I love this thoughtful piece and once again great details of personal experience. This housing ownership issue is a deeply entrenched but has different regional or “sectional” approaches by law and history I’ve discovered (I should add I’m a long from from fully discovering this issue). But one thing that it reminded me of was a friend of my brothers and fellow gym teacher in inner city Buffalo. They taught together at “one of the worst” inner city schools in the city for 11 years before my brother transferred. His friend is still there and I had the opportunity to speak with him and my brother last month when visiting. He said he was no longer in what I would call “the inner city house flipping business.” For a couple decades he flipped houses in the inner city, on behalf of two Jewish owners in NYC who funded the flipping. They bought the dilapidated houses for about $10K, and this gym teacher as a “side business” renovated them, overseeing crew who did the work.
Once renovating, they were rented out at a new perceived market value as nice new apartments. We are talking basically about “ghost homes,” the kind your see in documentaries. There were some people living in some units while other homes were boarded up. Over a decade or two the neighborhood gets upgraded. I don’t what the rental value is, but for sure even at $500 hundred for a two unit house per month they are making money since the cost was so low to begin with. Investors are long term thinkers, and work over a decade or longer. That is what you are seeing done with your old homes that are probably being rented out where the investor is not fixing anything, pocketing the rent while not reinvesting. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed using this method of “white ownership theft” of black wealth. It’s a long term strategy to make poor people —blacks, but now browns—to rent the property to pay it off, not put any money back into and basically let in fall apart, raising the rent and even taking government money to fund it if forced to. In 10 or 20 years, the rent goes up, making greater profit and paying off the house. In thirty years the asset is completely paid off and can then be abandoned and bought for cheap ($10K for a home! That’s cheap since these old homes are structurally decent). Then they are renovated, rent out again, and again made profitable.
Perception is a key issue. Law makers won’t for renovation on home-owner investors, since it’s property, and the “slumlords” can drag their feet on repairs if there are laws, since it is hard to enforce them since the area is so big and enforcement basic almost non-existent, with judges being overwhelmed though deliberate lack of funding. Landlords thus win. Most “middle class” white Americans won’t live in “such an area” and so don’t believe that landlords can be making nice profits off the poor through rent extraction and inflation. It just doesn’t logical to the average person (and still doesn’t to me) that investors can get rich by buying dozens of cheap broken houses, flipping them, renting them out at a decent price for market value, and then making really good money by not fixing the house over 20 plus years and letting them rot while inflation rises.
My bother just sold his two apartment home in a neighboring town and the renter was basically paying for 80 percent of his monthly mortgage payment. The house was $62K and quite affordable when bought a dozen years ago. I urged him to keep it and have it managed but it isn’t his style. My other brother lives in a house in Buffalo not in the inner city but still a working class area, that costs $29K when bought two decades ago. Basically less than the cost of a new Camry. Small two bedroom one bath, but good him and his partner. They fix it up and keep it nice. By branding the poor as “criminal” and unsavory, and black and brown, which Trump is doing constant, this image maintenance creates the mindset in the middle class to avoid such “horrible” areas, letting them rot.
Not ironically, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner bought such a poor tenement complex in Baltimore not so long ago and a reporter did an investigation and found he was using this exact playbook or sucking rent and not fixing the property, letting all the unit rot. These areas are actually full not of “welfare queens” but working class people, so the majority are paying from their paycheck to the hundreds of units Kushner bought through borrowed money. This is on way the rich steal from the poor and let the poor rot, creating concentrate wealth into a few people from hundreds of working class poor by jacking up rent. The state and federal government is complicit by underfunding the legal system and inspectors to protect the renters property from neglect. It is hard to believe that wealth is created from poverty, but it is.

Thanks for the excellent observations and insights to this vexing and persistent problem. I guess my question about this particular phrase, which I see often, is about the meaning. I would suspect is not a “last vestige” given how pervasive the system of neglect still is.