Comment by evil-olive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evil-olive | Hacker News Reader

> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.

ctrl-F "RealPage" - nothing. hmm.

ctrl-F "rent" - also nothing. really?

from about a year ago: Justice Department Sues RealPage for Algorithmic Pricing Scheme that Harms Millions of American Renters [0]

> The Justice Department, together with the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today against RealPage Inc. for its unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments.

> ...

> Another landlord commented about RealPage’s product, “I always liked this product because your algorithm uses proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and term. That’s classic price fixing…”

if I hear about antitrust in the context of housing policy, RealPage making it easier for apartment buildings to collude on rent prices is the very first thing that leaps to mind.

it seems like Thompson is being awfully selective about which antitrust-related criticisms he's responding to here. he seems to be focusing exclusively on building single-family homes, and completely ignoring the concrete example of monopoly power being used for apartment rentals, and antitrust laws being used to address that.

0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

Thompson is responding to a specific paper.

'One of the most detailed articles in this space is an analysis of the Dallas, Texas, housing market by the lawyer and writer Basel Musharbash. In “Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable”'

Musharbash doesn't mention RealPage either, so go blame him, since he doesn't think RealPage contributes to Dallas's problems.

Thompson writes these articles to deflect valid criticism.

> Thompson is responding to a specific paper.

yes, he's responding to [0] which was written by Musharbash and published in Matt Stoller's newsletter.

and as I said, he's being selective about what criticism he's responding to and what he's ignoring. because Stoller has also published, in the same newsletter, articles about RealPage price fixing [1, 2].

Thompson says:

> The antitrust left, however, claims...

if he's going to say "here's what the antitrust left believes" and then proceed to debunk it, I think it's reasonable to point out that his response is cherry-picking only part of what that "antitrust left" believes.

of course, if he wants to publish a follow-up article defending RealPage, I'd love to read it.

0: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...

1: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...

2: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental...

It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made. Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited, which is both interesting to read and also telling.

Stoller is free to find similarly decisive refutations of arguments Thompson had made (they're unlikely to be forthcoming).

>Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited

That's not true. At all. That's what Thompson _claims_. Look at what was actually written.

It's incredibly sleazy writing. It's so one-sided it might as well be a celebrity gossip magazine piece.

I feel like not a lot of celebrity gossip consists of calls with economics professors who wrote cited papers discussing those citations, but we might just read different rags.

Notably, he never included the full conversation. It's almost like the question asked to the economic professors and their responses are completely different from the way the questions are presented in the article. Claims and questions the target article never mentions or implies.

I think there's like, I don't know, a few fallacies named for such practices.

But hey, don't take my word for it. Here's Musharbash very patiently dealing with this himself: https://x.com/musharbash_b/status/1950938130447479281

Also just some general life advice, if reading Thompson's article didn't didn't set off any red flags for you (regardless of what you did or did not know going into this conversation) I would employ a little bit more skepticism and spend a little more time reading the source material in the future.

Disagree with him if you want but calling Thompson a grifter makes it hard for me to take anything Musharbash seriously or want to dive deeper into whatever he's written.

"If you point out that someone I like is doing something bad, that's too uncomfortable and I'll just stop listening" - You

I think for this to be interesting to an outside observer, it should at least address the bulk of the debate around the topic. If the GP is right and it's missing the key points of the anti-abudance critique, then I'm afraid it's missing the forest for the trees and misleading to a general audience.

> It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made.

yeah, I never said it was.

Thompson himself says:

> Still, I wanted to spend more time engaging with the arguments of the antitrust housing folks.

he says he wanted to engage with the arguments made by the antitrust left.

which means he chose which of those arguments he was going to engage with.

and he chose to make this a 2-part post about why he thinks the antitrust left is wrong about homebuilding monopolies:

> Thanks for reading. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of my analysis, where I’ll explain what really happened in Dallas and why I think unaffordability became a national phenomenon if the cause isn’t oligopolies.

now, if there's a part 3 where he talks about RealPage and antitrust as it applies to rentals rather than single-family homebuilding, I'll gladly eat crow.

but until that happens, I'm going to call Thompson intellectually dishonest, because there's a cute little sleight-of-hand trick he's doing here. his opening paragraph:

> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.

he's saying some of the best criticisms of his book come from the antitrust left.

and that he's evaluated some of the arguments made by the antitrust left and thinks they're wrong.

if you miss the sleight-of-hand, you might come away thinking that he's responding to the best arguments made about housing by the antitrust left.

but he's pretty clearly not doing that. because the "antitrust left" argument against RealPage doing algorithmic rent-fixing (detailed in a 115-page federal lawsuit [0]) is much stronger than the "antitrust left" argument about homebuilding monopolies in Dallas (detailed in a Substack post by some guy)

0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1364976/dl?inline

Collusion among landlords can only work in a housing shortage. With an abundance of rental units, individual landlords would "defect" (in a game theory sense) and lower rents in order to fill their vacant units at the market price.

Don't we have a housing shortage? Also, many (institutional?) landlords are happy to leave units vacant and/or evict tenants spuriously for higher profits.

Explain the economics of keeping units vacant in the face of increasing supply.

Maybe read the referenced article?

Yes we do. The OP's point is that _if_ there is collusion, building housing will help solve the collusion problem _and_ solve the housing shortage.

Spending effort on theoretical collusion which may or may not be happening is a diversion from the real problem, which is lack of housing supply.

> it seems like Thompson is being awfully selective about which antitrust-related criticisms he's responding to here

He was responding to a specific critique of his book. So... yes. That's how that works.

I wish everyone who cares about the price of housing could go to a hearing like this one. Sadly, they happen in every community so if you're curious, you ought to go:

https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...

That is your housing shortage right there.

Now, Real page probably jacks up prices a bit. A bit multiplied by a lot of renters means real harm and it was probably worth taking them to court over.

However, at the end of the day, RealPage is simply not enough to get Los Angeles rents out of Houston property. Supply and demand are still where it's at.

You're claiming that your idea of 'X' is true, and for evidence of this, you're linking to a site that was created by people whose mission is to advocate for the idea of X.

Am I likely to be getting an impartial view of the situation from a source which solely exists to push X-related messaging?

Is such a group/site really going to give a fair shake to other theories Y and Z, or to conflicting data?

"You're claiming X is true, and providing me with a source you believe has good arguments for X being true. Very suspicious."

If you start digging into this issue you'll find every example you want. If you only challenge people you disagree with, you will remain wrong.

I care about fixing the housing shortage in the city I live in. I spend hundreds of hours as a volunteer, see a lot and read a lot. I'm pointing out what I see on the ground doing the work. And what I see is NIMBYs, not institutional investors or RealPage or 'foreigners' or whatever else the bogeyman du jour is.

If I were convinced the problem lay elsewhere, I would focus on that, because I don't have anything invested in the problem being a specific thing.

Why do people think they have a right to live wherever they want? The people Bend are happy with Bend as it is. If you can't afford to live there, move.

Why do people that happen to live somewhere believe they have a right to prevent others from living there? If you don't like who's moving to Bend, move somewhere else.

"Why do people think they have a right to control what other people build on private land? If you don't like what's getting built, move."

Why is the govt's job to control where people live? I thought individual freedom was a big part of the whole deal?

Can you cite some evidence of a place where RealPage's supposed power has led to a consumer harm like higher rents? I may be biased because my research has been cited by RealPage in their suit against the city of Berkeley, but to me RealPage just finds the market clearing price, and that's not particularly evil in my book.

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