Patrick Range McDonald, the award-winning advocacy journalist, has started a monthly column called “The Real Dirt” at the Housing Is A Human Right website. Using his deep knowledge about Big Real Estate, McDonald writes the column to expose its culture of lies, scams, and other unscrupulous act.
“With my work at L.A. Weekly and Housing Is A Human Right,” says McDonald, “I’ve been closely following, and deeply investigating, the real estate industry for more than a decade. What has become clear is that Big Real Estate has a troubling culture of fraud, corruption, all-around shadiness, and even murder. I’m not only informing the public about those things, but also documenting them with ‘The Real Dirt.'”
Already, McDonald has written about the California Apartment Association hiring fake activists to try to kill rent control in a city in California, the ongoing RealPage scandal in which a cartel of corporate landlords have illegally worked together to wildly inflate rents, and a group of corporate landlords that have targeted Black tenants for eviction in the Los Angeles area.
“When you cover the real estate industry for a while,” says McDonald, “you realize that many of the things that come out of the mouths of real estate insiders are lies and distortions and, therefore, the industry can’t be trusted. At all.”
He adds, “There are constant stories of real estate big shots bribing politicians, hiring hit men, and committing fraud of one kind or another. It happens time and again, and it’s happened for a very long time. So it’s a part of the real estate industry’s culture, and that impacts the tens of millions of people who live in apartments and single-family home rentals. It’s serious stuff.”
“The Real Dirt” can be read at the end of each month at the Housing Is A Human Right website.