A new algorithm is jacking rents across the nation and crushing the real economy
“Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay.” — Adam Smith
A few months ago, I saw a pair of websites — one from the UK, one from Canada — within 24 hours of each other. Both were dedicated to helping parasitic land-lorders find the best properties to monopolize in order to squeeze real wealth out of tenant-serfs:
Land-lording, as we’ve discussed before, it’s actually just a holdover form of economic exploitation from the era of feudal serfdom, where those with economic power monopolize property and literally lord it over the poor, making them homeless unless they pay usury to access shelter from the elements.
When the classical economists talked about “free markets,” they were talking about markets that were free from feudal rentierism.
Not only is shelter monopolization anti-contributive, anti-meritocratic, and deeply immoral, but it actually destroys the real economy and shatters society, without exception in all of human history.
So what did corporatists do?
They invented an AI that maximizes how much money they can bleed from the working class.
The algorithm in question is called YieldStar, and it’s the sort of demonic program that only the most anti-human of corporatists could invent.
The AI is owned by a wretched Texas corporation called RealPage, the nation’s “dominant provider of such rent-setting software.”
The software exists for one sole purpose: To help land-lorders extract the highest possible rents from the contributor class.
The bot analyses data and does the math on how desperate working locals are, then encourages land-lorders to push rents so high — often double-digit percentage jumps in a single month — that it creates vacancy.
Remember: “Let the market decide” actually means “push the price until populations break.” Up rents until it creates real suffering and hardship for men, women, and children.
Can you fathom the implications?
An AI robot is telling corporatist parasites how much extra profit to extract from the contributor class by monopolizing shelter and literally making human beings homeless.
We are all paying many more multiples to buy houses, and far more to rent houses, because corporations are using artificial intelligence to silently price-fix human shelter out of reach of the poor. (Good old capitalism and its “efficiency.”) In the same way that oil producers like OPEC collude to keep prices high, land-lorders can now collude via AI to maximize rents.
The AI is doing such a good job that it’s emboldening land-lorders to put their economic exploitation into overdrive:
“Never before have we seen these numbers… very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually… The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it.”
Even more heartless? One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer-generated pricing.
Are you burning with holy fury right now?
I hope this absolutely enrages you.
(I hope it also gives you some verbal ammunition to shoot down the next smug little land-lorder who calls themself a “good” person because they “charge less than market rent.” Being slightly less of a thief still makes you a thief.)
I’ve been saying it for years: For-profit land-lording is a collection of mini-monopolists working as a cartel to price-fix rent-extraction via “the market.” Now YieldStar is proving my thesis with hard evidence.
To be clear: For-profit land-lording is the illegal and immoral monopolization of shelter in order to extract wealth, and YieldStar is an illegal and immoral cartel to coordinate pricing.
It’s time to ban both.
The calls to action here are extremely simple:
- Publicly contact your (s)elected officials on social media right now and demand that they shut YieldStar down on anti-competition and human rights grounds.
- Then demand hard rent caps at no more than inflation — or if you’re truly serious about ending shelter exploitation, demand an end to feudalistic for-profit land-lording.
And if you want to make it personal: Confess and repent of any economic exploitation in which you’ve taken part. Sell your rental units to your tenants without any profit. Sell your real estate and REIT stocks and give the money to social housing providers. Sell your bank bonds and donate the most to homelessness charities. Cleanse yourself.
Like Jeff Bezos’s new shelter monopoly startup, rapacious land-lorders will not stop until they are stopped. As we have seen time and time again throughout history, land-lording is a slave-making business that leaves the masses assetless and in poverty in order to enrich those who do the least amount of real wealth-creation in society.
For-profit land-lording must stop in our generation, or corporate AI will determine who gets to serve for life as tenants and who gets to die on the streets.
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Author Jared A. Brock
