. As such it is a political act, an effort to persuade and to establish a particular understanding of who landlords are and what they do, all in the service of influencing public debate and public policy. This is not to argue that tenants don’t also try to influence the public narrative; of course they do. It is merely to note that this phrase, “housing provider,” is a calculated bid to construct meaning in a highly contested policy area and it needs to be recognized as such. Those who choose to adopt the phrase choose to adopt the narrative.
If the landlord industry truly wants to do something to burnish its public image, it might consider publicly rejecting or sanctioning members of its community who hiked rents in Los Angeles County by 20% in the aftermath of the fires of January 2025. It might help to police property owners who evicted tenants during the pandemic in violation of federal and local laws. It might take action to address sexual harassment of low-income women by landlords, or address any of a number of discriminatory or exploitative practices that haunt the industry. Those wishing to hide behind the “housing provider” label will argue that not all landlords are bad, which is of course true. They will say only a portion of landlords engage in the practices that give landlord its stigma. But, if the only response by the industry is to stop using the word landlord, it betrays a self-serving concern that does little to improve negative public perceptions and, in fact, largely confirms them.
We don’t call Exxon an “oil provider,” nor do we call GM an “automobile provider.” We don’t even call the corner mom-and-pop store a “grocery provider.” There is no reason to accept the kind of politically motivated doublespeak behind the rise of “housing provider.”
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'We the People—Not the Wealthy Few': Voters Target Greed of Landlords, Insurers, and Gas Giants
"We deserve a government that uses our money to fund our care, not one that uses our money to line the pockets of corporations," said one protester.
Feb 26, 2025
After meeting with their members of Congress, working-class voters on Wednesday marched to the Washington, D.C. offices of three companies behind the nation's housing, health, and climate crises that are set to cash in on federal Republicans' planned tax giveaways.
Organized by People's Action Institute, the protest targeted Blackstone, an investment company that has become the world's largest corporate landlord; UnitedHealth, the country's biggest health insurance company; and American Gas Association, which represents more than 200 energy companies that provide services to 189 million Americans.
The participants—who hailed from 60 congressional districts across 27 states—emphasized issues including unaffordable rent rates, housing insecurity, homelessness, denied medical treatment, unpayable healthcare costs, high utility bills, health harms from fossil fuels, and corporate lobbying for tax cuts that benefit companies and billionaires rather than working people.
"We're here today because we want to make the rich pay their fair share!" declared JJ Ramirez of People's Action Institute member organization VOCAL-Texas. "Blackstone is a private equity company that has over 300,000 rental properties across the country. They gobble up these homes, raise our rents, price gouge us, and then evict us when we can't afford to live in their places. We're here today because Blackstone has conspired with other corporate bad actors so they can gobble up everything that we have."
While the protesters gathered outside Blackstone, they stressed that corporate landlords in general are an issue. Ann Kiesling of Progressive Maryland, which supported tenants at the Enclave Silver Spring apartment complex, said that "I will never forget a woman with a disability telling me about the time she had to hop up, with the help of a neighbor, 15 flights of stairs to get to her apartment because the landlords refused to fix the elevators. I will never forget the parents of a four-year-old telling me how they had to heat up water on their stove to give their kid baths because their landlord refused to fix their hot water for over a month."
"An out-of-state private equity landlord, Hampshire Properties, is raking in massive profits by charging luxury rent prices while letting the building fall apart and leaving tenants with the consequences," Kiesling continued. "And while we are here fighting for basic living conditions against mold, broken elevators, pest infestations, corporate landlords like Hampshire Properties, like Greystar, like Blackstone, are pouring our rent money into lobbyists and elected officials' campaigns instead of fixing their buildings."
Hannah Peterson, a disabled veteran, seminary student, and member of the People's Lobby in Chicago, pointed out Wednesday that "just last night, House Republicans passed their budget resolution to cut millions from Medicaid."
That resolution
sets the stage for cutting not only $880 billion from the healthcare program that serves low-income Americans, but also $230 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. Elected Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House, want to gut safety net programs to fund an expansion of tax giveaways to the rich that GOP lawmakers passed and President Donald Trump signed in 2017.
"Republicans are already funneling our tax dollars out of programs our communities need and into pockets of private corporations and billionaires," Peterson said. "We deserve a government that uses our money to fund our care, not one that uses our money to line the pockets of corporations."
As Medicare for All advocates often highlight, although the United States has Medicaid and Medicare, which serves seniors, it is the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare. Instead, the U.S. has a for-profit system that often leaves patients unable to access or afford necessary care, including because of denials from insurance companies.
"To the folks at UnitedHealthcare... if you really care about people's health, why don't you publicly come out and oppose the cuts to Medicaid?" asked Citizen Action of New York's Amelia Bittel—who has dysautonomia, a disorder that led to a heart surgery at age 35 and requires weekly blood draws.
"In my city of Syracuse, New York, 48% of the population relies on government-funded programs to get their insurance," said Bittel. "You don't need the $1.3 billion that you stand to profit from these cuts. Your company routinely reports the highest profits. Why not give back to the patients?"
At the American Gas Association, Gloria de Graves from Citizen Action of Wisconsin explained that in the Midwestern state, "if you're not familiar, we hit negative 30°F sometimes, and that means that people can freeze to death in their homes if they do not have a way to heat their homes."
"So all I'm saying is We Energies and Xcel Energy, who I have paid plenty of money to over the years, need to stop charging us so much money so that we can afford to feed ourselves, we can afford to stay housed, and when we are fleeing domestic violence, that there is a safe, electrified, and heated home to go into so that we are warm and safe in the winter," de Graves said.
Celebrating the multisite protest on Wednesday, progressive Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said that "I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, because there are people in my community that can't afford to come up here."
"It is so important to understand corporate greed and how it is embedded in environmental injustices, embedded in environmental racism," she said. "They want the federal government to continue to literally fund poisoning us, while we get sick here in our country. So they're making us sick, and we're subsidizing the fact that we don't have access to healthcare that supports our families."
In a dispatch earlier this week, People's Action executive director Sulma Arias wrote that her group "refuses to give up. We believe ordinary people have the power to rise and meet this and every moment, if we act together. We believe in the fundamental dignity of every person, without exception, and we believe government exists to serve all people—We the People—not the wealthy few."
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Government-Funded Landlord Trump Hypocritically Attacks Government Spending
The Trump real estate fortune was built by hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and huge tax breaks, none of which are available to the working people Trump is hurting with his current attacks.
Feb 04, 2025
President Donald Trump is making good on his promised threat to “dismantle Government bureaucracy” and “cut wasteful expenditures,” issuing orders to choke off the funding pipeline for federal grants and assistance programs.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Because government spending, particularly the generous big-landlord benefits baked into U.S. law and tax policy, forms the very foundation of Trump’s own wealth. The Trump real estate fortune was built by hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and huge tax breaks, none of which are available to the working people Trump is hurting with his current attacks.
Trump became wealthy the traditional American way: he was born into it. As most thoroughly described in Samuel Stein’s excellent 2019 book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Donald’s father Fred’s real estate empire began with Brooklyn and Queens housing developments financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). For some of those Trump developments, the path was literally cleared by government demolition of existing homes and buildings. Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.
That was not the only investigation targeting Fred Trump’s government-funded properties. His Maryland buildings were so decrepit and his ignoring of the residents’ pleas for help and city orders to repair so blatant that the elder Trump was actually arrested in 1976 for operating a “slum property.” A U.S. Department of Justice discrimination lawsuit during the same era showed that the Trump properties systematically blocked Black prospective renters, using racist practices like attaching to their applications a paper bearing a big letter “C”—for Colored—so they could be rejected out of hand.
Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.
That federal housing discrimination lawsuit, filed in 1973, did not just name Fred Trump. It also included the company’s president, his 27-year-old son Donald.
Donald Trump soon followed in his father’s footsteps by exploiting government programs to develop his buildings. The benefits included an unprecedented 40-year tax abatement, funding that was designed to support low-income neighborhoods, sweetheart deals to privatize public land, and government bonds used to finance his developments. “Donald Trump is probably worse than any other developer in his relentless pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” a New York deputy mayor told the New York Times in 2016.
For example, the famous Trump Tower benefited from over $163 million in tax abatements provided by New York politicians whose campaigns Trump helped fund. That money was part of what the Times estimated was nearly a billion dollars Trump received in government grants and tax breaks for his New York properties alone, not counting the government benefits for his properties in Florida, Nevada, and Atlantic City. "Donald Trump's business wouldn't be possible but for major government subsidies,” Timothy O'Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, told NPR.
Trump’s dependence on government funding is more than matched by the taxpayer dollars hoovered up by his designated government waste czar Elon Musk. As CNN has reported, the world’s richest person reached his status thanks to government loans and contracts that propped up Tesla and SpaceX in their vulnerable beginning stages. Musk still rakes in billions of dollars from government contracts and government-mandated payments to Tesla by other automakers.
“The foundation for Musk’s financial success has been the U.S. government,” tech analyst Daniel Ives told CNN.
We know that the Trump-Musk attacks on federal government programs are deeply harmful to vulnerable people, devoted civil servants, and communities and organizations trying to make the world a better place. Less well known is that Trump and Musk both owe their fortunes and careers to the very government spending they demonize now. They used government programs to climb to great heights, and now are intent on pulling up the ladder behind them.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once said that a hypocrite politician is one who cuts down a redwood tree, then stands on its stump to deliver a speech about conservation. When the wealthy and powerful Donald Trump mounts his attacks on government programs, he does so while standing on a platform built by government largesse.Keep ReadingShow Less
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