Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is getting into the real estate business, and that’s VERY bad news for home buyers. Plus, a major settlement has been reached between the companies responsible for PFAS contamination and the state of Ohio, with the companies agreeing to fork over more than $100 million to help cover the damage caused by their “forever chemicals.” Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is getting into the real estate business and it’s very bad news for home buyers. Bezos’ plan would jack up home prices and put ownership outta reach of millions America. The chances of an emerging generation Z buying a home right now, what the statistics I saw were almost, almost impossible.
Farron Cousins: Right. And it is, and Jeff Bezos sees what these other groups are doing, what BlackRock is doing, what the rest of Wall Street is doing. And Bezos says, well, hey, Amazon can get into that. So they’ve made this new company called, what is it, Arrived. Arrived is the name of the company. And what it is, is it allows just your average everyday investors, you can put in a hundred dollars here, maybe $500 there, and you own a share of this single family home that Jeff Bezos has bought. So then, you own 0.5% of it.
Mike Papantonio: If that, I mean, you own 0.000 because Bezos has put $25 million in to your little $100.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So then when it sells, you get that percentage of the sale price and people think, hey, this is a good idea. But it’s gambling on the market with these homes, because they go in, they make a couple of small minor improvements that really don’t mean anything, and they jack up the price by 250 grand.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they want these people to be renters. We want a nation of renters. We don’t want a nation of homeowners. I wish I could call on the statistic, it’s kicking around in my head, but the chances of a generation Z or even a millennial owning their own home right now is so diminished. And so they’re counting on that. The economy is such that somebody trying to move into the job market, if you’re generation Z or millennial, it’s very, very tough to make the kind of money it takes to buy a house. So he says, ah, that’s a great opportunity. People are suffering. Let me come on in and give them rental property. So it’s a buy-up of rental property. We talked about this before. We’ve done a couple of stories on this where Wall Street’s trying to buy everything. Close down entire neighborhoods where it’s their rental property. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They’ve almost in some areas bought entire cities.
Mike Papantonio: Yes. Yes. That’s right.
Farron Cousins: At this point. And you can’t buy those homes anymore, but you can surely pay your little monthly fee to live here until we say, okay, you’ve gotta get out, we’re gonna make room for somebody better. And meanwhile, obviously the wealthy people like we had talked about, they’re building their own special city high up in the mountains with their golden gates that nobody can get in.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Wow. Great movie there. Isn’t it?
Mike Papantonio: A major settlement has been reached between the companies responsible for PFAS contamination in the state of Ohio, with the companies agreeing to fork over more than a hundred million dollars to help cover the damages of their forever chemicals. Full disclosure, it was our case, it was this law firm’s case. We are doing this all over the country where cities and water municipalities are being paid for the damages they’ve done to the water system. So this is one of ’em that just took place and we just finished it up last week. It’s a lot of work. Some other folks involved with this, obviously the folks that are the political vehicle there in Ohio was so good. They were so good to work with. Sometimes you work with these entities all over the country and you see some of them are just so dysfunctional they can’t accomplish. These folks, the politicians involved in this did a remarkable job. And our co-counsel did great job with that too.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is truly a great success story. And it’s hopefully the first of many. Right. Okay. So we’re dealing with Ohio right now and typically what we’ve seen on the national stage, you know, talking about the politics, the politics from Ohio on the national stage, not exactly.
Mike Papantonio: Sometimes they’re problematic, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. But, so it’s good to hear that at the state level you’ve got people that actually know how to come together and get things done when it’s time to get things done.
Mike Papantonio: They understand they’re there to try to protect these consumers that are using water that can kill ’em. And so Ohio says, hell no. We’re gonna, we need to fix this. And so we handle these cases all over the country. Water facilities, counties, cities, municipalities, and sometimes you have politicians that are in charge of it that stand out. And this is one of ’em. I mean, they did not play. They said, look, y’all messed up really bad and our voters out here, our consumers are at risk.
Farron Cousins: Well, and with these PFAS contamination, it’s always important to remind people we’re talking about multiple different types of cancers. We’re talking about endocrine disruptors. We’re talking about hormonal disruptors. Birth defects. I mean, it runs the gamut of some of the worst of the worst that you can see from chemical contamination.
Mike Papantonio: Those are the areas, we found all that out in the early cases that I was trying up in Ohio, up in Columbus, Ohio. And that unrelated to this. This was the kind of the second phase of it. But I’m proud of these, I’m proud of these folks because you understand I’m so often critical of how politics works, and I love to see when it actually works.
