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Comment by internet101010 | Hacker News Reader

And the DoJ, who recently sued RealPage for engaging in a price fixing scheme that has played a large role in the rise in rents across the country.

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As well as Live Nation/Ticketmaster

I'd rather they have prosecuted Jan 6 and the theft of natsec documents

Huh? Lots of people are currently in jail for things they did on January 6th.

Lots of low-level foot soldiers. Not the capo.

Only for another few months

Price fixing only works if supply is constrained via some kind of cartel, which cities often have by way of density limits and NIMBYism.

Not a Trump voter, but this is a huge area where many Democrats are flat wrong. Talking to some Democrats about the supply problem with housing is like talking to some Republicans about why a hard line abortion ban makes maternal mortality go up. It can’t possibly be true because the ideology says it can’t be true.

There is collusion between real-estate owners and property management software companies that are using Large Language models to keep prices high. This has nothing to do with cartels.

Here is an article [0] that talks about the issue. This is a real problem driven by this collusion, don't act like it isn't. And now that Trump is in office, these kinds of investigations are going to disappear and the housing crisis is going to get worse.

[0]: https://thehustle.co/why-is-rent-skyrocketing

I don't think they believe collusion isn't happening.

I think the argument above is that democrats are one of the drivers of building restrictions, leading to the ability to collude. If new entrants to the market were plentiful then the existing cartels would be undercut. Also, rent control puts a tight lock on the rental market by forcing landlords to keep their rents high lest they become locked into the low rents they may otherwise offer.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether to be on board with that assessment, but there is a reasonable argument to be made that a free-er market could actually benefit housing costs.

What this completely discounts is the existence of corporate landlords. Thousands of homes are being bought and kept empty to restrict that supply. It's ridiculous to destroy land used for other purposes just to build more empty houses and hope Blackstone et al. don't notice. It's also silly to hand those corporate landlords the right to jack up rents overnight as though they won't use it. The assumption that they'd rather have lower risk agreements over a longer period of time (e.g. lower rents now with slow increases year-to-year) is naively assuming that publicly traded companies will not attempt to maximize profits for the coming quarter.

> that are using Large Language models to keep prices high

Where do LLMs come into this?

what the h do LLMs have to do with this?

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