Albrt had an informative piece cross posted here at NC yesterday focusing on ways to measure whether Trump is improving the alignment of the Republican party with the working class or selling out his supporters and continuing uniparty rule for the oligarchs. Albrt focuses on the policy areas of immigration, tariffs and manufacturing, energy, firing (certain) federal workers, drugs, and alternatives to the college path.
One that should be added to the list is antitrust policy, namely will Trump continue the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in so-called “information sharing”?
Oddly, Biden officials outside of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Lina Khan-led Federal Trade Commission rarely ever talked about it, and the Kamala campaign certainly didn’t campaign on it.
Front and center in the information sharing arena is a big case against RealPage. The DOJ and eight states on August 23 sued the private equity-owned company that allegedly operates as the middle man in a national property management cartel that has sent rent through the roof. The civil lawsuit accuses RealPage of using the software it sells to real estate management companies to orchestrate an illegal price-fixing scheme, which all but eliminates competition among mega landlords, allows them to boost prices, and acted as a major factor in skyrocketing rents in recent years.
RealPage and the rental management companies, many of which are private equity-owned, are also facing dozens of class action lawsuits from tenants. A separate lawsuit against Santa Barbara-based Yardi, a company similar to RealPage, accuses it of using its RENTmaximizer (now Revenue IQ) product to do exactly what RealPage is accused of doing.The DOJ also opened a criminal investigation into RealPage, and the large apartment owners and managers that use the company’s pricing software, to determine if the firm is facilitating price fixing.
The DOJ crackdown on RealPage came as part of a major antitrust shift that closed Clinton-era loopholes on “information sharing.” That decision was a major win for Americans as it lowered the bar for antitrust cases — a bar that was previously so high you could drive a double decker bus through it and have room to spare.
In addition to RealPage, there is also the open DOJ antitrust lawsuit against Agri Stats Inc. for running anticompetitive information exchanges among broiler chicken, pork and turkey processors. Agri Stats allegedly collects, integrates and distributes price, cost and output information among competing meat processors, which allows them to coordinate output and prices in order to maximize profits. The fact discovery in the Agri Stats case is set to close on January 24, with dispositive motions due by July 2.
What will come of the RealPage case and wider efforts to rein in cartel behavior under Trump 2.0? To fully appreciate the stakes let’s first take a deeper look at what RealPage does and how now-closed Clinton-era loopholes (propagated by every administration after up until Biden) opened the floodgates to cartel takeovers of the American economy.
Why the Rent Is Too Damn High
In 2011, Warren Buffett said told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission the following:
“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”
That type of pricing power came to many multi-family rental markets in recent years where major Wall Street owners turned to rental management software that essentially acts as collusion software. It sets prices and vacancy rates and helps the bottom line because property managers know that their “competitors” are also using RealPage’s system and will not undercut them. Company executive Andrew Bowen once said that the software was “driving it,” referring to rental price increases. He added: “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
That pricing power from collusion allow RealPage and its peers like Yardi to play a role in the student loan crisis and students sleeping in cars. They play a role in the homelessness crisis. And they almost certainly play a role in your rent being so high — whether your landlord uses their software or not.
To really get a feel for the effect of the RealPage and property management company cartel, it’s best to look at individual metro markets. That’s because in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Nashville, Dallas, Atlanta, etc. the market can be dominated by large (oftentimes private equity-owned) companies, and if all of them are colluding using RealPage, the effect can be enormous. In Los Angeles County, for example, 79 percent of all multifamily rental units are being listed using collusion software.
Speculative investment vehicles have taken over much of the housing market, a trend that took off during the foreclosure regime of Obama when predatory billionaire investors increasingly began to buy up an unprecedented share of single-family homes, apartment buildings, mobile home parks, and the government-subsidized affordable housing sector. They have also been the most eager adopters of collusion software which effectively allows them to act as a cartel over many metro housing markets.
What happens with RealPage under Trump won’t just be confined to shelter. The DOJ’s updated stance on “information-sharing” affects other necessities like health care where Americans pay more than anyone else in the “advanced” world for the worst outcomes and food where cartel behavior contributes to the eye-watering cost of a trip to the grocery store nowadays.
Since the new administration will inherit the DOJ’s RealPage litigation, what direction it takes will tell us a lot about its wider position on the exchange of competitively sensitive information through the use of algorithmic software and potentially AI.
Closing Clinton-Era Loopholes Wide Enough to Drive a Truck Through
Between 1993 and 2011 the Department of Justice Antitrust Division issued a trio of policy statements (two during the Clinton administration and one under Obama) regarding the sharing of information in the healthcare industry. These rules provided wiggle room around the Sherman Antitrust Act, which “sets forth the basic antitrust prohibition against contracts, combinations, and conspiracies in restraint of trade or commerce.”
And it wasn’t just in healthcare. The rules were interpreted to apply to all industries. Companies increasingly turned to data firms offering software that “exchanges information” at lightning speed with competitors in order to keep wages low and prices high – effectively creating national cartels. The end result was RealPage, Yardi, and others like a long-running conspiracy among poultry producers to exchange information about wages and benefits for plant workers and collaborate with their competitors on compensation decisions.
In Feb. of 2023 the DOJ closed the information-sharing loopholes. From the statement announcing that decision:
After careful review and consideration, the division has determined that the withdrawal of the three statements is the best course of action for promoting competition and transparency. Over the past three decades since this guidance was first released, the healthcare landscape has changed significantly. As a result, the statements are overly permissive on certain subjects, such as information sharing, and no longer serve their intended purposes of providing encompassing guidance to the public on relevant healthcare competition issues in today’s environment. Withdrawal therefore best serves the interest of transparency with respect to the Antitrust Division’s enforcement policy in healthcare markets. Recent enforcement actions and competition advocacy in healthcare provide guidance to the public, and a case-by-case enforcement approach will allow the Division to better evaluate mergers and conduct in healthcare markets that may harm competition.
Essentially, the Biden DOJ took the logical approach that longstanding antitrust principles barring competitors from using human interaction to fix prices and wages applies equally to the use of software algorithms or AI.
But no judicial decision has yet adopted the DOJ’s position, and the incoming Trump administration can simply reverse the Biden DOJ decision. It remains unclear which way the Trump DOJ will go, but the search for signs is on. From Mintz, a “a litigation powerhouse and business accelerator serving leaders in life sciences, private equity, energy, and technology”:
As January 20, 2025, approaches, antitrust practitioners and the business communities are searching for clues whether the incoming Trump Administration and its antitrust officials will continue the Biden Administration’s approach to the exchange of competitively sensitive information, particularly through the use of algorithmic software.
Will Trump side with the billionaires seething over the DOJ and FTC efforts to rein in their rapaciousness ever so slightly or his working class supporters seething over their long decline in living standards caused by those billionaires?
Reasons for Skepticism
- Trump has promised to unleash AI upon taking office, which includes getting rid of the minimal Biden administration protections:
During the campaign, Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen helped shape the President-elect’s tech policy agenda. To “take the lead over China” on AI, campaign allies said the new administration will discard Biden’s AI guardrails and go full steam ahead on autonomous weapons, intelligence, and cybersecurity.
Still, it remains to be seen if that will apply to collusion software.
- Pam Bondi
Any hope that Trump’s first pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, would usher in a “Khanservative” DOJ looks like it’s circling the drain with Trump’s new pick Pam Bondi. Gaetz sexual proclivities were used to torpedo his nomination, likely due to his antitrust views.
Meanwhile, everything about the corporate lobbyist and foreclosure fraudster Bondi says that it’ll be open season for information sharing again.
3. Trump 1.0 and RealPage
It’s worth remembering that RealPage really took off following a crucial decision by the first Trump administration: the 2017 merger between RealPage and its largest pricing competitor. According to ProPublica, some DOJ staff raised concerns about the merger but were overridden by political appointees of Trump.
Reasons for Guarded Optimism
- The GOP is changing
As the failed nomination of Gaetz showed, Republicans are no longer universally opposed to antitrust. Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., for example, hold similar views as Gaetz. George Washington University Law School professor William Kovacic, who served on the FTC from 2006 to 2011 and was chair from 2008 to 2009. With more via Roll Call:
Kovacic pointed out that Trump’s antitrust enforcers filed one of the cases against Google and Meta and started the investigation into what eventually became the case against Apple in the first term.
“I cannot readily imagine them pulling the plug on those cases, because you have this coalition that wants that kind of scrutiny to continue,” Kovacic said.
Kovacic said a throughline for both the Biden administration approach to antitrust and conservative criticism of big tech companies is that a traditional antitrust approach that emphasizes prices is not enough.Biden administration cases have discussed concerns around competition for small businesses and protection for local communities, while conservatives have criticized tech companies for allegedly censoring conservative voices online — both things have little to do with prices.
However, he pointed out that Republican commissioners on the FTC have objected to several of the agency’s moves and rulemakings and could reverse them in the second Trump administration, including its rule banning noncompete agreements. Kovacic also said that the Biden administration’s more aggressive approach on mergers — suing to stop them rather than accepting settlements to lessen the antitrust problems created by a deal — could fall by the wayside for both the FTC and DOJ.
If — and this is a big if — Trump wants to do right by his voters, he would not only continue the Biden administration’s antitrust action but ramp it up.
- J.D. Vance.
During the campaign, Vance on his “populist crusade”, made promises to continue antitrust enforcement, often sounding more like Bernie Sanders than a traditional Republican, but does he mean any of it? Or, as Thomas Frank has long highlighted, are Republicans like Vance simply adopting the language of the putative American Left to effectively attract voters long abandoned by the Democrats?
While smart politically (there’s a reason Bernie was popular and the Democrats had to use dirty tactics to kill his campaigns) there could be limits to Vance’s “populist crusade” and they’re set by Silicon Valley. Vance hails from both the venture capital world and the poverty of West Virginia. Who will he prioritize?
And here’s where this point becomes another one for skepticism. From The Verge:
Vance has played at being a man of the people, but he owes his place on Trump’s ticket to Silicon Valley’s billionaires. After all, he is a pet of Thiel, who put forward $15 million for Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign. (There were other wealthy donors, too, including Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.)
While reassuring Silicon Valley it will still have access to “high-talent, high-quality” workers, Vance is leading the charge in shifting the blame for Americans’ long decline in living standards onto immigrants, which could work for a short period until people notice that their lives aren’t improving all that much. It could also divert attention away from antitrust issues and cases like RealPage.
Still, it’s a low bar to clear to be better than the sanctimonious Democrats at this point. An end to all the lectures might be welcome even if it doesn’t necessarily result in an improving quality of life.
If we’re counting, that’s four points for skepticism and 1.5 for optimism. Thankfully, some tenants aren’t waiting for the Trump administration to fix things.
Tenant Action
Regardless of what happens with RealPage, housing policy in the US is so geared towards rent seeking and the fixes needed are so numerous that the path forward is unlikely to originate in DC.
Tenants across the country are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.
A growing number of tenants’ unions across the country are coordinating rent strikes to protest rent increases and decrepit living conditions. And they’re finding some success. A union in Kansas City, for example, used a rent strike to get millions in overdue repairs to their building. Other Kansas City tenant unions are emulating that successful rent strike, and more action like this could be on the way according to Ruthy Gourevitch and Tara Raghuveer of the Tenant Union Federation:
Absent meaningful action from the government, the question is not whether tenants will revolt, but whether the revolt will be from a place of desperation or a place of power. To ensure the latter, tenants are organizing unions, from Bozeman, Montana, to Louisville, Kentucky. Unions are uniting across geography, and aligning through groups like the newly launched Tenant Union Federation, which we launched this year. Drawing inspiration from the labor movement and community organizing, tenant unions reflect the urgency to build a new kind of power to seriously contest the forces of real estate capital.
Tenant unions seek a different system entirely, where homes are not treated as commodities but guaranteed as public goods, and where our lives are not reduced to line items in a landlord’s budget. This vision isn’t a radical fever dream; it is the only way out of this mess. Ultimately, achieving this vision will require rejecting the market as we know it today and creating publicly backed, nonmarket alternatives. Before we get there, tenants need protections. As tenants build local power within buildings and across neighborhoods, these unions are also demanding a regulatory agenda.
Gourevitch and Raghuveer go on to outline that regulatory agenda, which includes national rent caps, anti-eviction protections, habitability standards, and antitrust action to prevent consolidation and collusion in the rental market.
Even better would be tenant-owned housing, such as what happened in Maine recently when residents of Linnhaven Mobile Home Center, a community of nearly 300 occupied homes in Brunswick, banded together to buy their trailer park to prevent it from falling into the hands of private equity.
Actions like that and tenant organization are likely to prove far more effective than relying on Trump, Bondi, or whatever ghoul the Democrats put in office next.
RealPage seems like a sideshow to me. Landlords have to advertise, and I remember when they did so using classified ads in newspapers.
Computers (and, yes, the internet) have made it easier to discover price elasticity by neighborhood. Now the big cartels will have to scrape the web themselves, like they did back in the day. I don’t see that shutting down RealPage will do much except create a few entry-level tech jobs. RealPage’s technology itself is a junior college tech project, the cartels will simply revert to doing it in house, as they did since time immemorial.
I’m not one of the economists around here but seems to me there must be a lot more to this than “information sharing.” If apartment owners are keeping their properties off the market in order to drive up rents then how is it they can afford to do that? Surely any solution would require the government to be much more intrusive in regulating the housing market just as solving high medical costs mean the government must be more aggressive in directly regulating that. In a computer age “information” is one of the hardest things to control and if you shut off public sources they can just as easily collude in private and cover their tracks.
Meanwhile Trump and Musk are saying they want to reduce regulation and Trump is even a real estate person himself. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope in that direction.
Just to add that through homeowner favoritism in both property tax charges and zoning governments already regulate the rental market–to the benefit of landlords. In a similar way the Congress itself often seems to be colluding with the medical industrial complex to make them richer rather than fairer. To be sure we did once get a Sherman Antitrust Act but that was over a hundred years ago.
Isn’t the problem here a lot bigger than who is in charge of antitrust enforcement?
Hello Carolinian! You write: “If apartment owners are keeping their properties off the market in order to drive up rents then how is it they can afford to do that?” Though I do not profess to be an expert on this matter, large landlords using RealPage may be able to afford to keep properties off the market b/c lowering supply by keeping apartments off the market increases revenues from the apartments that remain on the market (that is, decreased supply + same or greater demand = higher rent). I also wonder whether RealPage allocates who must reduce supply and by how much to participants in its programs. Also, I wonder whether higher pricing power by the large landlords also has a knock-on effect for the smaller landlords who are able to increase their rental prices in the “shadow” of the big landlord’s rent increases in particular rental markets.
I am a small landlord….or was in Southern California. What I found is that it is very hard to find qualified tenants who can pay reasonable rent who are not high risk. Section 8 tenants are more expensive to keep than to leave the unit vacant because of repairs and destructive behavior. The big advantage the big corporate renters have is attorneys on staff or a fixed yearly fee that handle the evictions and the endless legal tussle over damages, not paying etc. If you can spread those costs over a large number of places they can be bearable. Otherwise the landlord eats it and I sure have as have many of my friends. The other thing is that the big boys have very detailed rental contracts with huge numbers of add ons and they screen their tenants with a microscope. Although I rent a few units out I am paying rent where I live. When I applied they wanted everything basically a full financial statement. And the rent is high and the add ons are higher but they have the legal power to enforce and the little guy would have to pay a lawyer 700 per hour to have that clout. My sense is most small landlords are making money only on the capital appreciation of the properties which is largely inflation driven. So the little guys are getting the crappier tenants and a lot of them would rather not rent out than deal with problematic tenants. There are a lot of vacant houses and apartments in Southern California and they are vacant not because the rent is high and the tenants cannot afford the rent but because the landlords cannot afford the tenants at any reasonable rent level that anyone would pay. And the bad ones drive your good tenants out. So often one is happy taking a 2 or 3% per year capital gain and carrying a vacant property. Investing now in rental property is just insane with the current price levels for everything. Look at the price for a plumber in LA. And look how often tenants shove Tampax down the toilet. That is a ton of rent in aggregate.
Coordination software makes it easier to manage a housing cartel. Not unlike OPEC managing price by setting production levels and allocating production among members. “Anti-trust” has lost some of its inherent meaning since most Americans are unlikely to know what the trusts were that needing busting, but they might have head of OPEC.
I have not studied this, but I gather that the point is the implied agreement not to undercut the shared model rather than just aggregating information about what competitors are doing.
It’s not really about doing a better job of sharing price information. It’s about recommending constantly higher rents, which all the other participants agree to go along with. This generally requires keeping a larger percentage of units vacant. Those vacant units are homes actual people actually need. Studies have shown these cartels are making homes increasingly unavailable and unaffordable in some markets.
What would you think of a grocers’ organization that would agree to all throw out 25% of the broccoli crop, to keep the prices nice and high?
My guess is they will tackle it the same way congress went after the Keating Five, or, how the FBI was told to change their definition of mortgage fraud in 04? or, how Obama went after the bankers that trashed things in 08…….change the rules to allow perps to fail upwards is my guess.
How these times have made a cynic of me..aargg
The sloganeering around the rent gougers could go something like this.
We have to
destroy the village to save itfree up capital to build new housing. Rent price discovery upwards provides the incentives to invest. Slash the red tape, remove the shackles, liberalize zoning, encourage social credit scores for the right kind of tenants, unleash the market forces to helphard-working American familiescreditors.In the end, that village will be destroyed. Pack your bags. Or heed advice about really nasty downsides of AI and take action to help humans.
When there was heavy inflation in housing, everybody that had a mortgage was cheering on the increase-really the only thing that went up in price, until Covid hit and everything else you purchase followed suit.
I can’t see the price of food falling, but used houses have a long way to fall.
While public housing developed a poor reputation we seemingly used to have a lot more of it, even in my small city. There’s a boom of rental property building here but fancy architect-ed buildings rather than housing blocks. I believe our GOP government is more inclined to offer rent subsidies to the needy so they can live in those fancy buildings rather than build new specialized poor people housing which were, it’s true, regarded as ghettoized discrimination.
Which is to say there once was a war on poverty and now the mantra is “what poverty?”
Even my appreciated if now somewhat hurricane stricken urban trails are probably intended to further enhance the real estate market here. George Washington and other founders were real estate tycoons. Some things in America never change?
So taking on the forces involved in the above post likely to be an uphill slog.
Maybe in California with our Prop 13, but a lot of Americans did not enjoy the higher taxes they had to pay to live in their house, and likely higher homeowner insurance too. And most people I think realize that when they sell that inflated house it will cost them a lot more to buy another (if you are not say arbitraging CA prices vs Arizona). Part of the reason a growing number of boomers are looking to retire in place.
Different perspective if you use real estate as an investment.
ChatGPT query: Design a rent collusion regulation that prohibits price sharing. Further define aggregate data. Give examples of data that should not be shared.
Rent Collusion Regulation: Prohibition of Price Sharing
Further Definition of Aggregate Data
Examples of Aggregate Data
Examples of Data That Should Not Be Shared
In this example, the info battle resembles cell phone data anonymized for spying purposes vs privacy rights. Add in Fair Housing regs and it gets more complex. What would Snowden say?
Another idea that might have legs is this: If Tenants are in the business of renting, as evidenced by their lease contract (among many other vendor contracts required by LL like water, energy, trash pickup) are LLs engaging in the restraint of trade portion of the Sherman Act?
This has become front page news again in San Diego where an estimated 15-20% of LLs are large enough to be probable users of the software. It popped up pre covid then disappeared.
2. J.D. Vance.
I’m seriously wondering to what extent Vance will act like a Catholic, especially given he’s a converted Catholic. Had he been born into it we probably shouldn’t expect much, but as an older convert he had to go through a process and to be baptised had to make a commitment, a promise to God, which he can’t easily forget. And Catholics especially are about charity, especially for the poor and disadvantaged. I guess there’s also the question of how much influence Vance has with Trump, how much influence he’d have on the administration. There’s the formal role that comes with the title, that of being a key advisor, but does Trump even talk to the guy very much, does Trump go to Vance before anyone else? And does Vance himself present thoughts and ideas to him in a way that Trump can consume and appreciate, or anyone?
I look at Kamala, she seemed to have had zero influence, seemed to be a token, a placeholder. I don’t see what, if anything, she did or contributed. I’m also trying to think back to any time in history where the VP seemed to make a significant contribution and what comes to mind are LBJ under JFK, Truman under Roosevelt, G.H.W. Bush under Reagan. And GHW would be significant because Reagan had dementia and GHW surely knew it, probably carried him.
In all three cases the VP was key to foreign policy decisions. In all three cases, the VP had decades of legislative experience and cred, years of relationship building enabling them to act as mediators between opposing factions, political power built up over time which could be used to translate into getting stuff done. In all three cases, the VP was driving policy decisions they themselves had contributed to, played a role in, and were actively roadshowing and selling to America and the world.
I don’t see Trump letting Vance or anyone else do this, this would need a president secure enough in their person that they can let others take some credit or operate with some autonomy. I also don’t see Vance coming up with any kind of policy proposal, foreign or domestic, that Trump endorses and lends support to, lets Vance roll with. He may even be too junior and inexperienced to come up with anything good anyway.
I also see Trump putting Vance in a position of having to compromise on or go against his Catholicism, it might even test his faith and beliefs. Murder comes with the job, with Trump it’s going to be a genocide too. Under Trump, the Palestinians, Jesus’ people, will be wiped from the face of the earth, probably the Lebanese and Syrians as well, unless Vance’s Catholicism has any say. Under Trump the Israelis will be murdering Christians and nuking Iran unless Vance has any say. No Catholic can endorse these without going against God, there isn’t anything even remotely close to just cause here, but in the White House we apparently have National Security Advisors like Stuart Seldowitz who believe all Arabs rape their children, practice incest, want to impose a caliphate on the whole world, have a view of Arabs far beyond any reality. What would Vance do, does he share those beliefs? And if he doesn’t, how does he operate against a WH that does? It would take someone with amazing charisma, vision, depth, knowledge.
Will Vance be hammering the nails in the cross, is the big question for me. And that goes for this question of housing and rent and a whole slew of other social justice issues.
Cradle Catholic here. There has been a recent wave of catholic converts linked with right wing return type stuff. A lot of people who get into catholicism for the aesthetic and not for the morality. Or anti internet pro family people who want a moral grounding. My family is very Dorothy Day groovy folk music vatican 2 catholicism and my sister likes to whine about how all these new right wing converts are ruining the church, but i think any step towards Christ is good. It takes time to fully understand catholic doctrine and catechesis is in such a terrible state right now. (I also kinda agree that tradition and gatekeeping are good. There is a balance. Both sides are right about different things.)
Anyway. i truly doubt JD Vance will be some bastion of catholic values. Joe Biden wasnt. Only JFK came close but JFK is an outlier. I feel like most politicians chose worldly values over god.
Vance entered a Catholic Church that consciously purged its Social Gospel wing under the Cold War-inspired Popedoms of John Paul ll and his Hitler Jugend adjutant and successor, Ratzinger.
I wouldn’t expect much from Vance on that count if I were you; he’s a Catholic the same way Steve Bannon is, which is to say the Opus Dei/Tradition-Family-Property wing of the institutional/political church.
I don’t disagree with your broader points, but I differ with the interpretations of the historical influence of past VPs.
All the historical sources I’ve ready are clear that LBJ was completely shut out of all decision making in the Kennedy White House. JFK’s aides were known to have derided him as “Senator Cornpone”, and he was sent on ceremonial trips to India (among other places) to keep him well out of the way. Caro, Dallek, and all his biographers state that in Cabinet meetings, Johnson barely spoke, and maintained a sort of aloof, downbeat, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. The impression of all the Kennedy staff was that Johnson was morose and feeling sorry for himself.
Harry Truman was Vice-President for all of 82 days, and was never even briefed on the progress of the war, or anything else; his first real knowledge of the atomic bomb came in a briefing from Henry Stimpson a few days after he became President. That was just one critical policy element on which Truman was excluded. Truman, too, was considered an embarrassment by the Roosevelt White House.
As for George Herbert Walker Bush, I know fewer details because I’ve not bothered to read much of that history — I remember living it and feeling it was all too petty to bother reading about later. But I do recall that Bush was chosen as Reagan’s running mate somewhat reluctantly, and probably as a sop to the starched-collar crowd that still held a lot of power in the Republican Party at that time. I also recall reading that there was little closeness at all between Reagan and Bush.
For reasons structural and personal, very few Presidents have had close relationships with their own Vice-Presidents.
Unlike any of the previously-mentioned VPs, Kamala Harris was simply a non-entity. I always thought George W. Bush had the intelligence and personality of a high school cheerleader, but Harris takes the cake on that score.
I presume Betteridges law of headlines applies here. I’ll go with, no.
Trump, being a real-estate developer, will be landlord-friendly.
Yeah, I think that is safe to say. An awful lot of faith is being irrationally placed on Trump being some kind of populist friend of the Common Man.
The most obvious cost-cutting move DOGE could do would be to get rid of expensive leases for Federal office buildings. Instead, it looks like they’re going to demand Federal employees come back to the office 5 days a week.
That tells us all we need to know.
I don’t even think RTO is really about real estate. Instead, it’s all about asserting power over the rabble, economical and environmental costs be damned.
on remotely related note, here a piece on Robert Moses from JACOBIN, with a pretty good title:
An Urban Legend
By Juliana DeVaan
Fifty years after the publication of The Power Broker, the legacy of urban planner Robert Moses is ripe for revisiting.
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/an-urban-legend
As a “mom-and-pop” landlord, there’s plenty of information available now without needing “algorithms” or third-party software. In my state it’s all about “workforce housing”. If multi-family rentals are so profitable I don’t see why we would need all these NGOs getting into the act. Meanwhile expenses keep increasing. The state puts a 4.5% tax on rents so it shares in the benefit of increases. The county uses differential property tax rates to favor owner-occupants. Then they try to put the blame on STRs or “empty homes”. I don’t think the multi-family market is heavily influenced by those.
An interesting and intelligent post, but I think missing the main event. Sure, renters colluding to raise prices is important, but the only reason they can get away with it is because the government has opened the border to excessive third world immigration. The total number of people forced into the country in the last four years is massive – about 10 million according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, although this is likely a major undercount. In addition you have to add in demographic momentum because of the low age distribution of third world refugees, both from this and preceding cohorts (the total population impact of third world immigration is at least double the total number of immigrants). This vastly exceeds the rate at which. we ACTUALLY ARE BUILDING HOUSING. (Sure you can wring your hands about enabling the economy to build more housing but unless you do this in reality you are just flapping your gums).
Now suppose that instead of more people than housing, we had more housing than people? Imagine someone who owns an apartment complex. Right now they can just use their software to collude and boost prices. But suppose their complex was 40 percent vacant? The cartel software tells them to not cut rents because that would ‘betray’ the renter cartel. But, if they lower their rents by 10%, then can fill their complex to 100 percent capacity. Ultimately it will be impossible for a renter cartel to avoid defections and competition will lower rents. How could it not?
In the medium to long run, nobody beats supply and demand.