Pangea raised $180m to buy up low-rent Chicago properties "to help poor people," and then created the most brutally efficient eviction mill in Chicago history

Pangea was founded by Al Goldstein, a Deutsche Bank investment banker who quit to found a massive, intercontinental payday lending outfit; he tapped the investors that he enriched with his payday lending business to stake him $180 million and bought up thousands of low-rent buildings in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods (which are also Chicago's blackest neighborhoods).

Pangea took over buildings (some of them derelict and abandoned or squatted) and renovated them, and rented them out, becoming the city's largest landlord and collecting many public accolades for their work in helping Chicago's affordable housing crisis.

But on the way, Pangea also reinvented how tenants get evicted in Chicago, taking eviction from a rarity in the city to a commonplace occurrence, inventing a playbook for rapid evictions that other landlords are now following, creating an epidemic of evictions in a city where eviction was once unheard-of.

A very long, in-depth report in the Chicago Reader investigates the conditions in Pangea rental units, and finds many tenants who have complaints about substandard maintenance, including problems with mold, asbestos, toilets, power, etc, as well as a bewildering array of fees levied against them (along with surprise rent-hikes). Tenants struggle to get justice, not least because Pangea owns its buildings through thousands of shell companies that trade the titles around between them, making it hard to name the right owner in court filings.

The business has grown by 13,323% since its founding, with annual revenues of $113m.

Pangea's eviction playbook involves dragging tenants in arrears into court -- Chicago's eviction courts are incredibly stilted and one-sided and don't even keep transcripts of hearings to be used in appeals -- and then getting them to sign paperwork saying they'll pay high fees and penalties as well as paying back-rent, paperwork that also makes tenants surrender their right to legal remedies for the hazardous conditions in their homes. Read the rest