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Despite Pandemic Carnage, Predatory Nursing Home Financiers Keep Thriving
Joel Landau, who has a history of stripping nursing homes for real estate gains, now owns the largest chain in the country.
by Maureen Tkacik
April 14, 2021
The biggest nursing home chain in America quietly changed hands earlier this month, in a little-noticed deal that underscores just about everything that is rotten about America’s elder care system.
Genesis HealthCare and its 350 facilities are now in the hands of a documented serial liar with a history of conning his way into nursing home takeovers, then evicting the patients and flipping the real estate to luxury condo developers. His name is Joel Landau, and he pulled off exactly this feat with a nursing home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2016, walking away with a $72 million profit after orchestrating an improbably elaborate campaign to convince a battalion of city and state officials that lifting a deed restriction that required the property to house a public health care facility was the only way to preserve the building as a public health care facility.
The Rivington House scandal, which captivated the New York media for symbolizing the emptiness of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s populist pledges to reclaim the city for the 99 percent, was part of a broader pattern for Landau, who has been perpetually sued across multiple industries in the service of flagrant frauds. Whatever his intentions for the Genesis homes, it’s safe to say they can’t be good...
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