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Hello, my name is H Hetty O'Brien.

I'm a regular writer at The Guardian Long Read.

I wrote this piece, The Blackstone Rebellion, how one country took on the world's biggest commercial landlord, which was published in 2022.

I was interested in what happened after the 2008 financial crisis where power seemed to have migrated to this new type of company, private equity-owned company, and these companies are buying up a lot more housing in the cities where people lived.

And I learned that Denmark and specifically Copenhagen had mounted this really active and quite

vociferous campaign against Blackstone's activities and had been successful.

I think what's changed since 2022 is that private equity is playing an even greater role in our

everyday lives than it was back in

2022. And you can see that in the way that the current Labour government has been very keen

to get its support in terms of helping to fund the building of infrastructure and other

kind of big state projects. And so I think the close relationship between the industry

and government has become much more relevant and interesting since I wrote this piece.

This episode contains strong language.

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The Blackstone Rebellion

How One Country Took on the World's Biggest biggest commercial landlord by Hetty O'Brien.

Blackstone is the largest commercial landlord in history. Over the past two decades,

it has quietly taken control of apartment blocks, care homes, student

housing, railway arches, film studios, offices, hotels, logistics warehouses and data centres.

...