Thought leadership in the DST space is a heavy lift. It entails much more than a mere recitation of basics. It mandates ongoing analysis of the social, economic, and political trends that shape our lives.
Without this, you are investing in the past, not the future. Quoting Nicholas Vardy’s Global Guru, “America has redrawn its economic map many times.” In so doing, many people and places were left behind. “Textile money left New England for the south. The steel money left Pittsburgh. The auto money left Detroit and never came back. Each time, the migration looked gradual, then obvious, then irreversible, and investors who saw it early did considerably better than the ones who assumed the (economic) map was fixed.”
We have been telling CRE investors for years the economic map is being redrawn and the arrow is now pointing to Texas. For landlords, this is exacerbated by the socialist march to power in northern, progressively governed cities.
Hasan Piker, an American left-wing political commentator, popular with the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) recently “ranted about the hypothetical murder of a U.S. senator and seethed about slaughtering landlords, “kill those mother f…ers. Murder those mother…ers in the street. Let the streets soak in their f…ing capitalist blood dude.” (the Washington Examiner, September 2-9, 2026).
Clearly, Mr. Piker was channeling his inner Lenin whose famous “hanging order,” called on his minions to “Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known Kulaks, fat cats, bloodsuckers.”
As ‘fat cats’ landlords should know the revolution will not be peaceful.
Perhaps this is why Texas is now home to 57 of America’s largest companies, recently edging out California’s 56.
According to Vardy, “two years ago, California held the lead, more than a hundred companies have moved their headquarters to Texas since 2020, among them Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA), Charles Schwab (NYSE: SCHW) and Hewlett Packard Enterprises (NYSE: HPE).”
Having grown up on the Peninsula working summers harvesting and pruning David Packard’s apricot trees in Los Altos Hills, HP was the company that started it all, in a one car Palo Alto garage. For them to jump ship, things have really changed.
As California and the rest of the West Coast worked overtime to regulate, tax and penalize business, Texas “spent decades engineering itself into a magnet for capital. Lower taxes, lighter regulation, cheap land. Abundant energy. Tort reform. And lately, corporate statutes written to shield management from shareholder lawsuits.”
“Texas produced roughly $2.9 trillion in goods and services in 2025. That makes it the second largest state economy in the country after California, and were it a sovereign nation, one of the eight or nine largest economies on earth, ahead of the likes of Canada and Russia.”
This is significant in light of the continuing hostility directed at business in general and landlords specifically up and down the West Coast.
Conspicuously, Portland based landlord, Princeton Property Management just agreed to pay $725,000 to a Vancouver renter in what “tenant attorneys say is Washington’s largest settlement for alleged wrongful eviction.” (The Oregonian)
That’s nearly three quarters of a million bucks for wrongfully evicting a tenant property management claimed created “a severe health and safety hazard.”
As landlords, BTDT. You know what that looks, and smells like, as do renters in surrounding units.
Management maintained the tenants allowed an “extreme accumulation of garbage, debris, and filth throughout the apartment,” creating unsanitary conditions which later cost Princeton Property Management $20,000 to clean up.
Tenant advocacy groups hope this is a warning to landlords of the potential cost of “wrongful eviction.”
This isn’t a warning shot across landlords’ bow, it’s a full broadside below the waterline.
Given the continuing leftward march of progressively governed cities and increasing militancy of tenant advocacy groups, it may be past time to consider packing up for the Lone Star State.
If the current migration of companies and capital keeps up, Texas could need more housing, storage and associated services.
It’s not too late to attempt to capitalize on the potential for a “Texas Century” and DSTs may be able to help you do it.
