DOJ sues realpage for algorithmic pricing scheme that harms renters

Fine, just have local authority numbers then which halved from 175k in the decade before thatcher was elected, let alone had any chance to implement policy.

She didn’t reverse the trend, but she didn’t start it.

I guess it was closer to a dozen if you add up all the smaller ones. City tower, the Death Star looking one, the Alexa looking one, the 3 or 4 medium sized ones on Gold St, the Brooklyner, the 5 or 6 medium sized ones on Hoyt, the One with the Apple Store, the three or four around Barclays Center.

We’re talking about residential space for 10s of thousands of people that completely changed the vibe of the neighborhood for better and worse.

You don’t need the counter factual to look at the prices they’re leasing for. Or to understand that the wealthy folk in these buildings look down at the cutesy brownstones and think to themselves “oh it’d be nice to live in one of those next!”. To realize that the influx of monied people and the accompanying influx of goods and services to pander to them induces top-end demand for the neighborhood and inflates rent.

The kind of high-density housing we build in this country does not deflate housing prices.

To clarify, it might be different if the neighborhoods surrounding this area were not majority owned by nonresident landlords, often the children of the original purchasers.

Increased supply solves pricing when you have a competitive and free market, but the point people in this thread are trying to make is that housing (especially in urban areas) is not at all a free and competitive market. Landlords can afford to let an apartment lay fallow. However, people not only need places to live, but they believe that they can’t afford (socially, career-wise, whatever) to leave a set of zip codes. It leads to rent being a one-way ratchet that dramatically outpaces wage growth and inflation.

There are criminal antitrust cases[1], but they are hard to win. From "Why Does the Antitrust Division Keep Losing Criminal Trials?"[2]:

> Even in the best of circumstances, prosecuting criminal antitrust cases can be challenging. They require a deep understanding of a particular market and proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants entered into an illegal agreement. His- torically, the Division relied on multiple witnesses to testify that an agreement, or “meeting of the minds,” existed. There is often a thin line between lawful information-gathering and unlawful price-fixing, making it difficult for jurors to understand what, exactly, constitutes criminal conduct. One former Antitrust Division attorney went so far as to say that juries “don’t like to convict in antitrust cases” because they view violations as “technical.” Another recalled seeing jurors appear shocked when they learned during trial testimony that an antitrust conviction carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison. An attorney who interviewed jurors after one trial said that some jurors expressed anger that the Division was expending resources to prosecute these cases at all.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/criminal-enforcement-fine-and-ja...

[2] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/ant...

Except that there are significant switching costs. A person moving has to pay moving costs, might have to replace furniture that doesn't work for the new place, can affect your children's schools etc. This means the value of a unit to someone living there can often be significantly higher than the market rate.

This can led to situations where the most profitable move for landlords is to take advantage of the discrepancy to regularly raise the rent for existing renters by more than the market, in attempt to maximize profit. Sure they might have to deal with the hassle of finding a new tenant every couple of years when someone gets priced out, but if it leads overall to slightly higher profits it's the winning capitalist move.

The rentiers are ostensibly following the law, but the overall cost to the population and quality of life loss to renters can be significantly outsized compared to a sliver of additional profit for the rentiers. This is a great example of externalized costs in a free market and exactly where government should generally be attempting sensible regulation.

"Over a century ago, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to protect competition in the marketplace. As the Supreme Court has explained, the “central evil” addressed by Section 1 of that Act is “the elimination of competition that would otherwise exist,” including competition on prices.

When the Sherman Act was passed, an anticompetitive scheme might have looked like robber barons shaking hands at a secret meeting.

Today, it looks like landlords using mathematical algorithms to align their rents."

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-merrick-...