• 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    1211 months ago

    Housing is a human right.

    Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, created December 10th, 1948:

    “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

    Adequate housing is a human right.

    Homelessness is a human rights violation.

    America needs to understand this.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      English
      511 months ago

      Humanity collectively decided this shit 76 years ago and America still can’t get with the program. Smh.

      Sigh …this feeling of disappointment in my country is unceremoniously familiar.