Brookfield tenants from US, Spain connect across continents
September 25, 2026
In July, two tenant organizations connected from across the globe to discuss their new landlord: the private equity firm Brookfield Asset Management. Spanish tenants from the Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos de Madrid (SIM) and manufactured housing residents with the US-based organization MHAction, both of whom live in communities recently acquired by Brookfield, joined a bilingual Zoom meeting to compare their experiences living under private equity landlords.
During the call, tenants shared their stories, learned about how private equity landlords manage properties and obtain funding, and discussed potential future organizing opportunities.
Residents from both organizations have already lived under other private equity landlords for years. Midwest-based residents fromMHAction live in parks owned by the private equity-backed Yes Communities.[1] Yes itself is one of the largest manufactured housing owners in the country[2] and was recently acquired by Brookfield.[3] Several SIM union members live in Brookfield buildings previously owned by Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world.
While the contexts of the two organizations differ, private equity tenants spoke about many of the same issues regardless of their location. Residents from both groups spoke of unfair treatment, fears of displacement, and a lack of transparency on the part of management.
“We have absolutely no backing by management toward the residents. Rent gets jacked up. Our amenities are nothing. They’ve taken everything away from us,” said a resident of a Yes park in Saginaw, Michigan. “There’s no maintenance here, our roads are horrible, and it just keeps getting worse,” she said.
Another Saginaw resident shared that her rent has gone up every six months since moving in. “The fees and penalty charges that they put on their residents are exorbitant, unaffordable. It’s a relatively low-income area, and they price gouge us for just about everything.” She also noted that Yes has been “extremely non-responsive.” “Since I moved in, [I’ve probably] called Yes Communities no less than 40 times, and I have never once received a call back. So, they just see us as dollars, unfortunately,” the resident said. “I worry for my neighbors, because many of them are elderly, fixed income, and it’s just getting worse.”
Yes Communities residents also spoke to ongoing issues with water quality and utility billing. “The water is absolutely disgusting, and it’s ruining everybody’s appliances, everybody’s water lines. People have to replace their water lines because they get clogged,” said a resident from Mason, Michigan.
Spanish tenants spoke to the power of the tenant union as an organizing model, noting that it had been difficult to access official support and systemic change from the government and political parties. In Madrid, tenants moved into their apartment buildings, some as long as twenty years ago, with the understanding that the homes would be managed as public housing in perpetuity. However, in 2013, the regional government sold the portfolio of 47 properties to Blackstone. Blackstone soon began to raise rents, attempted to displace existing tenants, and failed to maintain buildings, said Alicia del Rio, a SIM tenant organizer. On two separate occasions, after Blackstone tried to add major rent hikes as a condition of lease renewal for dozens of tenants all at once, SIM members stopped paying rent in protest, publicized their struggle, and took to the streets, including a period of occupation of Blackstone’s Spanish headquarters. Twice they were able to secure three year lease renewals. Then came the sale to Brookfield.
Now that Brookfield has purchased the properties from Blackstone, they are looking to sell off the units individually[4] at nearly triple the price they got them for, according to SIM, creating what one Madrid tenant called “a disaster.” That is to say, the threat of displacement has returned as the private equity firm looks to increase its cash flow in order to boost its returns. Spanish tenants, however, are resisting what they name the “vulture fund” with numerous protest tactics. The tactics of resistance are working. On one occasion, Brookfield canceled a potential buyer tour to avoid the spectacle of on-site tenant protest.
The Canada-based Brookfield Asset Management is one of the largest private equity firms in the world. The company owns 77,000 apartment units worldwide, including the 5,000 units across 47 properties in Spain that it purchased from Blackstone[5] and 60,000 apartment units across about 200 properties in the US.[6] Brookfield also owns approximately 90,000 manufactured housing units in the US following the Yes deal,[7] 19,000 single family rental homes,[8] and a large number of commercial properties.[9]
While a previous initiative has brought together tenants of the same landlord across multiple states within the US, the SIM-MHAction was a rare opportunity to connect private equity tenants on different continents. As political pressure against private equity landlords mounts, international partnership of this could lead to major wins. As one SIM tenant said, “We have to keep fighting to prevent this from happening.”
[1] Stockbridge Capital Partners founded Yes Communities and in 2026 sold off the majority of its ownership in the company but continued to own 29% of Yes. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/16/gic-among-investors-buying-71-percent-of-us-property-firm-likely-valuing-it-above-2-billion.html
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260731201529/https://www.mobilehomeuniversity.com/mhu-top-100-community-owners.php
[4] https://www.eldiario.es/economia/5-000-familias-amenazadas-desahucio-invisible-brookfield-interlocutor-asistente-virtual_1_13230345.html
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-31/brookfield-buys-1-billion-of-spanish-housing-from-blackstone
[6] CoStar, previously cited in https://pestakeholder.org/news/brookfields-aggressive-buying-spree-meets-tenant-resistance/
[7] Brookfield outright owns 13,000 lots, combined with 77,000 existing Yes lots for 90,000 total lots. https://www.brookfieldreit.com/about/brookfield-advantage
[8] https://www.brookfieldreit.com/about/brookfield-advantage
[9] https://www.brookfieldreit.com/about/brookfield-advantage
