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- Hacker News
- Governments are always unsuccessfully trying to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand. They've been trying to do it for the last 4,000 years.by WalterBright
- Except by creating supply, like socialist run countries do by building social housing.by socialest
- Well, governments have successfully enabled wealth disparity to the point where corporations are buying up several tens of thousands of homes. Maybe free range capitalism isn't the amazing utopia it's cracked up to be?by FireBeyond
- Helium tanks famously represent the Law of Gravity.
- Do car dealerships next...by hiddencost
- Sadly, you can not legislate a culture of decency.by ElProlactin
- In San Francisco, I’m not a fan of Aaron Peskin’s ban on algorithmic rent-setting (Admin Code 37.10C https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...) (which is probably similar to the other cities) because 1) it goes beyond antitrust law in just banning data gathering for no good reason, and 2) it rewards bounty hunters.
1. It goes beyond antitrust guidelines by banning rent prediction using any “non-public competitor data”, which is stricter than the former antitrust guidelines which prohibited sharing “competitively sensitive variables” (https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/dealings...). To the extent that it differs from banning competitively sensitive data, it is just banning the use of data to make rentals more efficient. If landlords are pricing accurately but not monopolistically, this should reduce turnover, reduce vacancy, and reduce the occasions where a listing gets a crowd of applicants, which is good for both landlord and tenant. It’s bad to try to ban accurate data.
2. It provides a private right of action for tenants and nonprofits to sue, just like Proposition 65 (Known by the State of California to cause cancer) incentivizes bounty hunters to sue. The point seems to be to punish landlords more than it is to establish fair rules.
And it seems that these lawsuits are just piggybacking on the DOJ settlement by punishing anyone who uses RealPage as soon as the ordinance becomes effective in 30 days while RealPage was already working to settle federally. The complaints (e.g. the SF one https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73573242/gomez-v-greyst...) don’t have any new violations; just companies who are already settling. I don’t think that’s justice for a city to frontrun the federal settlement with new violations for the same program.
by yonran - > If landlords are pricing accurately but not monopolistically, this should reduce turnover, reduce vacancy, and...
Ah yes one of my favorite lines of argument: "We don't need laws, if companies are just behaving properly and against their financial interests to behave in a way that harms legit market pricing..."
Except as we know companies won't behave well without incentives. Which is why we need laws on it.
- > The point seems to be to punish landlords more than it is to establish fair rules.
Rules without punishments are useless though.
by stymaar - SF as a city has the fundamental problem that there's a huge part of the electorate will blame the housing shortage on absolutely anything they can find that's not the actual fundamental physical shortage of housing. That leads to an endless tangle of local laws and organizations supposedly trying to "do something about it", that are fundamentally just making the problem worse by adding marginal cost to every new already-difficult-to-pencil housing unit.by crooked-v
- I’d imagine it’s not so simple, especially without a functional legislative branch, but we could really use a “digital bill of rights” that could provide a comprehensive set of baseline protections and standards for things like this, online privacy, data protection, whatever stops Meta/X/et al from being maximally harmful, etc..by nativeit
- From https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-time-ba...
> Our work against algorithmic rent-fixing is starting to bear real fruit. Multiple cities have passed laws prohibiting corporate landlords from using rent-fixing software, including San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Providence, RI. These laws aren’t complex and don’t require unwieldy market definition, you just have to show that the defendant is using nonpublic information in an algorithm to set prices. And they are being enforced, with six different lawsuits now pending.
by toomuchtodo - Can you elaborate on what is meant by “rent-fixing”?by demibabs
- Will they just stop using an ‘algorithm’ and have a mathematician sit there and state numbers that are of unknown origin?by boredatoms
- In the People's Republic of Berkeley, our City Council patted themselves on the back in March 2025 when they passed similar laws.
Then they got sued by the company that was targeted, and immediately waffled and canceled the ban.
What's insane about all of this is that we also have Rent Control. There is no greater price fixing mechanism than Rent Control. Rent Control ensures that all landlords must seek the highest possible rent, because they are (potentially) tethered to it for life (of the tenant).
So if you create an economic system where sellers never will allow prices to go down, why bother banning price fixing -- its practically baked into the housing code.
by aorloff - Every rental unit in the city I live in is rent controlled — the government sets a maximum rental increase per unit per year. This is here in the People’s Republic of … checks notes … Dubai. It works great.by petesergeant
- There are arguments against rent control as an analgesic, but it being a disincentive for landlord/investor altruism isn’t one of them.by taurath
- Fun fact: in RealPage's brief about the Berkeley law they cited my work that shows rents in Berkeley declining. They never had the power to artificially set rents.by jeffbee
- Why would landlords not seek the highest possible rent without rent control?by Chinjut