Real Estate Speculators Are Swooping In to Buy Disaster-Hit Homes
“Hi Gina, I hope you have a good day,” said another exactly two weeks later. “My name is Christine, I am a land buyer. I hold my hand to see if you have any plans to sell the lot. ” The text was signed by “Twin Acres”. Twin Acres is not a recorded real estate broker. The attempt from Grist to send an SMS to file remained unanswered.
Sometimes Miceli said, she responds to the texts. “It depends on my mood. I think there was a time or two that I said: “Go to hell”. ” She does not intend to leave. She raises her family into the house that her husband’s grandparents have bought and she has a local brewery.
Some theorists call This phenomenon “gentrification in the event of a disaster”, when real estate investors flood a disaster area to buy damaged properties cheap.
Samantha Montano, emergency management professor and book author Disasseterologyspent years living and working in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and has seen this happen with his own eyes. In regions like the ninth lower district, some people moved by the storm did not have the resources to return. Speculators rushed. Some landowners have become instant millionaires, selling their properties to promoters outside the State in the hope of rebuilding and returning their property.
“The question of gentrification in New Orleans had been there from the start,” said Montano. “There were many groups that warned this, arguing for the housing policy and other collection policies to take into account the gentrification. [They] tried to prevent it. Twenty years later, Demographic Data from New Orleans have changed: lower and black income residents have been moved, and new richer residents have taken their place.
In the wake of the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, earlier this year, half of the purchases of houses were made by limited liability companies, according to Dwell, the home design information site. It is almost double what they generally represent compared to people who buy houses. Only six companies – including Ocean Development Inc. and Black Lion Properties LLC – dominated these transactions in Altadena, spending millions of dollars to buy destroyed properties in historically black neighborhoods. It is difficult to know who these companies are: often, they contact potential sellers via false telephone numbers or under names that are not necessarily attached to real companies.
The value of the lands struck by disasters rebounds regularly quickly, which means that buyers can turn the land or houses – sometimes even without making repairs. While climate change feeds more frequent severe natural disasters in the United States, “investors in the event of a disaster” seem ready to make greater profits than ever – and communities like the north of St. Louis support the burden.
A panel for sale in Altadena, California, in March, three months after forest fires swept the region.Photography: Juliana Yamada / Getty Images
