| TIAA boasts that its real estate and farmland investments, managed by Nuveen, are on the path to Net Zero. This sounds like good news. Nuveen “is one of the largest investment managers in the world with $147 billion of assets under management.” The company also boasts of its transparency, welcoming “engagement and dialogue with all stakeholders.” Unlike the rest of TIAA, Nuveen Natural Capital gives us an email address to use for questions or concerns: esgcommittee@nuveennc.com. That’s good, because we have lots of concerns. Research done by Grist, The Atlantic, and Action Aid has shown that Nuveen is in the habit of buying land that has already been deforested—which means that the company itself is not doing the damage, but is happy to profit from it. In Brazil, Nuveen has knowingly bought land from criminal land-grabbers, who regularly push small farmers off their land—often violently—and then lay waste to Brazil’s biodiverse savannah to make way for crops like soybeans for export. As we have reported before, Nuveen and subsidiaries have also been spraying toxic chemicals on the people of Elaine, Arkansas. And in Mississippi, TIAA has bought up large plantations, including 130,000 acres along the Mississippi River, which had once belonged to Black farmers, who are now “uprooted.” There’s a new trend in the Nuveen Real Estate portfolio that troubles us too. In the past decade, Barrons reports, Nuveen has turned its real estate focus on housing. The company claims to see “extraordinary potential in the U.S. affordable housing sector. To move the needle, we drive value through energy efficiency and community programs, including healthcare, education, financial inclusion, and employment services.” CalPERS, the nation’s largest public pension fund, has invested $100 million in the Nuveen Real Estate U.S. Affordable Housing Fund. But is Nuveen really promoting affordability? The company has been outsourcing a lot of its domestic real estate management to Invitation Homes, the largest landlord in the United States. According to Slate, Invitation Homes buys “relatively inexpensive single-family homes built since the 1970s in growing metro areas” at low interest rates, exactly the homes “that might otherwise be obtainable for younger, working- and middle-class households.” The company planned to buy $1 billion worth of single-family homes in 2024. A Federal Trade Commission complaint from 2024 alleged that Invitation Homes practices deceptive pricing, advertising monthly rental rates that don’t mention mandatory extra costs up to $1,700 yearly per tenant. “In a 2019 email, Invitation Homes’ CEO urged the senior vice president responsible for the company’s fee program to ‘juice this hog’ by making a new ‘smart home’ fee mandatory for renters.” Invitation also withheld security deposits for “regular wear and tear, pre-existing damage, or damage caused by planned renovations,” returning 39 percent of security deposit dollars, compared to the national average of 64 percent. Renters suffer from “code violations and life-threatening safety risks, according to… complaints filed with attorney generals in two states.” Tenants regularly complain of “leaky pipes, vermin, toxic mold, nonfunctioning appliances and months-long waits for repairs.” Mold in one apartment, for example, forced the Anderson family to move out of their Invitation Homes rental. The mold caused bacterial infections in Alvin Anderson’s leg, which had to be amputated. “When they said we’re going to have to take your whole leg off, that broke my heart,” he said. Invitation Homes refused to return the Andersons’ security deposit. And what is perhaps most disturbing, according to Reuters, is that Invitation Homes “charges tenants $95 if their rent is one minute late–even if the late payment is due to the company’s own nonfunctioning online payment portal–and then files an eviction notice to add more fees, penalties and legal costs if the tenant wants to stay in the home.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed a moratorium on emergency evictions. According to the FTC complaint, Invitation Homes “intentionally steered its renters away from the CDC program, instead encouraging renters to complete the company’s own ‘Hardship Affidavit,’ which provided no eviction protection to renters. When tenants asked Invitation for help, employees regularly fail.” The company settled the FTC suit for $48 million. Meanwhile, in California, Invitation Homes settled a lawsuit for having “increased rents for 1,900 tenants above the allowable amounts per state laws.” Now Nuveen is coming to a town near you. They have been focusing their investments on upscale rentals in college towns, raising rents for everyone. Students are a lucrative business. Meanwhile, the high cost of rental units near colleges and universities have been feeding a national housing crisis for those pursuing degrees. As real estate guru Jason Hartman put it, “a home that might rent for $1,000 a month to a single family could be rented by the room for nearly twice that.” The New York Times reports that “Off-campus student housing complexes across the country are getting larger, some home to more than 1,500 students, and they are being built on prime parcels as close to campus as possible, as developers seek to better manage their bottom line.” In 2017, a Nuveen affiliate acquired two new luxury student housing properties in Minneapolis. A studio apartment in one of these buildings goes for $1425/month. Students have been pleading for more affordable housing, and luxury dorms have crowded out reasonably priced housing not only for local residents but also for lower income students. Nuveen says affordable housing; we say junk fees and gentrification. |
