Narrative-first, evidence-driven

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Receipts: tracked in Methods and Sources by type: Official data | Primary documents | Independent analysis

Pattern summary

Housing gets expensive for two reasons that feed each other.

First, we restricted the number of homes we allow to be built. That created scarcity.

Second, once scarcity is high enough, rigging gets more profitable. When people do not have a real exit, fees, leverage tactics, screening traps, and quiet coordination stop being side issues and start becoming a business model.

So the housing problem has two parts at the same time:

• a public policy failure that blocked supply
• a private-actor conduct problem that got worse inside the low-choice market those rules created

If you only talk about supply, you miss the ways people are getting squeezed right now. If you only talk about bad actors, you miss the policy design that made those tactics more profitable in the first place.

The honest version holds both: build more homes and stop the worst forms of rigging.

What this looks like in human terms

For a lot of households, housing does not feel expensive in a normal way. It feels like a trap.

Rent rises. Move-in costs pile up. Application fees add up before you even know whether you will get approved. Mandatory fees make comparison shopping harder than it should be. One screening mark can follow you longer than the actual problem that caused it.

That is what makes housing such a strong squeeze multiplier. When housing costs jump, people do not just spend more on housing. They cut medical care, delay car repairs, skip savings, absorb worse jobs, or put off leaving a bad situation.

Housing sets the floor under the rest of the month, which is why a housing shock quickly becomes an everything-else shock.

Mode 1: Software that coordinates rents across competing landlords

What it is: RealPage’s YieldStar product collected nonpublic occupancy and pricing data from competing landlords, ran it through a shared algorithm, and sent back rent recommendations. The Department of Justice called it a hub-and-spoke conspiracy. According to the DOJ complaint, the practical effect was that competitors were sharing pricing information they are not allowed to share directly, just with a software company as the intermediary. The hub-and-spoke theory has not been adjudicated; the November 2025 settlement contains no admission of wrongdoing.

Examples:

• The RealPage mechanism: RealPage marketed YieldStar as helping landlords “outperform the market 3% to 7%.” Greystar, its largest client, reported its YieldStar buildings outperformed their markets by 4.8% even during a downturn. According to federal prosecutors, RealPage controlled 80% of the market for commercial revenue management software. [confirmed]
• What ProPublica found first: In October 2022, ProPublica documented the mechanism across multiple cities. In one Seattle neighborhood, 70% of apartments were managed by 10 property managers, every one of which used RealPage. In Denver, Nashville, Atlanta, and Seattle, five of RealPage’s largest clients controlled apartments in markets where two-bedroom rents rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019. [confirmed]
• DOJ action: The DOJ filed a civil antitrust suit in August 2024, nearly two years after the ProPublica investigation. In January 2025, the amended complaint added six major landlord co-defendants: Greystar, LivCor, Camden Property Trust, Cushman and Wakefield / Pinnacle, Willow Bridge, and Cortland. Together they operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states. [confirmed]
• The settlement: In November 2025, DOJ filed a proposed settlement with RealPage. RealPage cannot use real-time competitor data to train its algorithms, only historical data aged at least 12 months may be used, and an independent compliance monitor is appointed for seven years. What it does not require: no fine, no ban on the YieldStar product, no admission of wrongdoing. [confirmed]

Missing guardrail: No antitrust rule stopped competing landlords from sharing nonpublic occupancy and pricing data through a common intermediary before enforcement finally reached it. No advance review mechanism exists for pricing software deployed across competing landlords in local rental markets.

Mode 2: Zoning that keeps supply locked

What it is: Local governments have zoned most residential land for single-family homes only. That is a policy choice, not a law of nature. When demand grows and the rules prevent supply from responding, prices go up. This is not a private actor abuse. It is a government-created constraint. But it creates the low-choice market that the other modes in this case exploit.

Examples:

• Roughly 75% of US residential land is zoned for single-family homes only. In California, the figure is 95.8% of all residential land. [confirmed]
• NBER research finds that land-use regulation raises house prices, reduces construction, and weakens supply response. In cities where building is easy, supply responds to demand. In cities where building is hard, every demand increase becomes a price increase. [confirmed]
• Auckland’s 2016 citywide upzoning roughly doubled the permitting rate within five years and generated about 43,500 additional units above the counterfactual over six years. Rents ended up 14% to 35% lower than would have been expected without the reform. [confirmed]
• Oregon’s 2019 state reform and Montana’s 2023 bipartisan housing reforms show that state-level overrides can move where local veto systems stall. [confirmed]

Missing guardrail: There is still no durable federal or most-state backstop that requires local rules to permit enough homes to be built where people actually live and work.

Mode 3: Fees that pile on when you have no leverage

What it is: In a tight market, landlords can charge application fees, move-in fees, and ongoing mandatory add-ons because applicants who need a place to live often have no better option. The fees are not always optional, and they are not always disclosed before the renter is already committed.

Examples:

• Invitation Homes charged mandatory fees totaling more than $1,700 per year per renter that were not disclosed in the advertised rent. Applicants paid application and reservation fees before learning about mandatory smart-home, utility-management, and other add-on charges. The FTC reached a $48 million settlement in September 2024. [confirmed]
• Landlords collected an estimated $276 million in application fees from tenants in 2023. [confirmed]
• The FTC Junk Fees Rule finalized in December 2024 explicitly does not cover multifamily rental housing. [confirmed]

Missing guardrail: No federal rule requires landlords to disclose the full move-in cost before charging an application fee. No federal standard requires refunding application fees when applicants are rejected. State rules remain patchy and easy to game.

Mode 4: Corporate landlords with scale, leverage, and thin accountability

What it is: Nationally, institutional investors hold a relatively small share of total housing stock. Locally, the picture can look very different. In specific neighborhoods, a large investor can own enough units to shape the market people actually have access to.

Examples:

• Invitation Homes holds about 82,000 homes, Progress Residential about 80,000, and American Homes 4 Rent about 57,000. [confirmed]
• Research finds that geographically concentrated institutional investors can raise rents above competitive levels, while diffuse ownership does not show the same effect. [confirmed]
• Nearly 500,000 LIHTC units will reach their 30-year mark by the end of this decade, creating preservation risk where affordability protections expire or weaken. [confirmed]

Missing guardrail: Federal merger review is not calibrated to local housing concentration, and there is no routine public map showing who owns how much rental stock in concentrated local markets.

Mode 5: Eviction as a debt collection tool

What it is: Eviction courts often process cases in minutes. Most tenants do not have counsel. A filing alone can follow a renter for years on screening reports, even when the landlord does not prevail. That makes eviction a cheap leverage tool inside a system built for speed, not fairness.

Examples:

• Landlords filed just over 1 million eviction cases in 2024 in jurisdictions tracked by the Eviction Lab. [confirmed]
• Large landlords file at higher rates than small landlords, and the gap is not explained away by tenant characteristics. [confirmed]
• Invitation Homes filed eviction proceedings against renters it knew had already moved out, and steered tenants away from the CDC declaration during the COVID moratorium. [confirmed]
• Right-to-counsel programs in places like New York City, Cleveland, and Kansas City sharply improved tenant outcomes and reduced judgments. [confirmed]

Missing guardrail: No federal right to counsel in eviction proceedings. No federal requirement to seal dismissed cases. No national tenant-screening accuracy standard that clearly distinguishes a filing from a judgment.

Fallout

• In 2023, 22.6 million renters were cost-burdened and 12.1 million were severely cost-burdened. [confirmed]
• The rate of cost burden among households earning $45,000 to $74,999 has doubled since 2001. [confirmed]
• More than 770,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2024, the highest count since reporting began. Families with children saw the largest one-year increase. [confirmed]
• The national shortage of affordable and available rental homes for the lowest-income renters stands at 7.3 million units. [confirmed]

What good looks like

Housing should give people more real options, not fewer.

What that looks like:

• Real choice: more homes in more forms, and a real ability to move without financial ruin
• Normal pricing: clear all-in costs, fewer junk fees, easier comparison shopping
• Fair process: eviction and screening rules that punish bad behavior, not poverty or paperwork
• Simple rules plus real enforcement: fewer loopholes, faster accountability, and visible supply and pricing dashboards

This is not utopia. It is what a healthier housing system looks like.

What would reduce the harm

The goal here is not fantasy. It is to reduce harm quickly while making the deeper fixes easier to land.

The evidence in this case points toward a two-track strategy:

• Track A: relief people can actually feel in 0 to 12 months
• Track B: structural fixes that take longer but change the slope of the problem

Short term: 0-12 months

• Require all-in move-in cost disclosure before any application fee is charged.
• Standardize fee labels and cap obvious junk-fee stacking.
• Seal dismissed or withdrawn eviction filings automatically and expand right to counsel where possible.
• Require cure periods, mediation windows, or payment-plan steps before filing where feasible.
• Require disclosure when pricing software is used and prohibit use of recent nonpublic competitor data to set rents.
• Publish permit dashboards and use by-right fast lanes for compliant projects.

Medium term: 1-3 years

• Legalize missing-middle housing by right in more places.
• Use state backstops where local veto systems block region-wide housing need.
• Align infrastructure upgrades with housing production instead of letting utilities become the next bottleneck.
• Preserve affordable units before they fall out of reach, using right-of-first-refusal tools paired with actual financing.

Long term: 3-10 years

• Match merger review to real local housing markets, not just national scale.
• Publish concentration maps that show who owns what where.
• Expand skilled-trades pipelines and materials capacity.
• Institutionalize the throughput state with standardized forms, predictable timelines, and fewer late-stage resets.

Sequence matters

After you loosen one constraint, another one becomes the bottleneck.

The usual sequence is:

1. legal permission
2. administrative speed
3. infrastructure
4. financing and construction capacity
5. anti-rigging enforcement

If you do only the first, people say it did not work. If you do only the fifth, people say it is all regulation. The honest version does both.

Related methods

• official-data: rent burden, homelessness, housing shortage, eviction patterns
• primary-documents: DOJ RealPage complaint and settlement, FTC Invitation Homes case
• independent-analysis: land-use elasticity research, Auckland upzoning evidence, concentration research

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