- 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.
We need a national renters bill of rights! Rent control is badly needed because no one can afford to live anymore. If America becomes a nation of renters our economy will collapse.
Everyone should have ownership of their home. I do not know the mechanism for how to transition from rent to ownership, but its the only ethical, economical way.
The answer is probably a combination of things. We need to be able to build more houses / duplexes / apartment buildings / etc. That’s a fact. There could be ways to help people build their own house (up to code) and cut out the middleman.
If people could easily build their own, do you know how fast property values would drop? Homes in the middle of nowhere should cost nothing.
Homes in the middle of nowhere are already cheap. Making more housing isn’t a solution if billion dollar corporations can just buy all of them up for more than asking.
We need housing where people work. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t helpful for 75% of the country.
Corporations buy housing because they beleive its a good investment.
Right now, they’re right. But a lot of that is because it’s legally hard to build enough new housing to keep up with demand in many cities because most of their area is zoned exclusively for mcmansions.
Housing in the middle of nowhere being cheap if you can’t get a good job in the middle of nowhere.
You think if people build their own houses, then mysterious billion dollar corporations will buy them up? That’s… weird. I don’t know how that would be bad. You could just build another one.
Charge 50% tax on rental properties.
Put the money into a fund that builds more properties in that area.
You can argue that the tax will be passed on to renters, but they’re already charging all the market can bear because there’s a shortage of property.
My answer, cap the number of single-family rental homes in a given jurisdiction. Give 5-year chits that authorize a property owner to rent the property, then every 5 years have some sort of event that allows someone else to take the chit. That way you don’t have 80% of the single-family homes being bought up for rentals and it doesn’t bar the market from having new people enter.
As for the event, my preference is for a landleech Thunderdome. Two blood suckers enter, one leaves, and they are allowed to profit off someone else’s hard work. Corporations are allowed to participate by champion proxy, but the champion must be a C-level executive and they must participate in every match for every property they rent.
Apartments and multi-family homes (duplex, triplex, etc.) can be rentals as far as I am concerned because there is room for it in society, but housing needs to be put in the constitution as a right (as does food) and rent has to be more regulated.
Or we could just ban single family house renting. Hell, the a few cities where they should be banning any new single family housing at all.
That seems like a weird assertion.
It is honestly not. Property ownership is currently the primary method for being able to collateralize small business loans. Without the general populace having access to that, that initial step for starting a new business or pursuing a venture before it is viable for investment becomes VERY difficult to achieve. Especially if it is something that requires a lot of involvement or time to get moving. Once you take out the ability to make a startup or small business, you are left with an ever-dwindling pool of options and end up in a persistent state of monopoly it oligopoly for most goods and services, which in turn leads to an utter stagnation of economic conveyance and growth.
Another way it stagnates economic growth is in the increased expense associated with housing. The actual economy, not the BS we are told is the economy, grows when money moves. Individuals and companies buying goods and services from each other. That only happens with disposable income. If everyone is paying 2x what they would in rent that they would in ownership, that comes out of their disposable income. This leads to less luxury (in an economic sense) purchasing and, in many cases, restricted necessity purchasing. So less money is available to move, which causes the economy to shrink.
Unless there’s another way, like they’ve achieved in European countries where renting is the norm. Their economies didn’t collapse.
Afaik those countries also have rather extensive tenant rights laws, rent control/caps, and a robust entrepreneur support system, like universal health care and generous PTO laws so people can take time to pursue things while minimizing the risks.
Yes, and none of them have had their economies collapse.
Very true, but let’s see that happen in the US, Australia, or New Zealand. Or any of the other dystopian nightmares that capitalists have manipulated into their own private wonderlands.
I think you’re overestimating how different those countries are.
Ummm, I was comparing them as similar, not different. They are all facing identical housing issues and are faced with similar social programs and safety nets.