In the People's Republic of Berkeley, our City Council patted themselves on the back in March 2025 when they passed similar laws.
Then they got sued by the company that was targeted, and immediately waffled and canceled the ban.
What's insane about all of this is that we also have Rent Control. There is no greater price fixing mechanism than Rent Control. Rent Control ensures that all landlords must seek the highest possible rent, because they are (potentially) tethered to it for life (of the tenant).
So if you create an economic system where sellers never will allow prices to go down, why bother banning price fixing -- its practically baked into the housing code.
They would. But second order effects ensure that this very act leads to the decline of housing prices. These effects being eliminated by rent control makes it the premier anti-tenant policy.
What second-order effects...? Feels like such an oddly opqaue way to talk about them. And how do you ignore the effect of the fact that rent no longer rises during the life of the tenant, making it lower after a while than it would otherwise be...? (How) is it so obvious that that is dwarfed by the second-order effects of uncontrolled rent that it doesn't even warrant a mention? Because it isn't to me.
Every rental unit in the city I live in is rent controlled — the government sets a maximum rental increase per unit per year. This is here in the People’s Republic of … checks notes … Dubai. It works great.
I’d imagine it’s not so simple, especially without a functional legislative branch, but we could really use a “digital bill of rights” that could provide a comprehensive set of baseline protections and standards for things like this, online privacy, data protection, whatever stops Meta/X/et al from being maximally harmful, etc..
> Our work against algorithmic rent-fixing is starting to bear real fruit. Multiple cities have passed laws prohibiting corporate landlords from using rent-fixing software, including San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Providence, RI. These laws aren’t complex and don’t require unwieldy market definition, you just have to show that the defendant is using nonpublic information in an algorithm to set prices. And they are being enforced, with six different lawsuits now pending.
13 comments:
In the People's Republic of Berkeley, our City Council patted themselves on the back in March 2025 when they passed similar laws.
Then they got sued by the company that was targeted, and immediately waffled and canceled the ban.
What's insane about all of this is that we also have Rent Control. There is no greater price fixing mechanism than Rent Control. Rent Control ensures that all landlords must seek the highest possible rent, because they are (potentially) tethered to it for life (of the tenant).
So if you create an economic system where sellers never will allow prices to go down, why bother banning price fixing -- its practically baked into the housing code.
Why would landlords not seek the highest possible rent without rent control?
They would. But second order effects ensure that this very act leads to the decline of housing prices. These effects being eliminated by rent control makes it the premier anti-tenant policy.
What second-order effects...? Feels like such an oddly opqaue way to talk about them. And how do you ignore the effect of the fact that rent no longer rises during the life of the tenant, making it lower after a while than it would otherwise be...? (How) is it so obvious that that is dwarfed by the second-order effects of uncontrolled rent that it doesn't even warrant a mention? Because it isn't to me.
Every rental unit in the city I live in is rent controlled — the government sets a maximum rental increase per unit per year. This is here in the People’s Republic of … checks notes … Dubai. It works great.
Sadly, you can not legislate a culture of decency.
I’d imagine it’s not so simple, especially without a functional legislative branch, but we could really use a “digital bill of rights” that could provide a comprehensive set of baseline protections and standards for things like this, online privacy, data protection, whatever stops Meta/X/et al from being maximally harmful, etc..
Do car dealerships next...
From https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-time-ba...
> Our work against algorithmic rent-fixing is starting to bear real fruit. Multiple cities have passed laws prohibiting corporate landlords from using rent-fixing software, including San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Providence, RI. These laws aren’t complex and don’t require unwieldy market definition, you just have to show that the defendant is using nonpublic information in an algorithm to set prices. And they are being enforced, with six different lawsuits now pending.
Will they just stop using an ‘algorithm’ and have a mathematician sit there and state numbers that are of unknown origin?
Can you elaborate on what is meant by “rent-fixing”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing#:~:text=Rent%20al...
Like "price fixing". Landlords illegally colluding to artificially inflate the price of housing.