Once upon a time, complaints about the cost of living were met with snarky responses about leisure spending. “Can’t buy a house? Stop eating avocado toast, dumb-dumb!” As much as I wish that was a clever absurdism I came up with, that was an actual response to millennials not being able to buy homes. The excuses change a bit over time but excuses they remain — the more recent explanation they want people to believe is that people aren’t buying homes because they simply would rather not:
this parasitic leach of a human and real estate CEO that buys up thousands of houses to turn around and rent out says young people can't afford to buy homes and they would prefer to rent.
People like him are the reason nobody can afford to buy homes. pic.twitter.com/JHvPoDpjsb— 🥀_ Imposter_🥀 (@Imposter_Edits) March 22, 2022
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Not only has rent been too damn high, the DOJ is accusing landlords of concerted efforts to keep it that way! Globest has coverage:
[T]he U.S. Department of Justice has added six major apartment landlords as defendants, alleging their involvement in a widespread scheme to artificially inflate rents across the nation.
The amended civil complaint, filed on Tuesday, accuses these firms of using RealPage’s rent-pricing algorithm to engage in illegal price fixing, potentially affecting millions of renters across the United States.
…
The newly named defendants include the country’s largest apartment owners: Greystar Real Estate Partners, Blackstone’s LivCor, Willow Bridge Property Company, Camden Property Trust, Pinnacle (and its parent company Cushman & Wakefield), and Cortland.
This small group of firms controls over 1.3 million units across the country. Buying homes en masse and colluding to keep rental costs high probably has more to do with today’s high cost of entry housing market than a penchant for fancy toast or preferring to pay rent. A 2019 estimate of how much monopolies cost the average American family put the number at about $300 per month. I shudder to think about what an up-to-date assessment of the same would be valued at.
DOJ Expands Antitrust Lawsuit, Targets Major Landlords in Rent-Fixing Scheme [Globest]
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.