Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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the effect of corporate landlords tightening their grip on the nation’s rental market. Institutional owners — corporations or limited liability companies — now own the majority of all US rental units and over 80 percent of the properties with twenty-five or more units.
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These mega-landlords are well aware of what that kind of market control lets them get away with, especially with widespread access to anticompetitive algorithms to keep rents artificially high
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Bob Nicolls, CEO of one of America’s top corporate landlords, Monarch Investment and Management Group, told investors in September 2021 that big rent hikes were coming. “We have an unprecedented opportunity … to really press rents,” Nicolls said. “Where are people going to go? They can’t go anywhere.”
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the six biggest property management companies in the United States made a whopping $4.3 billion in profits in 2022, citing “pricing power” and “strong rent growth” as the source of their windfalls.
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Rent control is government-imposed limitations on the amount landlords can charge for rent.
✏️ Keeping in mind it’s not a total freeze, but a reasonable control on rent increases. 🔗 View Highlight
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Rent control disproportionately benefits those who need it most, especially the cash-strapped households with children and elderly renters most likely to be displaced from unregulated housing.
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Housing stability is clearly linked to longer tenures at jobs and improved educational outcomes for children.
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The core of their lobbying and marketing attack is that rent control deters incentives to build new homes. This is a self-interested rehashing of an Economics 101 argument: the lower the price of a good, the less incentive that for-profit providers will have to produce that good.
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criticism of rent control fails to account for the actual evidence
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many economists who are supposedly anti–rent control are opposing only strict rent price ceilings, not the system of controlled increases contemplated by all current rent control proposals.
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the argument that “rent control has negative effects on the development of new housing are generally not supported by the research.”
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rent control would push market forces away from higher-end construction toward what is needed. A study of the effects of New Jersey’s rent control implementation showed that landlords were indeed motivated post-rent control to create more rental units