People who were formerly able to afford places to live no longer can, because of Biden/Harris inflation, endless foreign wars, unchecked illegal immigration, and job losses.
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There are multiple reasons for the homeless crises including people coming into the country without having anywhere to live and expecting, demanding and receiving financial assistance from our government(s).
Additionally there is alleged collusion between many of the management companies to keep rents artificially high:
If you live in an apartment in Seattle, there's a good chance an algorithm is setting your rent.
Many of the largest property managers in the United States use the same service where data for 13 million rental units is collected and used to recommend prices.
Some tenants say that amounts to illegal collusion, and in a few places they're suing. That includes Seattle, where three lawsuits were filed in federal court last month.
The lawsuits are focused on a company with a software called RealPage.
In that software, landlords and property managers across the country can provide information about the apartments that they rent, including the rent they're charging and the size of those apartments. RealPage then uses an algorithm to recommend how much landlords and property managers should be charging for their apartment rentals.
By doing so, the software uses a plethora of information from competing landlords to recommend to other landlords how much they should charge.
The nonprofit news outlet
ProPublica recently published an investigation that raised various concerns, including questions about antitrust and competition, and whether this amounted to landlords basically colluding with each other to set their rents as high as possible.
Those questions and concerns became the core of the three Seattle lawsuits.
Seattle Times business and real estate reporter Heidi Groover talked to Soundside about these lawsuits and says that it's a complicated issue.
"At the heart of it is whether these landlords and property managers using this software, and knowing that their competitors are using it too, and knowing that the algorithm is informed by their competitors, are effectively colluding," Groover said.
Douglas Ross knows a lot about how antitrust law is applied to tech. He's a professor at the University of Washington School of Law who specializes in antitrust and class action litigation.
The idea that companies get together to fix prices is not new. But Ross says the part of these cases that stands out is the use of an algorithm. The legal argument hinges on the role of RealPage software to aggregate data and make recommendations. This isn't people talking and making deals in smoke-filled rooms.
(story continued at the link below):
Are Seattle rents being artificially inflated via algorithm?
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