Landlord Cartels Quietly Get The Greenlight To Keep Your Rent Sky High
In other words, this seems to be an illegal price-fixing scheme
American renters finally breathed a sigh of relief this fall. In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that rent prices were finally slowing down after the great spikes of the COVID-19 years. The average national rent fell 0.3% from August, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but was actually the steepest September drop in over 15 years.
The unexpected slowdown is mainly attributed to the glut of new apartment units, built during a construction boom, that are “taking longer to absorb than expected.” Despite the construction boom of multi-family housing tapering off, WSJ reported, landlords won’t be able to continue jacking up the prices due to all this new supply.
One major factor in the housing affordability crisis was not in the WSJ’s story, though. It reared its ugly head about a month after the report was published, as all of us were stressed out cooking and preparing for Thanksgiving dinner.
Quietly, under the cover of the Thanksgiving holiday week, the Trump Department of Justice settled a lawsuit that will have massive implications for renters across America – maybe even you. Conservative media doesn’t want to talk about it much, and, as far as I know, Fox News didn’t cover the big news (even if they did, they would likely feed you a sanitized spin piece pitched by a PR flak).
But I want to give it to you straight while peeling back some layers on the colluding powers screwing over just about everyone.