On yet another sunny Los Angeles day in late April, I drove inland to meet Chisholm at a Panda Express on the side of Interstate 5. She is an anti-abortion, Trump-loving conservative Christian who prays every day for the demise of Invitation Homes. She wore a purple shirt, a flowing purple skirt and a silver cross toe ring. “Send” and “Me” — representing Isaiah 6:8 — were tattooed on her heels. “I am the biggest Trump supporter you are ever going to meet,” she told me. “But this is one area he’s furiously failing at. It’s not like he doesn’t know.” Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chief executive, was once the chairman of the president’s economic advisory council and remains a close adviser. The chief executive of Colony Capital, Thomas Barrack, was not only among the largest donors to President Trump’s campaign but also served as chairman of his inaugural committee. Steven Mnuchin, now the Treasury secretary, bought the toxic debt of the failed California bank Indy­Mac with several other investors and, as chief executive and chairman, renamed the bank One­West and then foreclosed on more than 35,000 Californians, reaping government subsidies on nearly every one.

In June 2016, Chisholm told me, she rented a tan-colored ranch house in La Mirada from Waypoint Homes. The house had some problems — the dishwasher was broken, and the faucet in the kitchen barely worked. But her leasing agent promised to have those things repaired, so she signed: $3,000 a month plus a $100 pool-service charge. After moving in, she realized the pool was losing an inch and a half of water a day — it was leaking into the ground — so she deducted the pool fee from her next month’s rent. She also asked to have the smart lock that came with her home disabled and deducted the monthly $19.95 charge. In mid-July, she got a call from her leasing agent asking her why he was being asked to show her house again. “That was his way of giving me a heads-up,” Chisholm told me.

She looked at her bank account and realized that her rent check hadn’t been cashed. Waypoint told her that it hadn’t been received. In August, she got an automated email from Zillow that inexplicably advertised her home. An Invitation Homes employee emailed to tell her that she would be sent into automatic eviction but that she shouldn’t worry, they wouldn’t act on it. By then the refrigerator had broken, rats ate the bananas on her kitchen counter and two-inch cockroaches climbed the wall into in her granddaughter’s crib. (Waypoint authorized only two exterminations per year.) Chisholm’s August rent check hadn’t been cashed, either. She was told it hadn’t been received. She begged the office manager to visit her house and observe the problems firsthand.

According to Chisholm, the manager sat with her for hours and broke down in tears. “You don’t know the environment that I’m working in,” Chisholm says the office manager told her. “Your property manager is lying to you. She has all your checks. They’re stacked up on her desk.” She explained why: By claiming not to receive the checks or by refusing to cash them on the grounds that “they weren’t for the full amount owed” (Chisholm was withholding the pool fee until the problem was fixed), the company could still evict her for nonpayment. The manager promised to send the checks to Chisholm via certified mail so that she would have proof of payment. And she did. (The manager did not reply to requests for comment.) While Invitation Homes declined to comment on the experiences of any individual tenants, it said in a statement, “We aren’t always perfect, but we do work every day to provide the best possible experience for our residents.”

In February 2017, Chisholm started her first Facebook group. The only person she knew to invite was a fellow tenant of Waypoint Homes, who found her on Yelp. (He wrote to her, bewildered that she had written a positive review of the company; she had done so the month she moved in because a maintenance worker said his bonus depended on it.) But the group grew, gaining hundreds of members in the first few months. Suddenly she was fielding messages and phone calls from tenants around the country — particularly in Chicago; Phoenix; Atlanta; Florida; Los Angeles; Riverside, Calif.; and Las Vegas, the places where private equity had invested most heavily.

She started to notice patterns. False advertising was one of them. Helena Abonde, a Swedish woman, began to post frequently to the group. In May 2017, she had to leave North Carolina in a hurry after living with her cousin didn’t work out. She decided to return to her old job in Los Angeles and began looking online for housing. She spotted a listing on Zillow — a property in Van Nuys owned by Invitation Homes — with central air-conditioning and a fenced-in yard, perfect for her two beloved dogs. She called the listed number and was cautioned that houses were flying off the market and that if she didn’t sign a lease and send the first two months’ rent and a security deposit — a total of $6,000 — she would miss out on it. Abonde packed up her car, and as she was driving across the country with her dogs, the leasing agent, Alisa Cota, sent her a 42-page lease. At a rest stop in Albuquerque, Abonde signed it and emailed it back.

When she arrived at the house, no one was there to meet her; instead, Cota sent her the code to the smart lock. Her dogs were panting in the May heat of the San Fernando Valley, and the house was boiling inside. Abonde couldn’t find the air-conditioning controls and called Cota, who looked up the house and told her that the home didn’t have air-conditioning and that she had signed a lease agreeing to the house as-is. If she broke it, she would have to pay two months’ rent after giving notice — $4,800. (Cota apologized to Abonde after quitting her job at Invitation Homes.)