- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- A group of lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the United States
- A complaint filed by Washington D.C.’s Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider
- RealPage recommends prices for roughly 4.5 million housing units in the United States
- RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions
A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.
“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.
Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
All corporate landlords need to be dissolved. It shouldn’t exist. People should not be able to make profit off of housing ever.
Cannot say I agree with that last sentence but unlimited profits from housing should absolutely be illegal. I’ve been dealing with an absolute shit show of a corporate landlord, one that uses realpage, and it’s really been eye opening how fucked these companies are. I 100% knew they were scumbag pieces of shit but I got a full dose of the lengths they’ll go to in order to make a buck. Just two of the many cost saving measures: letting me go without heat for 3 weeks and letting our elevators stay broken for 6 weeks. I’m convinced the only reason they fixed our elevators is someone must have finally gotten their lawyer on the phone to them.
Absolutely souless garbage humans work for these companies. They sleep fine at night knowing you’re paying a lot of money for an apartment you’re freezing your ass off in, have to struggle to get in and out of, whatever. They absolutely give zero fucks about the lives they’re fucking with.
having to be responsible for the actual property seems to be a good idea.
idk how it’s handled in germany, but i’m not aware of stuff this bad. i have someone in my family who has renters, and they either go fix stuff themselves or pay a professional if the heating’s acting up again.
and being a renter of someonecs privately owned apartment in a corporate owned house, i feel like being taken care of adequately.
i hope it gets better for you guys.
Thanks for your response. I think that in the US one of our big issues is inconsistency. What I’ve described here is unprecedented for me until now but I’m sure many others have had much worse. The basic idea I think is that the bigger a company gets, the more they feel emboldened to get away with shit to save a buck here and there.
It’s insanely dehumanizing for someone to lie to your face and tell you their hands are tied and your broken heat will just have to stand for an unknown amount of time. My landlord before this was an amazing man who I will never forget. Many times he showed good will beyond what was required and you can bet your ass he would’ve had the heat fixed within a week at most even if he had to spend $10,000 to do it. In fact the heat did break once and he had someone there the next morning. Meanwhile the company with hundreds of millions in revenue refuses to spend a buck to expedite the process because they have the cheapest deal possible with some contractor who is slammed
The management in this building treats us like idiots who don’t matter. Despite repeated fuckups, everything is always “we’re doing the best we can”. If they were doing the best they could, none of these issues would’ve last longer than like a week and a half. The tenants here were damn near mutiny level it was so bad. People were posting notes with numbers to call and an exact count of how many days the elevators were out. It felt good to at least see people doing something to hold the assholes accountable.
There are times that a corporate entity of some description is extremely useful. The issue is for-profit companies.
A simpler solution is to add a tax, based on the property value for for-profit companies. For niche situations, the effect of this will be annoying but not devastating. For companies dedicated to sucking money out of housing, it will hurt them badly. Maybe have it tick up 0.5% of the property a year till it’s 5%. Slow enough not to cause a massive shock to the market, but large enough to force a change.
An obvious example of a useful company owned housing situation is a set of apartments. However, here a non profit would work even better.
As for valid for-profit ownership, it does happen. E.g. I know of a veterinary practice that owns several houses. They used them to provide subsided housing to staff, close at hand. They also allow them to house mid to long term locum staff close to the practice. Everyone wins from this arrangement.
I dunno if I want my employer to also be my landlord. It might have worked well for that specific case, but it’s easy to see how it could fall apart.
If you’re on a 3 month or so contract, it makes sense. It’s too long to deal with hotels, but too short for proper rentals.
Basically, there are some legit cases for property ownership. The trick is to kill the leaches, without causing too much damage elsewhere.
In denser areas, the only people willing to build skyscrapers full of housing are intending to be landlords. Even funding the construction of condos has become extremely rare because the cost to profit ratio doesn’t return enough to beat just buying ETFs in the market. If you can solve this problem for cities that desperately need to build housing faster and denser, then you can dissolve corporate landlords
A very easy solution is for the government to build public housing? Isn’t it rather obvious? It completely fix all things you talked about.
Buildings get built, rents are cheaper, and it doesn’t matter if the “returns” are lower than the stock market. The government doesn’t give a fuck about returns, they print the money.
Edit: and I also think it’s pretty fucking obvious why this easy simple and direct solution is not applied. Landowners and capitalists are in complete collusion. The classes are mixing in ways that they are indistinguishable now. And the government is completely controlled by capitalists. They will never cut their profits and means of control. They won’t allow it.
Public housing the US was historically federally funded and was for low income people. It was one of those liberal solutions that tries to solve something, but gets stuck in a system that is already racist, and then the whole thing is made worse by conservatives.
Social housing, where cities build housing themselves, can be a way out. Most cities don’t have a lot of experience doing this, so it’s going to have to start out with a few small projects. It can be mixed income instead of low income (which tended to support red lining).
Another possibility is for cities to use their leverage with developers to favor unionized shops. This may not be possible under existing state laws, however.
Definitely should be mixed income, and the planning for it is better handled more locally (neighbourhood/borough, city, town etc.). But it should be funded federally, cause cities can’t print money. All development they make has to be funded by taxes. The federal government doesn’t have to earn a dime, they can just print a couple hundred billion and distribute it to all the major population centers to develop public housing and infrastructure however they see best. That would work best imo
This right here.
I live in a very dense city, which means building residential towers is usually the only reasonable way to quickly increase housing density. And we desperately need housing.
Large buildings can cost billions to build. You need a government or corporation to organize around if you’re going to make that happen. And unless you’re China or the USSR in the 70’s, going the government route is going to be damn near impossible right now.
Best option is to regulate private industry.
Let corporations build them, don’t let them own them.
If they build a 100 unit apartment building, don’t let the corporation just rent them all out themselves.
Force them to be sold to individuals. That keeps the overall condo prices competitive, and then people who buy them can then rent them out on an individual basis for those who prefer not to / can’t purchase a condo outright.
Limit how many residential units a corporation can own and incrementally increase taxes for every unit above that limit.
Limit how many corporations one person can own. No more of this bullshit 20 numbered companies in one person’s name to get around shitty business practices.
As I stated at the top of the thread, nobody builds condos in cities anymore because they don’t make enough money to beat the market. If I’m rich enough to build a skyscraper it better have better returns than buying an s&p etf. This is the key issue for cities. If you block corporate landlordship, they won’t build condos instead. They will build nothing at all and invest in other stuff.