Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/14/kyivland.html
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Well… my russian language professor (Expert in Chinese, Russian, German, and several other languages I’m forgetting atm) said to me that Czech Republic was sliced up and bought by the Russian Mafia, so why not right? He said to me there’s literally a large piece of Prague that is owned and controlled by the Russo Mob aka the Russian Mafia.
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I would think that for 470B you could buy ALL of Cleveland. And the rust belt is having a BOGO, so you get Detroit for free.
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Lmfao ya. Cheap as shit. My cousin moved to Michigan and bought a house for literally $1.00.
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There’s a piece of this story that keeps being misreported. They aren’t the largest landowners in Cleveland. They are the largest landowners downtown and the largest commercial real estate owners. The Clinic is still the largest private owner by acreage and the city and county are the largest owners overall.
Locally there have been some rumblings about a few of the players in these deals for over a year. I sat in a real estate class discussing some of the new players who had burst onto the scene and were turning amazingly high profits on deals that had notoriously been mired in difficulty for years and sometimes decades. The prof. used the Huntington deal as an example of how a savvy investor can make huge profits in a highly volatile market.
Looking forward I think we are likely to hear some very interesting bribery cases. I don’t have any evidence, but several of the projects involved in these deals had really large tax credits making up a large part of their financing stack and they went through amazingly smoothly. No other renovation in the same area has gone as quickly and smoothly. Either there are massive bribes involved or we should just hand our local governance over to the money launderers because everything went way smoother with them in charge.
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Thank you for providing an informed local viewpoint! I’m serious; I expect we’ll see a lot of “lol Cleveland” snark in this comment section from people who can’t tell Cleveland from Carbondale from Carson City.
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Did they at least get a decent Russian Deli out’a the deal?
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Cleveland only has one good Russian deli and it predates this, but lots of classic Jewish-American delis, which are sometimes owned by people of Russian ancestry.
It is a long running joke among a bunch of my leftist friends that the reason there are so many Communists in Cleveland is that the city feels like an old Soviet state, little did we know how right we were.
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Not long ago, NPR had an expert on this subject who said that if you can trace the money, it’s probably legal. It’s the ones where you can’t uncover the owner that are money laundering or purchases using dirty money.
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OK fine, I’ll just shut my mouth.
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I wonder if the neo-liberals who demanded that developing countries open up to foreign investment ever considered that eventually North America would be carved up by foreign buyers in turn…
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Go ahead Keep on Making America Ukrainian Again. It’s working out great.
So, how’s Infrastructure Week going?
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They probably don’t much care. These are transnational economic elites (human and “slow AI”) who just go from one disaster to another, capitalising on them. Cleveland isn’t a total mess like Detroit was a few years back, but in the winner-take-all late-stage-capitalist American environment it’s a good place for predatory bargain hunters.
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Cleveland has come a long way since the “hastily made tourism videos.” It’s a great opportunity to invest. Even Ukranian oligarchs can see a good thing!
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Cleveland OH or Cleveland TX?
So let’s assume you have heavily invested your ill-got gains in Cleveland property. What’s the end game here? Being a slumlord? Most of those properties are vacant, and although the neighborhoods were nice at one time, they are in decay now because of the very effects that let you buy the houses cheap. Tear them down and build new, or renovate? That’s an investment I don’t see happening for a crime boss. Sit on them and hope the properties will eventually be worth more than paid? That’s a long game again I don’t see a crime lord tackling. A lot of people are laundering money by buying up property around the world; I’m just not sure where they’re going with that, especially since in many cities, the bottom is falling out of the luxury market.
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Everything I’ve read says that at least 30% of luxury real estate transactions in most cities around the world are actually money laundering operations. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was more and applied to ALL real estate transactions.
May this aspect of Trmp’s malfeasance not be confined to the memory hole.
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nihilism is organized crime’s great friend.
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