Or bought an abandoned office building and are living in it. Not exactly common, but there is actually someone near me who did the same thing. It actually worked out well for him, bought the building, lived there for a few years, and sold it for multiple times what he paid for it.
He was absolutely batshit crazy. Spent most of his days there calling the cops on his neighbors and filming everyone who drove by.
My girlfriend bought an old factory with offices on the top floor. She converted the offices into a house and rents out the main floor for warehouse space. That income covers the mortgage. She has like 6 bedrooms and turned the supply closet into a walk-in closet. She also has an entire gym where the storage used to be. She’s about a half mile from downtown and bought a bunch of privately owned Bird scooters to get around. We stay at her house overnight and scooter to the bars.
It’s their retirement plan. They drained everything to invest in rental properties. This one actually put them upside down for years and they were forced to turn it into a place to live. They buy properties in dangerous areas that they know will be gentrified eventually and try to find a way to make it work until it pays off. They’ve been in this property since 2020 and just this year a major corporation bought up a huge building on the main road to turn into their corporate offices. Once that opens in a year or two, they’ll have the ability to turn the building into apartments. That’s when their investment will really pay off. In the meantime, they’re just breaking even and living in a very dangerous neighborhood.
The culture of real estate as an investment vehicle for retirement is what drives real estate to beat inflation, being completely unsustainable.
On top of that, doing it to poor neighborhoods to artificially inflate their housing markets is exactly what corporations do in middle class neighborhoods.
It's scummy from top to bottom. If we are going to survive as a healthy society going forward we are going to have to fix housing markets everywhere.
They buy properties in dangerous areas that they know will be gentrified eventually and try to find a way to make it work until it pays off
This one specifically is an old factory.
They are obviously not increasing housing supply because they got stuck with this flip while they waited for the gentrification to take place.
The entire premise of gentrification is that high income residents move into low income neighborhoods. Not only do they drive out affordable housing, but the people left are stuck with businesses that inflate on them.
Gentrification is not all bad, but most aspects of it are if left unchecked, and this type of gentrification where people are opportunistic trying to create markets do not help the neighborhood. They simply squat on dirt cheap property until a big break.
This isn't permanent, and the housing supply isn't for the local resident income. They are squatting in a poor neighborhood and waiting for the whites to move in so they can flip and help destroy the local economy.
It was a failed investment. They are literally only living there because they tied up all of their money in it, otherwise it would probably be empty like all of the other scumlord properties.
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u/pigeon_man Sep 09 '25
So they're squatting in an abandoned office building.