“I have a friend who buys every crappy house he can get his hands on. He makes them barely habitable and rents them out to section 8.
He says the Government pays the greater part of the rent and he doesnt care if the inhabitants pay or not , he makes enough off the government to make the payments on the properties which will be his after the government has paid for them. If the renters pay anything at all that is gravy.”
My first job out of college was to rehab slum housing for Doctors and Lawyers. The gig then was the accelerated depreciation used to shield income. The Doctors and Lawyers were in the >50% tax bracket and would depreciate the slums in 7 years shielding a meaningful portion of their income from taxes. After seven years they would sell the properties to one another and start the whole cycle over. I came in on the swap to make the places marginally habitable. The funny thing was I had to be out of those neighborhoods before dark and I never let any of my tools out of my sight. These properties could have been bought by the residents but they prefered to just live their. The only articles of wealth to the tenants were a Cadillac and a color TV. All other forms of property were seen as meaningless. Learned a lot doing that.
"My God, it's almost dark...they'll be waking up soon!"
Having grown up working construction project in Boston's Mattapan and Roxbury sections, I know precisely how the character felt!
I remember in Washington DC up on the 600 block of W street N.W.. They came in and rehabbed a bunch of row houses there.
Problem was they couldnt rent them fast enough to keep the appliances in them until rented.
They would put appliances in one day and they would be gone that night. They finally gacve up.