By Jim Epstein | Reason.com
“Blackstone is one of the largest landlords in [the] world,” tweeted the New York tenant advocacy group Housing Justice for All in May. “We know they’re rich enough to #CancelRent, and we’re going to make them.”
And then there’s Chao Huai Gao, an immigrant from Zhengzhou, China. He owns a modest two-story house in Queens and isn’t rich enough to forgo rental income. He tells Reason that the emotional distress of having an occupant who isn’t paying rent and who he can’t evict has him contemplating “jumping off of a building.”
Gao came to the U.S. in 1999, working in New York restaurants and nail salons and doing interior renovation. “I haven’t taken a day off since I came to America,” he says. In 2017, he and his wife, who is a caretaker, made a down payment on a house as an investment property, supplementing their savings with a loan from their family in China. To cover their mortgage, they rented out both floors and moved into a cheap studio apartment nearby with their two young daughters.
