This is a really good piece of investigative reporting about how landlords are using techniques like warehousing and price-software to get around supply and demand in order to raise rents even when a city's adult population is shrinking faster than it's growing.
I'm generally in favor of building more housing but this is an important demonstration of the housing market is incapable of self-regulating and in fact housing being a market commodity is always detrimental to neighborhoods being both affordable and livable. Building more market rate housing doesn't increase supply and lower rent if landlords don't actually list all their vacant apartments or collude to raise rents all together despite there being an increased supply. Regulation of the market and building public housing, at minimum, is necessary.
This article definitely explains why Philadelphia rent still somehow skyrocketed when all the university students who usually fill most of the housing in its fastest gentrifying neighborhoods were sent home and told not to live in the city.
Rent prices in St. Louis doubled during the pandemic. Now suddenly prices have started to creep down in spots but ... also supply has mysteriously dried up all over, in a city where most people I talk to are baffled why anyone would live here unless they had to.
I had chalked it up to landlords scrambling to cover losses after the mass evictions in 2020, and suspected the supply issue was just them squatting on empty properties to artificially inflate demands and ... well there you go.
Apparently that is exactly what's fucking happening, with a side of naked fucking price-fixing.
