the landlord is making more money, people are being squeezed for all they got, and less people have homes.
this is a huge drag on the economy and adversely affects every single person in a region except the rent seeking landlords. Even if you own it is a negative as your CoL is going to go up as stores need to charge more to pay employees more so they can afford homes.
I don't believe that's the only measure of economic drag. For instance if, having no choice, people are spending a higher percentage of their income on rent, then it leaves less to spend on other economically stimulative activity, like frequenting a local coffee shop, buying clothes, etc.
Especially when that regressively scales with income (i.e. people who make less pay a larger percent of their total income).
And especially when the siphoned capital isn't being reinvested in new housing (because landlords and investors would rather collude and boost profit margins on existing stock).
So seems like "we" (ie people who read the article before commenting) do in fact know how big a drag it is in certain markets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/nyregion/apartment-vacanc...
I'm not claiming that this kind of service is good, or that having a trial is bad. I'm actually really interested in the judicial opinion because I could see it going either way. What I am saying is that it just doesn't feel plausible that this software is single handedly moving the market in a big way.
People really do want to point to a single boogeyman for housing unaffordability. And that's too simplistic. Nationally we're short millions of units at a time when we're wealthier than ever. Low supply and high demand means rising prices.
Fix it by making units easy and cheap to build.
High demand in NYC is definitely not high demand in buffalo. But people need to be where the jobs are, and they aren’t in buffalo.
https://www.rate.com/research/buffalo-ny
Better than NYC, but still low. For reference, the state defines anything below 5% vacancy as a 'housing emergency'.
Keep in mind that Buffalo used to have a lot more housing than it does today, it was more than one million people in 1970, and today, its just 800k or so.
Keep in mind that Buffalo used to have more than one million people 50+ years ago, and now only has around 800k.