Georgia launched a new text alert system for voting poll managers to notify officials of threats at the polls, the new incident-reporting tool created in response to threats made against state poll workers during and after the 2020 election. What do you think?
OAK BROOK, IL—Exchanging weary glances as their child closed her eyes and began to breathe slowly, exhausted couple Janet and Anthony Grisham reportedly expressed relief Tuesday after their toddler fell asleep and they could finally talk shit about her. “Oh my God, I was starting to worry she’d never actually go…
How to solve your decorating problems
Bradford
1976
Barbara Taylor Bradford has shown up on our site for her nonfiction decorating books. (I am so glad she turned to fiction.) For the time, these were pretty decent books, although I just about die a thousand deaths with this example.
Depending on the library’s mission, I don’t think one has to keep everything simply because the author is “significant”. No doubt that Bradford is significant. Hanging on to older titles because the author is “important” is not enough of a reason to keep something clearly outdated. Larger or specialty libraries can do this, but for the average public library, this is probably outside the scope of the library mission. Always remember your core audience and mission.
In this case, weed to save society from some seriously outdated decorating. (The prints are killing me!)
Payless Shoe Source—Elizabeth, New Jersey My father, a cobbler, made my shoes for me as a child. I was given new ones only as I outgrew each pair. But despite this, I felt he made the shoes reluctantly, as if he felt it wasteful. “Look at your daughter’s feet,” my mother would beseech him in dialect. “It is disrespectful for the cobbler’s daughter to go around in such a state.” Yet when I wore the new shoes, which contained the sweat of his labor, I could not help but feel grand beyond my station, as if even the ground I walked on had been fashioned only for me. Imagine then my surprise when this boutique, modest amid the splendor of The Mills at Jersey Gardens, redolent with the scent of a nearby Panda Express, offered me a pair of shoes, gratis, with the purchase of another pair. My elation was short-lived, however, because the stitching on the practical pumps I received in this bargain—BOGO, they called it—began to fray almost as soon as I put them on. My father, for all his faults, would never have allowed this, and in that moment, I missed him.
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Santa Monica Pier—Santa Monica, California I observed my daughter from a distance as she ate a $13 funnel cake, basking in the knowledge of her incipient beauty. I couldn’t help but think how my own life might have been different had I been born with her physical gifts. I wasn’t one to be pursued by the neighborhood boys. My thoughts never strayed far from the books I hoped would become my escape from Naples. Even when I met my future husband at university, he did not pursue me romantically for some time. I was bookish, perhaps mousy, and he, the handsome and clever son of a prominent magistrate. Yet where was this boy now? He spent nearly the entire day in Santa Monica, silent and withdrawn. When I asked about his sullenness, he complained about a claw machine that had taken his pocket change. The man in charge of the amusements, my husband said, was unsympathetic. It embarrassed me to see him in such a state. However, it is through the lens of my daughter’s innocent delight that I choose to remember this outing—a day in the sun before the burdens of adulthood have asserted themselves. Despite the indignity of my husband’s complaints and a slight sunburn, I had a pretty good time.
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AMC Movie Theater—Los Angeles, California I came to, suddenly, in the dark. Images flashed brightly before my eyes. Faces! Was it my mother? It was only after several moments that I recalled we’d gone to see a film about the Norse god Thor. The usher stood by my seat with his flashlight. This had a dreamlike logic or at least the qualities one associates with dreams. His mouth was moving, but I could not understand what he was saying. I felt sure he was making sounds, which would compose themselves as words, at least to others.
I recalled the feast days on which my mother would give me a few coins, which held in them the warmth of her hand and which she’d earned by taking in sewing work, much to my father’s displeasure. I would give the coins to the old woman in the pasticceria for a box of candy. The usher came into focus. He asked about the box of Junior Mints in my hand. Had I purchased it at the concession stand? No. I had bought it earlier at a dismal convenience store. Pointing to a sign that read NO OUTSIDE FOOD ALLOWED, he asked me to leave. How petty.
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Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum—San Francisco, California America seems to be a place of memory. A nation having a dream of itself where there is no past and no future, only an eternal present where all its glories exist outside of time. It is a cemetery of ideas, and so what better representative than a wax museum?
But this counterfeit aroused in me also something else, something intangible. What was it? A former lover? What use are these memories? They remain incomplete and disturbing, the faces of people I once knew are washed out and ghostly. This place does not represent anything in actuality. It is evocation without substance. Except for the wax statue of Peter Dinklage. That was actually pretty cool.
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Igloo Coolers Factory Tour—Katy, Texas As a girl, my mother told me that women were born to suffer, and nothing I have yet experienced has disproved this. But this drab place seems especially lamentable. The foreman and the tour guide seemed to be two versions of the same person—short pock-marked men in starched shirts, joylessly exercising power over their small domain. They reminded me of my father—who, in addition to being a cobbler, had been a porter at the railroad as well as a drunk—and his barely concealed anger, and how, as children, we would anticipate the moment when he would fly into one of his rages at some perceived slight. The women on the large and airless factory floor worked with insect-like efficiency. There was a gift shop that offered a 15% discount to anyone who had taken the tour. This is, I think, a good deal if you are in the market for a cooler.
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“Revenge of the Murderer’s Ghost” Escape Room—Boston, Massachusetts How is one expected to find joy in paying $30 (per person!) to be subjected to an hour of ceaseless anxiety? This room was meant to be the basement dwelling of a murderer, like those violent men of my youth, the Camorrists, but in actuality was more akin to the apartment in which my grandfather lived alone after my grandmother’s death. She’d drowned while on holiday, and the sordid dwelling became his penance for the guilt he felt at not having been able to save her. It produced in me a deep sense of melancholy.
We were meant to decipher clues left by the murderer, or his “ghost,” as the brochure informed us, in order to facilitate our escape. Yet my sons, despite having chosen this activity, spent the allotted time chuckling at inane videos on their telephones. I knew any affection I felt for them had long since vanished.
But then something happened, although I cannot say exactly what. A change in the tenor of the room, a light brightened or darkened perhaps, a door opened or possibly closed. The air grew heavy with the implication of crisis. I recalled a boy I’d known in my childhood who was killed near a seaside carnival over a game of dice. How his mother cried when the police returned his body. Had we escaped? I was convinced we were in the lobby again, but the sense of melancholy persisted, as though the murderer’s basement now existed in my mind. But if this dread place was in my mind, how then was I to escape? What the fuck.
A customer reported quite some time ago that when they submit their program to the Store, it always fails with a crash. But it runs fine on their machine! What could be the reason?
The customer shared the program, and one thing I noticed is that the program’s manifest declared the minimum supported version as 10.0.0.0, even though the program uses the SDK from build 16299. If you say that your program runs all the way down to Windows 10 version 10.0.0.0, then the Store validation will try to run it on the lowest version of Windows 10 it can find, which would be the RTM version, 10.0.10240.0.
And the program indeed crashes on build 10240, because the program uses some Windows features that were introduced in build 16299, and it failed to perform the required version check before trying to call into those features.
(In this particular case, the program used a NavigationView control on its main page, which explains why it crashed at launch.)
So check your minimum system requirements when you submit your program to the Store. If you say that you support a version of Windows 10 from 2015, then the Store is going to hold you to it.
Calder Kamin and Pixel. Photo by Essentials Creative.
The old idiom “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” takes on a whole new meaning after experiencing one of Austin-based Calder Kamin’s works of art. Constructed out of discarded scraps and recycled products, Kamin’s sculptures of flora and fauna showcase the possibilities of reuse while questioning our relationship with the planet and its future.
A graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, Kamin has been awarded numerous artist-in-residence opportunities throughout the United States over the years, allowing her to host community workshops and educate others about repurposing. Her work has been included extensively in solo and group exhibitions, including the recent exhibition Nothing Goes to Waste at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Furthering her commitment to reuse, Kamin also volunteers and serves on the board of Austin Creative Reuse, a nonprofit organization that diverts community waste to creatives as resources.
Kamin and I recently had an opportunity to discuss some of her recent residencies and projects, along with a few things she has in the works for the future.
Calder Kamin, “Upcycled Unicorn,” 2022. Photo by Essentials Creative
Caleb Bell (CB): For those who might not be familiar with your work, can you please describe it in your own words?
Calder Kamin (CK): When someone asks about my art, my initial reply is that “I make animals out of garbage.”
To go into greater detail, I make fantastical friends for a living. I let my inner child – who was obsessed with mythical creatures, environmentalism, and miyazaki movies – take the wheel. Much like my namesake, Alexander Calder, I relish in material exploration and play. Taking time to be still in nature after time in undergrad and doing things like observing bird behavior had a profound impact on the materials I choose to use in my work. After watching mother birds build architecture for the next generation out of trash they gleaned nearby, I thought I need to be more like a bird.
Canines are my current muse. Most people who know me know my pet, Pixel. Dogs would not exist if humans didn’t make trash. We are the only animals that expel waste that isn’t absorbed into new energy or life. Wolves made friends with humans, and we gained a companion, hunting party, alarm system, and clean up crew. This friendship is one of the major reasons why Homo sapiens triumphed over Neanderthals in the evolution race. My canines come from a future world full of hybrid flora and fauna intricately made out of vibrantly colored plastic. Something major happened on earth, but nature returned.
I do my best to transform the trash and spotlight the craft techniques I use to make my elaborate animals. My materials are humble and so are my methods. I am also exploring the use of textile waste and recycled glass with my upcoming residency at SiNaCa Studios.
Humans transformed nature to make our lives more convenient, only to leave a massive mess for the next generation. What are the steps to solve this crisis? My contribution for radical change is to shift society’s perception of trash. A majority of my artworks include public interactions about environmental stewardship or creative reuse. I also serve on the board of Austin Creative Reuse to inform my community about the circular economy, and I help fundraise for other reuse centers in Texas.
Ruth Asawa started the first creative reuse center in the Bay Area. I follow in her legacy. Through art, education, and an enduring optimism, I am out to empower others to see potential in by-product materials and themselves.
Calder Kamin, “Ultra Violet Vixen,” 2020. Photo by Essentials Creative.
CB: Can you tell me more about what a creative reuse center is? What do they offer their communities?
CK: The first creative reuse center, from my understanding, began because founders Anne Marie Theilen, a Bay Area educator, and Ruth Asawa, wanted to better the public school arts curriculum with the introduction of material studies. Ruth’s Black Mountain/Bauhaus education made her a fervent advocate for material studies. They began with collecting items from the community, mostly cardboard. The demand for more materials and community interest in redistributing waste for art education grew into SCRAP.
There are now Scraps all over the US. I’ve been to ScrapsKC, Art from Scrap in Santa Barbara, and Who Gives a Scrap in Colorado Springs. Some centers, like Austin Creative Reuse, focus on retail and donations. We take items that Goodwill won’t, but that might still hold value for an artist, educator, or maker. In fact, we divert 70,000 pounds from the landfill a month in Austin. 70k! Some centers do that in a year. We also provide programming, which we hope to grow now that we’ve recovered from the pandemic. In 2020, I launched our online first reuse market and fundraised $6,000 for sick leave. These folks are my family. The Welman project in Fort Worth collects materials for teachers and gives it away for free. They took really good care of me during my residency in Fort Worth at American Landmark Apartments. The Welman recently opened a retail space for the public, provides camps for kids, and is working on a maker space.
Donna J. Haraway writes about how we live on a damaged planet and says communities looking after one another is our survival plan. Governments and corporations failed us with a massive plastic mess. I believe creative reuse, or the circular economy, is a powerful tool for healing. Much like my art, it can’t happen without the help of the community and their donations. Now that I’m back in Austin for the fall, I volunteer five hours a week at the center. I also spread the word with all of my programs and connect cultural institutions to their local reuse center. They are a valuable resource that I want everyone to get excited about!
CB: Since you mentioned being back in Austin for the fall, I wanted to discuss some of the many residencies and projects that have taken you elsewhere this year. Let’s start with you being named one of the Amon Carter Museum’s 2022 Carter Community Artists. Can you share a little bit about the experience? What have you gotten to do with The Carter and the Fort Worth community?
CK: So far, we’ve collaborated on workshops for spring break, which were projects for The Welman highlighting the story of color and jewelry techniques. I attended the last party on the porch. In October, I will lead an adult workshop and a workshop for Autistic and sensory sensitive youth. Occasionally, they ask us to write about works of art in the collection or for their periodical.
During my post as artist-in-residence at the Shelby Northside apartments, I provided weekly workshops for the residents of the 300 unit complex. Jewelry making and repair was the most popular workshop. I attended classes at SiNaCa and recently found out I’m their next resident artist. I will collaborate with the staff on flame work projects and will use recycled glass in my art. We will work together on a public demo in March. Love Texas Art Studios in Fort Worth will also exhibit a few pieces in their new gallery.
The next residency on the books is the Currier Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire for a 12 week residency.
CB: When does the Currier Museum residency begin? What are your plans while you are there?
CK: It will take place April 23 through July 16, 2023. We still need to formalize the details, but I was really interested in their community programming centered on wellness for young refugees, vets, teens, and adults with developmental disabilities. I will continue to connect with circular economy leaders, encourage creative reuse, and explore a new body of work.
After a couple of experiences exhibiting with children’s museums, I realize I have a lot of work to do if I want to be effective in these spaces. My work needs to be a lot more interactive and encourage touch. I am working on a Cryptozoology Petting Zoo with my friend Jacob Reptile, Director at Aquarium Gallery in NOLA, where I had a residency in May, for young, blind, or sensory-sensitive visitors to enjoy. I would like to pilot some of my contributions during Currier programs.
Calder Kamin, “Once Upon a Time in the Future,” 2022. Photo courtesy of the Artist.
CB: After your residency at the Aquarium Gallery in May, you were a resident artist at Breckenridge Creative Arts in Colorado this summer. What projects did you work on there?
CK: Breckenridge Creative Arts and the city of Breckenridge recently adopted goals to lower emissions and plastic waste. Breck Create now owns a Precious Plastic Machine, a tool I hope to own soon and use for an upcoming permanent art project in Austin. The PP machine is a personal recycling tool you can either purchase or build yourself, since the blueprint is open source. It is also part of a utopian off-grid society in Europe. Breck Create is already collecting community waste and has replaced their wood shop with a PP machine that will mill beams and sheets that they can use like plywood or 2x4s. They were seeking a recycling artist to get the community excited about the new initiative and commissioned an outdoor piece for the annual arts festival.
While I was there, I provided weekly workshops for the public to papier-mâché toadstools, which I installed with my outdoor sculpture. In less than six weeks, I built a full-sized unicorn from scratch. There is a famous troll in Breck, and thought there must be other mythical beasts in the forests.
Four hundred pounds of one day’s worth of misprints was donated by the county paper. I papier-mâchéd that over to-go boxes, plastic packaging, soda bottles, toilet paper rolls and Folgers Coffee cans. Then, I added two layers of cement and grouted Mardi Gras beads into a floral motif. My real-sized My Little Pony has a long magenta mane and tail, custom glass eyes, and butterfly wings made from broken plastic sleds.
During my stint in NOLA, I was contemplating a plastic that could withstand the intense mountain UV light. Breck Create wanted a plastic outdoor sculpture, but plastic photodegrades quickly. Lo and behold, strung over my head in the French Quarter were thousands of beads. I saw that they hold up their integrity and shape, but the patina would change to silver, black or gold over time. I thought I could work with this. To my surprise and detail, I found there is a connection to Mardi Gras beads in Breckenridge. Visitors often throw them onto trees from the ski lifts, making a mess in the local forest.
The unicorn, titled Once Upon a Time in the Future, was installed for the Breckenridge International Festival of Arts in August on Moonstone Trail. The spot I selected was next to a tree covered in beads. It was meant to be. I also discovered little speckled mushrooms that matched my community-made, Mario-inspired shrooms. It rained every afternoon during the summer, so toward the end of my residency, you could find mushrooms everywhere.
I took advantage of being in a beautiful place by going for regular hikes with Pixel. I could take classes and use the other art studios, free range. I loved working with the torch in the glass and metal studio. I made glass eyes for my animals. Now I have the opportunity to keep exploring these materials with SiNaCa.
My travels have opened my world and I’ve been embraced by so many new friends. I have even reconnected with folks from my past as I traveled across the states to my next destination. As soon as I’m in a new place, I try to make connections, find the reuse center, and introduce and familiarize myself with my new neighbors. I’m planting metaphorical seeds to build connections.
CB: You mentioned the local newspaper in Breckenridge donating misprints to your project, which has me thinking more about your materials and where they come from. When you are traveling and the city does not have a creative reuse center, how do you source materials?
CK: I brought about 10 gallons of mardi gras beads with me that I collected from NOLA, The Welman Project, and Austin Creative Reuse. When I realized that wasn’t enough to cover the unicorn, Austin Creative Reuse mailed me a box. Breck Create also serendipitously found a box of beads that make up the mane and tail, which were leftover from an event. I exhaust what is available before ever buying new. Before Breck Create found the box of beads, I considered other materials like marker caps, which could be drilled and strung together. I even considered foraging for beads from the pines near the gondolas. Either way would mean a lot more work, so I’m glad they found the extra box. I turned the marker caps into beads for a necklace workshop after my install.
Being in the mountains was a real challenge for finding construction materials and adhesives. I would have to drive miles to make it to the next hardware store and items were always low or out of stock. Mail would get lost. My projects and I seem to thrive a little more in a city. I will keep this in mind with future residences.
I am very proud of the incredible trash picker community I’ve established in central Texas. I worked for the city for a couple of years when I returned home to Austin in 2014 and was quickly plugged into municipal resources. The Economic Development department hosts an annual pitch competition for circular economy businesses, called Reverse Pitch. I would always work the event, which provided the opportunity to connect with several local entrepreneurs and nonprofits who always have an eye out for me. There is a local vinyl record press company that keeps their press waste for me; I now make them flowers with the record flash as a product for the holidays. I learned about all the decommission offices for schools and bureaucracies, as well as who cleans up and finds a home for SXSW’s leftovers through a nonprofit that waived my membership to their directory of circular economy partners. They would even email me when they found something I needed. Austin Resource Recovery had a staff member who would sort art materials out of the landfill for artists to pick up for free. I didn’t have to buy spray paint for years. Learning all of these groups exist here, I’m able to be clear about my needs when visiting a new place and have suggestions for who we can source from locally.
After I saw the Nikki Saint De Phalle show at the Menil, a lightbulb went off. I could papier-mâché the unicorn and cover it in cement. I added junk mail and newspapers to my materials list when prepping with Breck Create. The rest was timing. A few minutes after I arrived at the Breck Create office, a man walked into the office where I was signing paperwork. He said “Someone needed newspapers?” Laughing, I said “Yes, that would be me.” He said he had 400 pounds of misprints he was driving to the dump before he heard about a visiting artist needing a lot of paper. I’m always reminded there is still a lot of magic in the world and a lot of trash.
I am also forever grateful to the volunteers at Austin Creative Reuse, my friends, and followers who collect for me. I do the same in return for other reuse artists friends, like Virginia Fleck. I’m always looking; always seeking. I know where the good trash is.
Installation view of “Dream Tomorrow Today” at The DoSeum in 2018. Photo courtesy of The DoSeum, San Antonio.
CB: As an advocate for Earth and the environment, what do you ultimately hope participants in your workshops take away? What message do you hope is impressed upon viewers of your work?
CK: Taking time to be still in nature transformed me as an artist. I had always made animals in clay. I began with polymer sculpty before getting a degree in ceramics and art history from the Kansas City Art Institute. After undergrad, I took up birding. I took my hobby a little more seriously and was introduced to local citizen science bird counts, as well as crowdsourcing apps like ebird and ibird, which I would later use for my first museum education programs. As I became more aware of the local and visiting birds’ colors, calls, and behaviors, the thing that stood out was seeing the female birds reuse materials; this revelation hit me hard.
Trash is a man-made cultural problem of the modern West. Humans in other countries or times reused everyday. After this realization, clay suddenly felt like an arbitrary way to sculpt animals. It would be another couple of years before I made a plastic fox, but, in the meantime, I collaborated with birds on a few projects. We were aware of climate change and pollution long before I was born, but our obsession with petroleum products has only increased. In the last 20 years, we’ve doubled the plastic mass. We are in a crisis. These overwhelming thoughts can make you freeze, but this was my chance to change, and I believe we all can.
Now, the work is accessible to all ages. My materials and methods are humble. I only use a hot glue gun, crochet needle, wire clippers, and scissors to transform the trash. Can workshop participants see potential in these materials and their abilities and imagination? This is why I work with children, educational museums, and television. I believe in planting seeds. The goal is to shift waste culture in fun and imaginative ways by engaging youth and families. My delivery is very serious but also gentle. I’ve been doing this work since 2013, so I have met several young people who participated in past workshops and have returned to share with me how they’ve become more creative and mindful.
There is still room to grow my skills and develop the narratives of my installations and sculptures. I’m just getting started. There are no rules for found object making. It’s all about play. Right now, I’m still in an experimental phase. I hope everyone can see how much I enjoy making my work and that my pieces stand alone as beautiful, well-crafted objects. Speaking directly with my audiences about reuse resources and stewardship is still a necessary companion to sharing the message of my creations.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
WASHINGTON—Relaxing restrictions in response to critics who called their longstanding policies discriminatory, the FDA announced Tuesday that food banks would begin accepting donations from homosexuals. “It has been the practice to reject any food donations from sexually active gay men due to perceived health risks,…
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to make the platform a more civil space, Twitter announced Monday that it would promote healthier discussions online by allowing only one user to tweet at a time. “Imagine you were having dinner with five or six friends and everyone just spoke at the same time—it wouldn’t work, because no…
It’s been over two years since a group of large book publishers sued the Internet Archive over our lending programs. After an expensive and lengthy discovery phase, arguments have now been fully briefed in the district court. What might we learn from the proceedings so far about how publishers see the future of libraries?
The first thing we might learn is that the publishers want controlled digital lending declared illegal. At the time the lawsuit against us was filed, much of the commentary and analysis suggested that the case was really about the National Emergency Library–our emergency pandemic lending program. But while the NEL is certainly a part of the lawsuit, it did not take center stage in the briefing. In the publisher’s request for summary judgment, for example, only a few short paragraphs–out of about forty pages of argument–were devoted to the NEL. Of all the submissions, about 99% have concerned CDL. So it seems clear that the publishers view this lawsuit as a referendum on CDL, which they claim will cause “catastrophic harm” to the publishing industry.
A second thing this lawsuit has demonstrated is that publishers will continue to sue libraries over digital practices that were long considered fair uses in the physical world–even if they are done on a non-profit basis with no measurable economic harm. In the case against us, the publishers argue that digital lending harms markets they claim to own–and that it therefore is not a fair use under copyright law–under “the common sense economic principle that users are drawn to free goods as a substitute for paid goods.” Put another way, in the digital realm, every non-fee-paying library practice harms the publishers’ economic interests as a matter of principle–regardless of libraries’ historic practices and their previously-accepted roles, let alone what tangible economic evidence shows. In the digital world, where publishers have newfound abilities to surveil and control libraries and their patrons, the publishers argue that the economic opportunities these abilities open to them trump longstanding library practices and the public interest. Thus, they sued over digital course reserves, and are now suing over digital lending, notwithstanding a “thriving” and profitable industry. What library practice will they challenge next?
For many of us, the internet promised a world where libraries and their patrons would have more and better access to high quality information. For these publishers, it’s simply an opportunity to charge more while providing less. In the CDL lawsuit, they have admitted that of the millions of books we have digitized, they themselves have only made about 33,000 available to libraries; only about 1% of what we have done, and only under restrictive and expensive license agreements. This is, they claim, the essence of their copyright rights: the ability to restrict access to information as they see fit, to further their theoretical economic interests, without regard to libraries traditional functions and the greater public good.
The good news is that many in the library community and beyond–including authors, small publishers, and patrons themselves–are seeing with clear eyes what is truly at stake. And they are seeing that, unfortunately, libraries and their supporters cannot just sit idly by–they will have to fight back. Indeed, that work has long since begun. In an extraordinary show of support–and recognition of what’s at stake–groups of librarians, scholars, and many others submitted friend of the court briefs in the publishers’ lawsuit against us. In these briefs, they demonstrated (among other things) the importance of libraries in the digital world. As the brief of Kenneth Crews, Kevin Smith, and the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic explained:
“To remain relevant and to continue to democratize information access, libraries must meet patrons where they are; in the present day, that means the Internet. Libraries have nurtured our democracy from its inception and have changed alongside our society–evolving from private subscription models serving only the elite to free institutions that enrich citizens without regard to race, creed, gender, or socioeconomic status. As a cornerstone of democracies, libraries will always be the site of cultural struggle and ‘a crucible for a society that is constantly moving toward a more perfect union.’”
Border patrol officials have found what the agency said was $400,000 worth of methamphetamine hidden inside pumpkins at the U.S–Mexico border in Texas. What do you think?
The FDA has confirmed a nationwide shortage of the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder medication Adderall due to manufacturing issues, with the shortage expected to last through the end of the year. What do you think?
At Slate today, I wrote about the terribly-named “quiet quitting” trend — how it mirrors a larger change in people’s relationship to work, and why a lot of workers are disgusted with the idea that they should do more than “quietly quit.”
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL—Adopting an affected speech pattern upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere, an astronaut aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule reportedly returned from the International Space Station with an annoying space accent Monday. “He was only in space for, like, nine months, and that is not long enough to pick up…
Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA’s claim that 5G could harm air travel safety.
The FAA claimed that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz “C-Band” would cause interference with certain radio altimeters. But the FCC conducted its own study showing minimal issues, and pointed to the more than 40 countries have deployed 5G in this bandwidth with no evidence of harm. Lifelong wireless spectrum policy experts like Harold Feld also blogged about how this was a an overheated controversy, and any real harm could be mitigated.
It didn’t much matter. It didn’t take long before the news wires were filled with reports about how 5G was going to be a diabolical public safety menace when it came to air travel. In part, thanks to folks at the FAA, who leaked scary stories to outlets like the Wall Street Journal.
Researchers found that 5G transmissions stay safely within their assigned frequencies and mostly don’t point signals skyward where aircraft operate, according to the report released Tuesday, the first of several from the government on the new high-speed mobile phone service.
There is a “low level of unwanted 5G emissions” in frequencies used by so-called radar altimeters — which calculate a plane’s distance from the ground and are critical to landing in low visibility — the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in the report.
The findings offer the the strongest indication to date that the patches being applied to some aircraft models should work well to protect them.
The fact that this always was a minor, fixable problem probably won’t get anywhere near the coverage you saw last year when countless news outlets proclaimed that airliners could soon start falling from the sky thanks to 5G. This was also a weird instance where the FAA failed to cooperatively heed the insights of the FCC, the one regulator specifically tasked with understanding how wireless spectrum actually works.
Alice Carter has produced a series of short videos in each of which she tells the story of one or another Ig Nobel Prize winner. Here are the first four episodes of that series.
BOB: Nope, everything is perfect as is: unremarkable and flavorless. Let’s start with spaghetti.
ALAN: I’ll grab water from the creek out back and start the boil.
BOB: And I’ll grab all the spices and throw them in the trash.
ALAN: Should we use the cheap plastic meal containers or the extra-cheap plastic meal containers?
BOB: The recipe says to use whichever is the thinnest, so the cooked food has delightful hints of plastic.
ALAN: Love that. Remind me, how do we get our fresh, out-of-the-microwave signature temperature?
BOB: The trick is to pour water onto the meal before freezing it. You know you’ve achieved the optimal consistency when it comes out of the microwave scolding hot on the outside and ice cold on the inside.
ALAN: Genius. While the spaghetti is boiling, I will start on the pizzas. There’s nothing like dough made of flour, water, and cardboard.
BOB: I find the cardboard from Amazon Prime boxes lends it a certain je ne sais quoi.
ALAN: I like how instead of tossing it, we smash it under a hydraulic press for an hour. It gives it such a unique consistency. It’s the only pizza you need an ax to slice.
BOB: Just like those pizza-loving Vikings did in days of yore.
ALAN: I’ll place the ten single shredded pieces of cheese on top, a half-inch apart. Not that it matters since we stack them upright during shipping—
BOB: —so all the cheese ends up on one side of the pizza anyway.
ALAN: Right. But with less cheese, you can taste the sauce—
BOB: —Like it’s fresh out of a V8 can.
ALAN: Whoops. It doesn’t look like we have enough dough to make all the pizzas.
BOB: We have tons of cauliflower. Cover it in marinara and fat-free cheese, and bam! You have—
ALAN & BOB: —a pizza cauliflower bake.
BOB: Here at Lean Cuisine, anything can be an ingredient, and anything can be a pizza.
ALAN: That is an entrée worthy of a fancy dinner party yet meant to be enjoyed by oneself while reading Fifty Shades of Grey in an office break room.
BOB: Hold on, I still have to fill every bite with our secret ingredient: loneliness.
ALAN: Voilà. Time for a taste test.
BOB: I am confident it will be perfectly miserable, as always.
ALAN: I love this job. I can’t believe the guy before me would let this go. What happened to him?
BOB: He tasted real pizza, and we never heard from him again.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.
“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?
“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
The celebratory remarks were more than swagger. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits.
“The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it,” said Kortney Balas, director of revenue management at JVM Realty, referring to RealPage’s software in a testimonial video on the company’s website.
The nation’s largest property management firm, Greystar, found that even in one downturn, its buildings using YieldStar “outperformed their markets by 4.8%,” a significant premium above competitors, RealPage said in materials on its website. Greystar uses RealPage’s software to price tens of thousands of apartments.
RealPage became the nation’s dominant provider of such rent-setting software after federal regulators approved a controversial merger in 2017, a ProPublica investigation found, greatly expanding the company’s influence over apartment prices. The move helped the Texas-based company push the client base for its array of real estate tech services past 31,700 customers.
The impact is stark in some markets.
In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.
To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm — a set of mathematical rules — to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge.
For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.
One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing.
Apartment managers can reject the software’s suggestions, but as many as 90% are adopted, according to former RealPage employees.
The software’s design and growing reach have raised questions among real estate and legal experts about whether RealPage has birthed a new kind of cartel that allows the nation’s largest landlords to indirectly coordinate pricing, potentially in violation of federal law.
Experts say RealPage and its clients invite scrutiny from antitrust enforcers for several reasons, including their use of private data on what competitors charge in rent. In particular, RealPage’s creation of work groups that meet privately and include landlords who are otherwise rivals could be a red flag of potential collusion, a former federal prosecutor said.
At a minimum, critics said, the software’s algorithm may be artificially inflating rents and stifling competition.
“Machines quickly learn the only way to win is to push prices above competitive levels,” said University of Tennessee law professor Maurice Stucke, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
RealPage acknowledged that it feeds its clients’ internal rent data into its pricing software, giving landlords an aggregated, anonymous look at what their competitors nearby are charging.
A company representative said in an email that RealPage “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”
The company noted that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.
“RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”
The statement said RealPage’s software also helps prevent rents from reaching unaffordable levels because it detects drops in demand, like those that happen seasonally, and can respond to them by lowering rents.
RealPage did not make Parsons, Bowen or the company’s current CEO, Dana Jones, available for interviews. Balas and a Greystar representative declined to comment on the record about YieldStar. The National Multifamily Housing Council, an industry group, also declined to comment.
Proponents say the software is not distorting the market. RealPage’s CEO told investors five years ago that the company wouldn’t be big enough to harm competition even after the merger. The CEO of one of YieldStar’s earliest users, Ric Campo of Camden Property Trust, told ProPublica that the apartment market in his company’s home city alone is so big and diverse that “it would be hard to argue there was some kind of price fixing.”
What role RealPage’s software has played in soaring rents — which in the decade before the pandemic nearly doubled in some cities — is hard to discern. Inadequate new construction and the tight market for homebuyers have exacerbated an existing housing shortage.
But by RealPage’s own admission, its algorithm is helping drive rents higher.
Few tenants know that such software, owned by a privately held company, has had a hand in rent increases across the country.
In Boston, renter Kaylee Hutchinson said she was puzzled when her landlord — unbeknownst to her, a RealPage client — told her days into the first pandemic lockdowns that her rent was going up. Building staff insisted that the market rate for her apartment was 6.5% higher than she was paying, despite her protests that people were fleeing the city.
Kaylee Hutchinson’s landlord, who uses RealPage’s pricing software, told her rent was going up at the start of the pandemic even as many people were fleeing the city.
(Philip Keith, special to ProPublica)
A few weeks later, she and her fiancé saw a newly vacant unit in their building advertised online for less. One of their landlord’s policies permitted moving to another unit owned by the company, so they did.
Hutchinson, who is an analyst for the police department, wondered if a computer algorithm was behind building staff’s inflexibility. “It was pretty obvious they should have been dropping prices,” she said. “They were digging their heels in.”
Hutchinson said she watched apartments in her building sit vacant at prices that didn’t make sense to her.
“A normal mom-and-pop landlord, they’re worried about having a good tenant and protecting their interest in the agreement,” Hutchinson said. “These companies, they’ll just replace you.”
The Origins of YieldStar
One of YieldStar’s main architects was a business executive who had personal experience with an antitrust prosecution.
A genial, self-described “numbers nerd,” Jeffrey Roper was Alaska Airlines’ director of revenue management when it and other major airlines began developing price-setting software in the 1980s.
Competing airlines began using common software to share planned routes and prices with each other before they became public. The technology helped head off price wars that would have lowered ticket prices, the Department of Justice said.
The department said the arrangement may have artificially inflated airfares, estimating the cost to consumers at more than a billion dollars between 1988 and 1992. The government eventually reached settlements or consent decrees for price fixing with eight airlines, including Alaska Airlines, all of which agreed to change how they used the technology.
At one point, federal agents removed a computer and documents from Roper’s office at the airline. He said he and other creators of the software weren’t aware of the antitrust implications. “We all got called up before the Department of Justice in the early 1980s because we were colluding,” he said. “We had no idea.”
When Roper returned to the United States in the early 2000s after a stint in central and eastern Europe, he said, he discovered the apartment rental industry was so far behind technologically that it resembled the emerging markets he’d just left.
Apartment managers were “basically pricing their product on a paper napkin,” said Roper, who eventually formed his own company.
Old computers and manual recordkeeping were mainstays of the industry. Leasing agents gauged how their buildings compared by calling up competitors. “This was just a ripe business,” with lots of money and lots of opportunities for technological improvement, Roper said.
RealPage hired Roper as its principal scientist in 2004 to improve software it had bought from Camden Property Trust, a large investor-backed owner and manager of apartment buildings.
Roper quickly realized he required data — a lot of data — to get the algorithm working properly. He began building a “master data warehouse” that pulled in client data from other RealPage applications, such as those for leasing managers.
A proof-of-concept version of the software had performed well in tests at townhouses Camden offered for rent in its home city of Houston.
At the time, the street behind Camden’s townhouses was shut down while a grocery store was being built. Leasing staff wanted to discount rent for the townhouses because of the nuisance, said Kip Zacharias, who worked with Camden as a consultant.
Instead, YieldStar suggested boosting rents. “We were like, ‘Guys, just try it,’” Zacharias said.
The units ended up renting for significantly more than staff had expected, he said. “That was kind of the eureka moment,” Zacharias said. “If you’d listened to your gut, you would have lowered your price.”
The practice of lowering rent to fill a vacancy was a reflex for many in the apartment industry. Letting units sit empty could be costly and nerve-wracking for leasing agents.
Such agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. “We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,” he said. “This is one of the reasons we wanted to get pricing off-site.”
Unimpeded by human worries, YieldStar’s price increases sometimes led to more tenants leaving.
Camden’s turnover rates increased about 15 percentage points in 2006 after it implemented YieldStar, Campo, the company’s CEO, told a trade publication a few years later. But that wasn’t a problem for the firm: Despite having to replace more renters, its revenue grew by 7.4%.
“The net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was $10 million in income,” Campo said. “I think that shows keeping the heads in the beds above all else is not always the best strategy.”
(Reminded of that quote, Campo told ProPublica it “sounds awful” and doesn’t reflect how he or Camden views renters today. “We fundamentally believe our customers are the most important part of our business,” he said. “We’re not about pushing people out.”)
Hiking rents at the same time benefited all landlords, the industry learned. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” one real estate executive and revenue management proponent told the industry publication Yield Pro in 2007.
One of the greatest threats to a landlord’s profit, according to Roper and other executives, was other firms setting rents too low at nearby properties. “If you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system,” Roper said.
Jeffrey Roper helped develop YieldStar, which uses an algorithm to suggest prices for apartments across the country.
(Shelby Tauber for ProPublica)
Roper wasn’t the only technologist working on an apartment pricing algorithm. Donald Davidoff, the primary developer of rival software called Lease Rent Options, or LRO, said he designed his program differently, to head off any concerns about collusion.
Instead of relying on a digital warehouse that includes competitor data, Davidoff used a complex formula and public market data to steer LRO’s algorithm. The system relied on incremental price shifts to manage demand for apartments, said Davidoff, an MIT-educated former rocket engineer. “That’s not dissimilar to changing a trajectory of a rocket through inflection of a nozzle,” he said — making small changes that can dramatically alter something’s course over time.
Davidoff said he was careful to avoid features that might run counter not only to anti-discrimination laws, such as the Fair Housing Act, but also those that bar competitors from conspiring to set prices.
“I had many conversations with attorneys to understand where the boundaries are,” he said. “Anybody who’s building one of these systems or is involved in these should care a lot about fair housing and should care a lot about price collusion to avoid both.”
Roper told ProPublica that when he was developing the YieldStar software more than a decade ago, he was concerned about avoiding both issues. He also said he didn’t want to misuse private data in pricing.
“I was highly sensitized to: You just don’t do it,” Roper said.
Despite differences in the software’s design, RealPage acquired LRO in 2017 after months of scrutiny by the antitrust division of the justice department. Federal regulators review mergers above a certain size — right now, it is transactions valued at $101 million — and typically allow them to proceed after only a preliminary review. But some are flagged for a more extensive look. The government can challenge a merger in court if it believes it could substantially harm competition.
RealPage’s purchase of LRO received such a second look, but the DOJ allowed it to proceed in late 2017. The department did not respond to requests for comment.
The approval allowed RealPage to acquire its only significant competitor, Roper said, adding, “I was surprised the DOJ let that go through.”
RealPage was pricing 1.5 million units, and the acquisition of LRO would double that, Steve Winn, RealPage’s then-CEO, said at a mid-2017 investor conference. “I don’t think there’s any concentration, enough concentration, of buying or pricing power here” to warrant DOJ concerns, he said. A third company had a substantial footprint in the market, Winn said, but property managers’ own manual pricing processes or proprietary systems were RealPage’s largest competitor.
“We expect our combined platform to drive accelerated, sustained revenue growth,” Winn said in a media release announcing the deal.
RealPage’s influence was burgeoning. That year, the firm’s target market — multifamily buildings with five or more units — made up about 19 million of the nation’s 45 million rental units. A growing share of those buildings were owned by firms backed by Wall Street investors, who were among the most eager adopters of pricing software.
RealPage renamed its combined pricing software AI Revenue Management. By the end of 2020, the firm was reporting in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that its clients used its services and products to manage 19.7 million rental units of all types, including single-family homes. The private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought the public company a few months later for $10.2 billion.
Winn, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $1.7 billion, stepped aside. He did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Thoma Bravo declined to comment.
Who Uses the Software and How It Works
Somewhere around 2016, according to one trade group, the industry’s use of the pricing software began to achieve “critical mass.”
The more property managers who sign on to RealPage services, the more data flows into the company’s repository. That in turn aids its pricing service, which the company says “leverages multifamily’s largest lease transaction database.”
RealPage’s clients include some of the largest property managers in the country. Many favor cities where rent has been rising rapidly, according to a ProPublica analysis of five of the country’s top 10 property managers as of 2020. All five use RealPage pricing software in at least some buildings, and together they control thousands of apartments in metro areas such as Denver, Nashville, Atlanta and Seattle, where rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019.
Greystar and FPI Management each control hundreds of buildings in metro areas where rents have risen steeply in recent years. And Equity Residential, Lincoln Property Company and Mid-America Apartment Communities each manage dozens of buildings in high-growth markets.
In contrast, these same companies control fewer buildings in metro areas such as Philadelphia, Tampa and Chicago, where rents have increased more slowly, the analysis found.
Many factors may cause RealPage clients to cluster in high rent-growth markets. The company’s clients may gravitate toward such markets because those areas will bear more rent hikes and so offer an opportunity to make more money, for instance. But RealPage says its software steers pricing that beats the market in areas where it operates.
RealPage’s algorithm calculates how demand for apartments responds to changes in price — what’s known as price elasticity.
The algorithm takes into account characteristics of apartments, like the number of bedrooms. It also considers factors such as how many more of a complex’s apartments are likely to become available in the near future. Property managers can adjust settings according to their priorities — such as how full they want their buildings to be.
The software also analyzes rent prices in the broader market, the company said. That data can provide insight into how competitors’ buildings located near the client — such as within, say, a half-mile or mile radius — are being priced, said Ryan Kimura, a former RealPage executive.
One advantage RealPage’s data warehouse had was its access to actual lease transactions — giving it the true rents paid, instead of simply those a landlord advertised, RealPage said.
Property managers can’t look at the unpublished data any one rival is sharing with YieldStar, Roper and other former RealPage employees said.
Nicole Lott said that when the building where she worked as a property manager near Dallas started using YieldStar, the software determined that similar buildings in the area were charging more. It pushed for steep increases.
“It really jumped rates up,” Lott said. “Leasing slowed down to a crawl.”
She and other staff challenged the software, asking the division of her company that oversaw YieldStar for a review, she said. The landlord ended up raising rates more gradually, she said.
“We didn’t think we could get those rates,” she said. “In some cases we were right and in some cases we might have been wrong.”
Kimura, a former RealPage executive who worked at the firm for three years before leaving in 2021, said the company would typically see pushback from property staff on about 10%-20% of the software’s recommendations. It was part of the process. “If they are approving every rate and it’s 100% acceptance,” he said, “they basically have a blindfold on and are pushing a button.”
RealPage claims its software will increase revenue and decrease vacancies. But at times the company has appeared to urge apartment owners and managers to reduce supply while increasing price.
During an earnings call in 2017, Winn said one large property company, which managed more than 40,000 units, learned it could make more profit by operating at a lower occupancy level that “would have made management uncomfortable before,” he said.
The company had been seeking occupancy levels of 97% or 98% in markets where it was a leader, Winn said. But when it began using YieldStar, managers saw that raising rents and leaving some apartments vacant made more money.
“Initially, it was very hard for executives to accept that they could operate at 94% or 96% and achieve a higher NOI by increasing rents,” Winn said on the call, referring to net operating income. The company “began utilizing RealPage to operate at 95%, while seeing revenue increases of 3% to 4%.”
But the software’s supporters say it’s not driving the nation’s housing affordability problem.
Though soaring rent is giving the industry a “black eye,” Campo said, the culprit is a lot of demand and not enough supply — not revenue management software. The software just helps managers react to trends faster, he said.
“Would you rather do your work today on a typewriter or a computer?” he asked. “That’s what revenue management is.”
Using software like YieldStar is “taking what we used to do manually on a yellow pad and calling people on the phone and putting it on a codified system where you take the errors out of the pricing,” he said.
RealPage, Seattle and Rising Rents
To see how rent-setting software can make a difference, look no further than Seattle, where over the last few years rents have risen faster than almost anywhere in the country, some studies show.
Large apartment buildings in one ZIP code just north of downtown, sandwiched between the Space Needle and Pike Place Market, are overwhelmingly controlled by RealPage clients, ProPublica found.
The trendy Belltown neighborhood, with its live music venues and residential towers, had 9,066 market rate apartments in buildings with five or more units as of June, according to the data firm CoStar and Apartments.com. Property management was highly concentrated: The ZIP code’s 10 biggest management firms ran 70% of units, data showed.
All 10 used RealPage’s pricing software in at least some of their buildings, according to employees, press releases and articles in trade publications.
Expensive markets with high rents, like Seattle, tend to have “very high” rates of revenue management use by landlords, Roper said.
Two buildings in the ZIP code — one with revenue management software and the other without — reveal diverging approaches to pricing apartments.
The Fountain Court apartments, 320 units clustered around a courtyard with a fountain, are about a half-mile from Amazon’s corporate headquarters. The building is owned and managed by Essex Property Trust, whose executives told investors in a 2008 earnings call that they were implementing YieldStar in the trust’s apartment buildings.
At the Fountain Court, rent has risen 42% since 2012, CoStar data shows — steeper than the 33% average increase for similar downtown buildings.
Tenant Amanda Tolep and her husband were approaching the end of their lease for a one-bedroom at the six-story building near the end of 2021 when they learned rent would jump about $400, to $1,600. The increase amounted to 33% — in one year.
Tolep had been working as a barista and launching her own nutrition-related business. Her husband worked for a bank. They expected their rent to go up, knowing they had received a “COVID deal.” But the size of the jump, along with other nuisances — like stolen packages and noise from a nearby fire station — led them to look elsewhere.
After finding prices similar to their raised rent at several other neighborhood buildings, the couple decided to leave the city and move a half-hour’s drive north.
A spokesperson for Essex declined to comment. None of the other biggest property managers commented on the record about their use of revenue management.
About six blocks away, rent has not gone up as dramatically at The Humphrey Apartments, a historic six-story brick building with 74 units.
John Stepan’s rent stayed relatively steady in a building that did not use RealPage’s pricing software.
(Jovelle Tamayo for ProPublica)
John Stepan, a writer for a tech company, moved into a studio in the 1923 building a little more than a year ago. It was small, but he liked the high ceilings, hardwood floors and farmhouse-style kitchen. He had secured a COVID deal, too: one month free, with rent of $1,295 a month after that.
A few months before his lease was up, the building notified him that rent would increase by $50, which amounted to about a 3.9% rise. “It was surprisingly low,” said Stepan, who left only because he found a condo to buy nearby.
Tami Drougas, the asset manager who oversees The Humphrey and two other Seattle-area buildings for the local real estate developer who owns them, said she doesn’t use a revenue management system.
“I don’t believe in them,” she said. “That’s great and fine for larger corporations. But I think it takes the humanity out of what we do.”
After 24 years in the industry, she said, she sees good relationships with tenants and vendors as the key to running a building successfully. She said The Humphrey has low costs related to vacancies.
The building’s rent has barely budged in recent years, she acknowledged. “We have a lot less turnover and I feel like that keeps expenses down,” Drougas said.
Seattle has been hit particularly hard by soaring rents. One report found the city had the steepest rent growth of any major city in the nation over the decade ending in 2019. Almost 46,000 Seattle households were spending more than half their incomes on housing, making them what federal standards call “severely cost-burdened,” according to a 2021 study the city commissioned. Many families have trouble paying for necessities like food and medical care when their rent eats up 30% or more of their income.
“Many others have been priced out of Seattle altogether due to rapidly rising rents and housing prices,” the study said.
It also found that people with higher incomes often “down rented,” choosing cheaper apartments that would otherwise have been available to people making less. Seattle should have had a surplus of 9,000 apartments affordable to people making 80% or less of the median income, the study found. But tenants’ down renting as prices rose turned that surplus into a deficit of 21,000.
Newly Rent-Burdened Workers Range From Accountants to Groundskeepers
In metro Seattle, more people in a variety of jobs are spending over 30% of their income on rent. Below are the 10 occupations where the share of rent-burdened households jumped the most.
Note: A household’s occupation was determined by the job held by the highest earner in each household; to determine if a household is cost-burdened, gross rent (including utilities) was divided by total household income. Homeowners were not included. Source: IPUMS USA, University of Minnesota.
(Graphic by Haru Coryne)
As the availability of apartments has shrunk, so has the choice of landlords. The startling concentration of property management in Belltown mirrors a national trend.
The number of apartments controlled by the country’s 50 largest property managers has grown every year for 14 years, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council, which surveys buildings with five or more units.
Those firms oversaw about 1 in 6 such apartments nationwide in 2019, amounting to 3.6 million units. By 2021, the number had risen to almost 4.2 million.
James Nelson, a former bank examiner and loan broker, noticed the concentration of landlords when he and his partner moved to Seattle in 2018.
Troubled by astronomical home sale prices and high rents, Nelson began looking at what was happening in the broader market.
After some digging, he found that many if not most of the bigger apartment managers in Seattle appeared to be using price-setting software. “The name RealPage kept popping up,” said Nelson, who is retired and writing a book on his research. “I went in and looked at the technologies that they were using.”
He concluded the landlords were using tech to do exactly what RealPage advertised it could do — help them charge high rents and beat the market.
“There is no competition,” he said.
Concerns About Competition
RealPage’s software has gained traction at a time when the Biden administration, concerned about rising prices and corporate concentration, is looking to bolster enforcement of rules meant to ensure competition is flourishing.
To win cases, antitrust prosecutors have traditionally needed to show that competitors agreed among themselves to tamper with pricing. “If competitors agreed among themselves to use the same algorithm and to share information among themselves with the purpose of stabilizing pricing, that would be per se illegal,” said Stucke, the former antitrust prosecutor.
If they simply shared information without agreeing to manipulate pricing, the question of whether antitrust law was violated would be more complex, he said. Stucke said he knew of no cases where companies had been prosecuted for what’s known as tacit collusion while using the same algorithm to set prices.
But Maureen K. Ohlhausen, who was then the acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a 2017 talk that it could be problematic if a group of competitors all used the same outside firm’s algorithm to maximize prices across a market.
She suggested substituting “a guy named Bob” everywhere the word algorithm appears.
“Is it OK for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?” she said. “If it isn’t OK for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t OK for an algorithm to do it either.”
Through a representative, Ohlhausen declined to comment on RealPage.
Courts have frowned on sharing nonpublic data among competitors. Lease transaction data is not always public.
As far as RealPage’s claim on its website that it uses “disciplined analytics that balance supply and demand to maximize revenue growth,” Stucke said that businesses can’t usually control supply and demand on their own. “Normally that’s left to market forces,” he said.
The RealPage User Group — the forum for apartment managers who use the company’s products — encourages rivals to work together, something that has been challenged as anti-competitive in antitrust prosecutions, too. The company’s website says the group aims to “promote communications between users,” among other things.
Starting out with 10 members in 2003, the group has grown to more than 1,000 participants, according to the website. A dozen subcommittees, including two focused on revenue management, meet in invitation-only sessions at the company’s annual conference, RealWorld, and participate in a conference call each quarter.
Those sorts of collaborations, Stucke said, “could raise an antitrust red flag.”
If clients are tampering with market forces, their assertions in RealPage marketing videos that its software keeps prices and occupancy “more stable” could also become relevant in court, Stucke said. Similar comments have been used as evidence in previous antitrust cases.
And the exhortations by RealPage and real estate executives for companies to use YieldStar and let some units sit vacant to raise prices are reminiscent of a legal case in the early 1900s, he said, where lumber companies shared information and a directive to reduce supply in order to push up prices.
In an email to ProPublica, RealPage dismissed the notion that the company was using market data improperly.
The company said that using actual rents helps the company “capture a truer picture of price elasticity and affordability,” which reduces the odds a unit is overpriced. And the lease transaction data RealPage is using isn’t always private; sometimes such data is disclosed, the company said, such as when publicly traded real estate firms make reports.
The FTC, which has broad authority to bring enforcement cases against businesses for anti-competitive practices, said in 2021 that it was seeking a more active role in such cases.
A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment on RealPage’s pricing software.
The agency has tangled with RealPage before: In 2018, the company agreed to pay $3 million to settle an FTC complaint that the company had failed to do enough to make sure personal information used in its tenant screening product was accurate. RealPage did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.
Higher Rents Are Burdening More Tenants
Drama over rising rent costs — now a key driver of inflation — has been increasingly public. The year before the pandemic, roughly 46% of renters in the U.S. spent more than 30% of their income on rent and therefore met the definition of cost-burdened, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found.
In mid-September in Washington, D.C., angry protesters disrupted the normally sedate yearly conference held by the National Multifamily Housing Council. Before security ejected them, they seized the stage and recounted how their families had been harmed by an inability to find safe, affordable housing.
At the center of the acrimonious debate has been RealPage’s Jay Parsons.
Since RealPage’s own July conference, he’s repeated a statistic, compiled from a company data set of new lease transactions, that market-rate apartment renters are only spending around 23% of their income on rent.
“The reality is that rents can only rise as incomes rise,” Parsons told The New York Times last month. “If people can’t afford it, you can’t lease it.”
But his sunny view has drawn sharp rebukes.
“This is demonstrably false,” wrote Ben Teresa, co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Twitter. “One of the defining characteristics of housing markets in the last 40 years has been rents increasing faster than wages.
“The problem is quite precisely that people are paying rents they can’t afford,” he wrote.
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SEATTLE—In a shocking revelation that carries grim echoes of the team’s sign stealing in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, multiple players on the Houston Astros were caught Saturday politely asking the Seattle Mariners’ catcher for a little heads-up on the pitch selection. “Hey, man, if you wouldn’t mind letting me know…
