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The Corporate Landlord Tied to Israeli Bombs and US Evictions w/ Thomas Birmingham | The Nation Podcast · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the nation podcast, where we take you behind the scenes of our biggest stories with the journalists who wrote them.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Dee Dee Gotten-Plan, special correspondent for the nation and host of the nation podcast.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: On one side of the world, a major corporate landlord is evicting tenants by jacking up rents by hundreds of dollars.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the other, its parent company is linked to Israeli bombs genocide and illegal settlements.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the multi-billion-dollar story of American landmark.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of this country's most eviction happy landlords.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Elco, its corporate parent, a powerhouse subsidiaries are tied to the Israeli military and far-right settler movements.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Elco has even been cited by the UN for facilitating human rights violations.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Birmingham spent months meeting the families at the mercy of American landmark.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: interrogating the corporate landlords profiting from them and examining the connection between one kind of displacement here in America and another thousands of miles away in the West Bank in Gaza.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's an investigative reporter and research fellow at in these times.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's also I'm pleased to say a former nation intern.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: like me, although a half century later.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: His story, the eviction kings, was produced in partnership with type investigations and is published in our December issue.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas, we're so excited to have you on the nation podcast.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for joining us.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's great to see you again.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a pleasure.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you're based in New Haven.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This story is mostly set in the South and on the West Bank.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did you stumble onto it?
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this story was born in the weeks following the 2024 presidential election.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: When there were a lot of conversations happening among tenant organizers and other groups
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: the degree of Americans' connection to what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And many of the tenant organizers, I know,
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: had started to look into potential real estate ties and the links between land disputes in the United States in terms of tenants' rights and eviction cases and potential is really ownership of those companies and an increasingly private equity dominated market.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I stumbled upon this United Nations Human Rights Office database that lists companies doing business in the West Bank and in these large illegal settlements and started going through the list to see if I could find any ties to landlords in the United States.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, the first company I actually searched was Electra, which just so happened to be the owners of American landmark, as you said, a landlord with roughly 34,000 units, 70,000 tenants, and from there it was sort of off to the races.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tell us a little bit about the origin story of American landmark.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did this company come to be and how did it come to own, what is it 34,000 units across 111 mega complexes?
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so the origin of American landmark comes from a man named Joseph Lubek who is the current CEO.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is a former corporate lawyer from Philadelphia and in the 1990s he sort of cashed in everything he had to start buying up property in Florida and launched what was then called landmark residential.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: and very, very quickly found a lot of success in kind of the speculative real estate market.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: By 2008, he had a massed almost $2 billion.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And by that point, the great recession hit.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And...
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: obviously devastated families across the country, but Lou Beck is sort of on the record talking about how he saw a lot of opportunity in that crisis.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And around that time he met the Salkan family who were the owners of a company called Elco, which is today the third largest
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Essentially, they, the Saul can family, saw the immense success that Lubak had found in his real estate operations thus far, and saw the opportunity therein.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: They purchased 90% of landmark residential, and sort of started this cycle of,
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: building multi-billion dollar portfolios together, Elco and American landmark, and selling them off again at massive gains a few years later.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that cycle has been repeating ever since.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: In that sense, Lou Beck sounds like a fairly classic real estate investor, you buy distressed properties, you put as little as possible into them, you flip them as the market rises for more and then you put your profits into more and rinse and repeat.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Did you learn any more about the solkins and where they came to Israel from or how they got into this business?
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so Elco, what I found interesting is that they are almost as old as the state of Israel itself.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've been in business since 1949, just one year after the state of Israel was created.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they have really just become a massive, massive conglomerate in all sorts of different.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: industries.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Energy, infrastructure, defense contracts, you name it, but part of the appeal based on a podcast in which a high-up executive at Electra appeared,
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: part of their appeal and getting into the United States real estate market was the potential that they saw in a company like American landmark and you know really transforming it into a full-fledged private equity firm.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what does that mean?
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's the difference between a real estate company and a private equity firm that's invested in real estate?
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah so the difference
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: in what happened when Electro took over American landmark and helped transform it into this private equity model.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Was it essentially just made all of these purchases that American landmark was making throughout the southern states where they own property purely speculative.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: necessitates that the rents at all of these properties be raised significantly, such that the
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: sort of international network of investors that have their hands in this private equity electorate pot can see the returns on their investment that they're expecting to see when electors sort of pitches them on becoming involved in the investments in the first place.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as my investigation,
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Highlights, the tenants at these properties are very much paying the price of that model.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So from the tenets point of view, rents go up much faster and they're more less responsive, more detached.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like in New York, for example, everybody who's ever rented an apartment in New York or almost everybody comes away, not a lover of landlords.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it is true that most of the bigger landlords in New York,
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: are in it for the long term.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: They hold their properties for generations.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They pass them on to their kids.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean that they don't get as much rent as they can as fast as they can.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it does mean that they're sticking around for a while.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whereas if it's just a private equity speculation, it's like get in, make money, and you know, you
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: not necessarily any continuity or any sense of long-term responsibility.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I guess that's one difference.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one thing that really, I was both fascinated by and impressed by and your reporting is how much time you got
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: from Lubek and how open he was with you.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So how did that come about?
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did you approach him?
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how did the interactions go?
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: My conversations with Lubek came in the tail end of my reporting after I already been working on the piece for basically nine months by that point.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: We essentially compiled all of the reporting that I put together and sent it on over to Lubec and his higher-ups at Electron, Elco, and yeah, we're very surprised to get a very prompt response from Lubec, you know, with the overall tone of it being wanting to set the record straight on what American landmark is doing.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the conversation with him that followed, I was in a strange way refreshed by how honest he was about the model that they're utilizing because it runs very contrary to my conversations with many other landlords and generally how landlords present the kinds of business practices that they enact.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: What stood out to me the most from my conversation with him was his admission of the degree of displacement that their company expects when they purchase a property, which is which is They anticipate that as many as 45 percent
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: of the original tenants of a property will move out as a result of American landmark taking over the property and raising the rent by in move x-words as much as four hundred dollars in one go.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so let's let's break this down because yeah it's not just four hundred dollars it's it's four hundred dollars on a thousand dollar a month initial rent so we're talking about a 40% rent increase you know now
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, Zoran Mamdoni wasn't the only one to say that the rent to damn high in New York, but 40% renting creases would never fly at least in the regulated market in the city.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So how do they, how do they get away with it?
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's start with that.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, in my conversation with him and in remarks we found from higher ups at Electra and Elco,
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The places that their properties are concentrated in is very explicit.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: They only own properties in southern states, primarily Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one particular executive at Electra is actually on the record is same that part of this appeal is that they're Republican red states.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a quote from him in the piece that says, In free market capitalism, there are a few protections for the tenant.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you want to evict a tenant in New York, you will have a lot more of a challenge than evicting the tenant in Florida.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's coming straight from Joseph Lubex higher-ups that this model is enabled by the fact that there are so few tenants protections in the states where they own property.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's part of their strategy too is to buy properties in states where there are very few or non-existent tenant protections.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then when they buy a building, what do they do to justify these rent increases?
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the story follows a tenant named Dyeron Kelly in Charlotte, North Carolina, who
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: was living out in American landmark property when they took over, and he describes the quote-unquote renovations that American landmark put in throughout the property to sort of justify the $400 month rank crease that he was hit with right off the bat.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: He sort of described them as gadgets,
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: light fixtures, doorkies that work like hotels, you know, new cabinet doors, but his fridge, his stove, the major appliances, were all unchanged.
• 13:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, once you tack on a $400 rent increase for say $800 or maybe even $1,200 worth of gadgets,
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: the rent increase stays for it.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like you have to show that you've paid off your appliances and now it goes down.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just stays up.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they apparently pack something else on top of that.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so the $104,000 increase is just on the base rent.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: In all American landmark properties, they also have what's deemed a concierge package of additional fees that are almost all mandatory for the tenant to enroll in.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: These include a Wi-Fi and cable service, a valet trash pickup service, and a host of other $5, $10.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: charges that most tenants I talked with had no idea why they were there in the first place.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that for many tenants I spoke with, acted as an additional rent increase in the neighborhood of $150 to $200 in the sort of combined total of all of these extra fees that American landmark rolls out when they took over property as well.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's say your net income is $2,400 a month.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you rent this apartment for 1,000 or 1,200 a month, and you're very happy.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then suddenly it's $1,400.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then with concierge fees, you're talking $1,600.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, you're still at 2400 for your net income.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you're now facing the choice between food, gas, heat, and your rent.
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And probably having to stretch out maybe an extra week in the month before you can cover the whole rent.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So maybe you're late.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: 10 days, then what happens?
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, and I also just wanted to note that most of the tenants I spoke with are very much working class.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Truck drivers, concert rigors, stay at home, moms.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so these increases were very devastating when they first hit.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, so in cases like Darren Kelly's and the other tenants I spoke with,
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Once you hit that 10, sometimes 15 day mark and you're behind on rent, American landmark will file an eviction against you.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are very sort of trigger-happy.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's say when it comes to filing evictions, some landlords will wait substantially longer or have to wait substantially longer because there are
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know increased regulations on when landlords can file eviction cases and when that eviction case hits, there are even further fees that American landmark can charge to tennis.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is very standard practice for landlords, but I spoke with someone at the eviction lab
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: will face an additional $180 in fees every time an eviction is filed against them.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And some of the tenants I spoke with an American landmark said that the fees that they faced as a result of the eviction filing themselves climbed as high as $400.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: On top of the additional rent on top of the additional fees,
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so there were just many cases in the tenants that I spoke with, where it was very apparent just how quickly these costs just spiraled out of control.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, the reason the story is called the eviction kings.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: is because you found an eviction rate that's way out of line, even with the norm and a sector not known for benevolence.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So give us a sense of statistically how much more predatory American landmark is, than other landlords?
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, yeah.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's very difficult to produce a average eviction rate or look at this comparatively.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: but the eviction lab which is based out of Princeton gets pretty close and their average national eviction filing rate hovers around seven eight percent every year.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in any of the areas that they look at, the peak of that average they've found is around 23 percent.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: at multiple American landmark properties that I visited that I looked into the eviction behind rate hits 50, 60, 70, even 80 percent.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So nine to 10 times that national average.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: These kind of exacerbated rates, I found we looked at thousands and thousands of eviction filings.
• 18:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: They weren't concentrated in any particular area, all of the states where American landmark owns property had at least one property with a greatly exacerbated eviction filing rate.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we also found evidence that these eviction filing rates are a dramatic increase even from the previous owners of these properties at Diron Kelly's property in Charlotte that I spoke about earlier.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: The previous owners were filing at a rate of around 16%, which is high, which is high.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But American landmark is filing there at around 65 to 70%.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the rate quadrupled after they took over.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, presumably, in order to be able to keep doing that, they have to be doing it a pretty hot market.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Joseph Lubeck was a columnist at Forbes for a brief period of time.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so we get a lot of insight into...
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: his model from a lot of those publications, and yeah, he specifically has written about cities in, quote unquote, hottest markets in the Sun Belt, cities like Charlotte, so you like Richmond, Virginia, like Jacksonville, Florida, where he essentially predicts that the markets in these cities will lend themselves particularly well towards sustainable, very high
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: my reporting found that he was right on the money about that.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Charlotte has in the last few years consistently had some of the highest average rent increases in the country and American landmark now owns roughly one in every 85 units in in the city they have you know almost 2500 units there now.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: how and why American America is targeting some of their purchases.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we turn the corner to the other half of this story, which is its international dimension, which I definitely want to get to.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that was interesting to me about your interactions with Lou Beck is that he
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was totally unabashed, you know, he had an answer for everything.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what, I don't know what Elco is paying, but as a front man, he's obviously very talented.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the claim he made is that these are initial increases, and as they get better quality as they say tenants, they'll settle down, did you see any evidence of that?
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I actually, I did find that what tenants complained the most about was that very large initial rent increase and I certainly didn't see any evidence of the contrary from what Lou Beck claimed that once the
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: the buildings are quote unquote stabilized as he put it through that very large right increase.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't feel as compelled to continue to raise the rent by such a dramatic rates.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, that also doesn't take an account the massive fees, the fees from the many, many eviction findings.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or the human cost to the people who've been evicted.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, of course, and you know, that's I think the other really crucial thing here is, you know, these tenets once they face that huge initial rank increase You know, many of them hung on for as as long as they could, Dyer and Kelly successfully paid his rent for almost a year after that large rank increase, but it eventually just became
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: he had exhausted all of his savings.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It became so out of reach that he was eventually evicted and spent the following months on the street afterward.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, there's a very, very severe human cost.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's as good a bridge as any to the
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The connections between this kind of displacement here and settler activity in Israel and in the territories.
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So talk about Elco, the parent company, and their relationship with the settler movement and
• 23:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they're placed in that ecosystem.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so like I said earlier, the UN Human Rights Office has this database where they track business activity in the illegal West Bank settlements and Electra slash LCO actually shows up in their twice under two of the subsidiary companies of which there are are many.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: The first of which is involved in these massive infrastructure projects, particularly the development of a large tunnel in Jerusalem, which will connect one very large illegal settlement with Jerusalem and make it much easier to facilitate movement to this settlement.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is my lay out domain, which is like 40,000 units.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, right, it's a huge, yeah.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I spoke with a member of the Seventh Watch team at Peace Now, which is an anti-Settlement advocacy group who talked about how
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: the development of roads and tunnels like the kind that electros develop mean, they've seen that result in dramatic increases in the population of these settlements once those roads are completed.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now,
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Electres, other subsidiaries include Electraphic Keam, which is one of the largest public transit operators in Israel and many of its bus lines go directly to illegal settlements, they own branches of grocery stores in the settlements, a whole host of just very intrinsic business relationships and many, many different sectors.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's lay this out for readers and listeners.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, this matters not just because, you know, the settlements have been deemed illegal by the UN and by American policy up until the current administration.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But also because if you think that there is ever going to be
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: a two-state solution, there has to be territory for one of those states for a state of Palestine, and settlements like Malayadu Mimo are exactly in the way of any peaceful resolution of the current conflict.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So by entrenching the settlements further, they make any peaceful settlement
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: further out of reach.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's interesting because one of the dynamics that you capture really well in the pieces, you quote someone pointing out that the settlements were built by committed ideologues, but that doesn't mean that everybody who lives in them is a committed ideologue.
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you say that when this road is finished, when this tunnels finished, you can either pay for a two room apartment in
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: or for the same price, 10 minutes away in a settlement thanks to this road, you can get a five-minute room apartment for the same rent.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So again, it trenches the position of these illegal settlements in Israeli society and makes it far more difficult to imagine a future in which they're not continually occupied only by Jews.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, and that's one sector of electra and alco's involvement in the subjugation of Palestinians, but my reporting also found that
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are also very heavily intertwined with the Israeli military in amidst the ongoing genocide.
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We found this quote from the CEO of an electric subsidiary that states, quote, the IDF is a major client.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: We stand shoulders to shoulder with them in facing challenges and fulfilling missions.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are likely the only supplier that can say we've expanded our areas of deployment.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a great source of pride for us, and this was in 2024, well, into the genocide.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they've also helped electors also help construct and maintain multiple Israeli military and police training facilities.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So even on top of the business activity in the legal settlements, there's also an extremely direct link to the military operations as part of the ongoing genocide.
• 27:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet there was something else you put in the piece that I was intrigued by, and I don't know whether you, you know, follow it up or will follow it up later or not.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you quote Lou Beck saying, some of our biggest investors are Muslim countries from the Gulf, from Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar.
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So did you, do you have any further information on that, or was that
• 28:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certainly, an interesting quote.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, unfortunately, I'm in the process of trying to scope that out a little bit more because that really stood out to me as well.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, I think speaks to my sort of odd feeling of...
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: being refreshed by how wheeling move-back was to just be honest about the depth and breadth of his operations.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it certainly seems like based on what we found about how their operations are playing out in the United States.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm very, very curious to keep digging and find out more about what their operations might be entangled with elsewhere in the world as well.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope you'll continue doing that work in the nation.
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk finally about your sources for this story in terms of the tenets.
• 29:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: One more can you tell us about Kelly and Mary Napier and some of the people you introduced to in the story where are they now and what are their circumstances?
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, so Kelly, like I said, spent months homeless after he was evicted by American landmarks.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was, um, since he's a truck driver, he was showering at rest stops, you know, sleeping in his truck.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: he tried to find room at a shelter in Charlotte, but they were full, which is another sort of layer of our housing crisis that Kelly sort of found himself face to face with.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of the extreme of where some of these tenants end up.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another case, like you mentioned,
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mary Napier who moved only moved in to an American landmark property after her house burned down and she needed somewhere fast to stay in American landmark on surprisingly makes it very easy to sign a lease and find a place in one of their buildings.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But with the combination of the fees and all the extra things that American landmark
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: tacked on, which she felt very misled about.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: She also was eventually evicted just a year after she moved in.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And is now kind of in a situation that is common among a lot of the tenants that I spoke with, where she's moved in with family or friends in a space that is very much not equipped for the number of people that are currently living there.
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's living in a single room, essentially with her two children.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that really gets to the degree of displacement that American landmark is perpetuating through its model as that, you know, when these tenants are evicted, they're not finding new places of their own in most instances.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're having to
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: move in with people who already have their own kind of set up, and so it's just Constraining people and and sort of hanging people out to dry in wide scale Like we said earlier 45% of their 70,000 tenants is well over 30,000 people and so that's It's it's some very very widespread impact that we're looking out here
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we've talked about the story having two haves, the sort of half in the US and the half in Israel.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how would you describe aside from the corporate link, what else connects those two haves?
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: The thing that I think I'm gonna take away the most from this piece is processing the degree to which my reporting on American landmark here, reveals
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: new and horrifying ways in which the average American might be connected to what's happening in Gaza and in the West Bank via the costs, you know, demanded of people for their housing through their rent money, you know, in the year that she lived in American landmark property,
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mary Napier sent American landmarks some $15,000, and that money was then funneled into this network of Electron, Elco, and their investors across the world, but also included in their operations in the West Bank and in Gaza.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think given the fact that they have
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I said, some 70,000 tenants right now, who are going to be paying rent on December 1st, I think it begs the question of how entwined the average person is in ways that we might not even anticipate because of our increasingly corporately dominated world.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Birmingham, thank you so much for coming on the nation podcast and thank you for your article in the December issue.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Take care.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our interns are Lauren Norr Walton and Leo Miranda.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can get us wherever you find your podcasts.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm DD Guttenblan, host of the Nation Podcast.