Business According To Trump

This is an answer on Quora by Ron Ellis to the question: What is something about Trump that is not talked about much?

In the '70s and '80s Trump was buying up rent-controlled apartments in NYC. They were rent-controlled because old folks had been living in them since the '40s and '50s and were now on Social Security, and rent prices were rising faster than Social Security, so they were getting priced out of housing they had lived in their entire lives. NYC established a housing authority to oversee the apartments so landlords couldn’t raise rents higher than cost of living increases in Social Security and these old folks wouldn’t end up on the street. The City also made sure the landlords maintained the apartments in livable conditions, and there was a grievance committee to settle disputes.

If you know anything about NYC, you know the City supplies water and heat underground through stream tunnels and City boilers. Residents pay the City for this. Electricity comes from the utility company. You may have seen steam coming up through the subway vents in movies about NYC. The apartments were set up so if they were vacated for a certain amount of time the landlord could take control of the apartment again. The assumption would be the tenant had died. These were all people in their 70s or older.

Trump bought several of these buildings cheap because they were in prime locations, but you couldn’t do anything with them until all the residents were gone. In the winter he arranged for the heat and water to be turned off through shady connections. The residents complained to the housing authority, but through more shady connections the complaints were delayed being processed. These old folks couldn’t stay in a high-rise apartment in a NY winter with no heat or water, so they had to move. After the required period had passed, Trump was able to take control of the now vacant apartment. When the building was empty, he could tear it down to build a new building.

These buildings were built back in the '20s and '30s, which means they were insulated with asbestos and painted with lead paint. Trump used illegal immigrants to tear down these buildings. He didn’t provide them with the safety gear that is required to be provided by law, and to dispose of most of the hazardous waste he used more of his shady Italian connections from NJ to illegally dump the lead and asbestos waste. The buildings that were rebuilt were usually built with substandard materials. All the while he would skip out on paying whoever he could. If they sued, he would delay them in court until they ran out of money trying to fight the case or eventually settle for pennies on the dollar. That’s why he has hundreds of NDAs. He put 80-year-old grandmothers out on the street, used illegal labor, put multiple contractors out of business by not paying them, improperly and illegally disposed of hazardous waste, and failed to hire union labor as required in NYC. BTW, he did all this with other people's money, and when he sold the new building kept the profits and paid back the investors.

Are you surprised that he is one of the few presidential candidates to lose his own home state? That’s your hero, MAGA people. All New Yorkers know what Trump is!