- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.