HeavenlyPossumJul 15, 2023

A journalist recently noticed something strange about the New York City housing market. During the peak of the COVID crisis in NYC, the city lost close to seven percent of its population as people either died or moved away.

The real estate vacancy rate was close to twenty-five percent.

Since then, according to an array of parties with considerable interest in rents, the population of NYC has rebounded. As a result, housing is once again scarce and rents have soared.

Except…there’s no actual indication that the city’s population has actually rebounded, and certainly not by enough to explain soaring rental prices. After all, the city’s population had already started to decline before 2020.

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https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html

Show threadHeavenlyPossumJul 15, 2023

It’s hard to explain this discrepancy unless you assume that landlords are conspiring to keep housing stock empty and off the market—ie, “warehousing”—to keep supply artificially low and prices high.

As of 2021, there were over 40,000 rent-stabilized apartments warehoused in the city, so we might imagine that the total number of apartments being withheld is much higher.

But that’s absurd, some neoliberal might declare! How could landlords, who are very numerous, conspire with each other across the entire city to manipulate the market ?

ProPublica helpfully supplies the answer: a firm called RealPage, which provides software called YieldStar, which allows landlords across the country to coordinate price increases en masse:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

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Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.

Texas-based RealPage’s YieldStar software helps landlords set prices for apartments across the U.S. With rents soaring, critics are concerned that the company’s proprietary algorithm is hurting competition.

ProPublica
Show threadHeavenlyPossumJul 15, 2023

Our neoliberal friend might still object: capitalists don’t want to withhold products from the market, silly! They want to sell as much as possible to as many as possible to maximize revenue.

Except, as Blair Fix reminds us, capitalists actually have two very broad options for maximizing revenue: breadth (selling more stuff) or depth (raising prices). Breadth is socially sanctioned and, in neoclassical orthodoxy, the only possible way for capitalists to behave.

And we empirically observe capitalists pursuing depth all the time! Amazon, for example, has been observed destroying unsold consumer products by the warehouse-full. Despite its vast volume, Amazon has still decided that it’s better to sell fewer things for higher prices than more things for lower prices.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/12/15/inflation-everywhere-and-always-differential/

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Inflation: Everywhere and Always Differential – Economics from the Top Down

Here’s an update to my post ‘The Truth About Inflation’. As expected, inflation is still differential. And no, it’s not caused by government spending.

Economics from the Top Down
Show threadHeavenlyPossumJul 15, 2023

You might have noticed lately a glut of media coverage of the “drawbacks” of remote work. Sorry, did I call it media coverage? I meant “naked propaganda.” Take, for example, this comically transparent effort to make remote work look unhealthy and ugly:

https://studyfinds.org/remote-workers-claw-hunchbacks/

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Future shock: Are remote workers doomed to have claw-like hands, hunched backs?

A new study examining the future of the workplace might have you running back to your office at warp speed!

Study Finds
Show threadBaron Vonskinnback
@HeavenlyPossum I remember asking my boss in my last job if I could buy a new chair to ease my sciatica, he just laughed & said "if I buy you one they will all want one" I left that company to work from home in 2019, my sciatica is virtually gone now, businesses don't care if you are comfortable or not, they care about money, it is your responsibility to care for yourself, because you are the one who pays the price for not doing so.
Jul 16, 2023 at 9:31amTusky
Show threadHeavenlyPossumJul 16, 2023

@Vonskinnback

They’ll take better care of a copy machine than they will you. Labor is unique among the factors of production in that we and we alone are expected to maintain ourselves as productive inputs at our own cost.

Show threadBaron VonskinnbackJul 16, 2023
@HeavenlyPossum this happened after I had just saved the business over £20k by upgrading/refreshing their entire IT fleet & cabling (which was not my job) as well as achieving an ISO27001 accreditation through implementing a full IT security reimagining & writing the policy documentation, they also turned me down for a pay rise, I was out of there within 3 months. It was a great experience for me & I am still in contact with them & I still do private work for them, but my day rate is quite high.