“None of the companies admitted fault or liability. They did, however, agree to stop providing Realpage with their nonpublic data for use as an input in Realpage’s revenue management system’s price recommendations, and to stop using Realpage’s RMS in ways that use competitors’ non-public data to inform pricing recommendations”.
Okay but Realpage has a decade of real pricing data that it can use to continue informing these rental companies and outside of them having extremely hard boundaries in their service this is just going to happen again.
This doesn’t do a whole lot to address the actual issue, and these companies aren’t going to stop colluding over a wrist slap like this.
skybrian 6 hours ago [-]
What about when market prices are public? Is knowing the market prices collusion?
omgwtfbyobbq 6 hours ago [-]
It can be, if everyone also acts to keep prices high by behaving in ways that aren't typical.
Basically when somebody makes a pricing error on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange there's a mob of automated arbitrage bots that try to trade against it. Who wins and actually gets to make the trade is mainly determined by how high of a transaction fee your bot is willing to pay.
You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee.
Instead what happens is bots offer the lowest possible fee, then immediately increase their fee as soon as they see a competing bot try to take the trade with a higher fee. This results in the bot offering the highest fee changing every several milliseconds as the fee quickly grows.
The way Ethereum mining works, this results in the winning bot being randomly selected from among the set of bots "bidding" up the transaction fee: blocks are mined at random intervals of iirc about 20 seconds, and whoever had the highest bid at the time the next block is mined wins. <20 seconds of bidding is short enough that even with the bidding, the transaction fee doesn't get bid up particularly high, and the winner makes out with a highly profitable arbitrage trade.
By giving up a guaranteed win and instead rolling the dice against other bots, transaction fees stay low and everyone has a higher expected profit. It's coordination that happens without any communication between the participants and quite possibly the participants didn't realize they were in effect cooperating when they added the high speed bidding behavior to their bots.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee
This is like 1980s sawtooth algos in real finance.
A lot of crypto is former HF folks taking old strategies to a dumber field.
rahimnathwani 4 hours ago [-]
Tacit collusion wouldn't work in this case, because most rental markets aren't oligopolies.
xvedejas 5 hours ago [-]
Is there an actual issue? I've seen compelling arguments that places that banned the practice of algorithmic rent setting did not see any appreciable drop in rents. I'm almost convinced the problem is entirely supply side.
ctmlr 5 hours ago [-]
The problem is political, landlords run every level of government and use that power to artificially limit housing supply.
DANmode 5 hours ago [-]
Is allowing price-fixing and deniability (ans a service) across 100 mile regions a problem, while you yourself are highlighting a supply-side crisis?
Yes. That’s a problem.
xvedejas 3 hours ago [-]
If it's causally linked to higher prices, I agree. My question is whether we certainly know it's causally linked. In my mind right now it's similarly plausible that these things are just snake oil sold to landlords. There are a ton of conspiracy theories that would be a real problem, if true.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
It's snake oil.
Landlords have an inherent trade off between holding out for a tenant who would pay a higher rent and not having the unit vacant in the meantime. Holding out for longer than that helps the other landlords at your expense. Meanwhile there are a large number of landlords, there is no way for the ones using a given system to force the others to do the same, and a significant percentage of them don't.
So if the system tells the landlords using it to do the thing that would increase rents if every landlord was using it, the "defectors" who don't use the system win out over anyone using it, which means using the system rather than defecting would cause you to lose money and everyone would have the incentive to defect.
Whereas if all the system is doing is suggesting the optimal point in the trade off between holding out for a higher paying tenant and renting the unit sooner, without assuming the other landlords are being required to use the same system, that's the same thing an individual landlord would do if they're not colluding.
The actual way landlords collude is through zoning boards, because then they have an enforcement mechanism, i.e. if someone is trying to defect by adding new units to alleviate the limited supply then the other landlords can sic the government on them, having passed the various laws against constructing those units there.
epistasis 8 hours ago [-]
We need a public rental registry of rental prices that anybody can browse, analyze, etc. The information disparity is a problem.
However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
Gigachad 5 hours ago [-]
How it works in Victoria, Australia is for renewing an existing lease is you must provide examples of comparable rentals in the area at or above the price you are proposing. And the tenant can dispute with their own comparable if they believe the price is wrong. New listings can be listed at any price.
There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.
Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.
ctmlr 4 hours ago [-]
Most landlords arent big corporate in the USA either especially in areas where the housing crisis is the worst.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
dimaggiosghost 4 hours ago [-]
Services like RealPage provide information that allows the small landlord to act like corporate overlords, praise be American corporatism.
ctmlr 4 hours ago [-]
How about an app that collectively bargains rents algorithmically? Call it RedPage lol.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
That's basically a listing search page that allows you to sort by price.
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
hermanubis 5 hours ago [-]
A growing body of economic research shows that this allows producers to keep prices high even with lots of competition.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
By what mechanism do the producers keep prices high if the "lots of competition" is constantly undercutting them and adding new supply to replace anything the colluding subset tries to withhold from the market?
Timon3 56 minutes ago [-]
If the evidence seems to disagree with your theory, maybe your theory has to change?
epistasis 5 hours ago [-]
Can you share several articles about this? I haven't found one but it's hard to search for.
genxy 4 hours ago [-]
The prices should be delayed two months. The rate at which pricing information propagates dictates how much of the rental pricing mass (number of owners * average units owned) gets thrown around how quickly. I don't have a number, but something like 2 months. Treat this data as if it was a vile of Devil's venom [1]. If they setup back channel information sharing networks, or collusion networks of any kind. <bad thing happens, not just a fee>
Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.
Should rentals be seen as economic opportunities for hyper efficiencies? IE should the market be structured to extract the maximum profit from renters?
Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
The general premise of the rental market is that if rents are high, the profits from building new rental units will justify the construction costs and then new units will be added until the rents go down, i.e. until it stops being profitable to add more.
This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.
Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.
skinfaxi 35 minutes ago [-]
Some states have solved this to some extent with the builder's remedy to override local zoning decisions.
coryrc 26 minutes ago [-]
And cities, like Seattle, still undercut this by taking way too long to review permits.
kdot 8 hours ago [-]
Al la dc rent registry, which I always thought was ironic because doesn’t this create a database where landlords can consider prices based on others… but I guess it would be public in this case.
Well the point of market based interventions and government regulations like this is primarily to reduce information asymmetry. You still ultimately need to increase supply or reduce demand to move price.
genxy 4 hours ago [-]
Depends on the rate of information update and how long the records are retained for. High frequency updates create a higher fidelity information channel.
lotsofpulp 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t see why rental agreements can’t be registered with the county like house sales are. It would also eliminate the need for squatter laws, as it would be trivial for police to pull up the county website and see who belongs in the home.
nicbou 6 hours ago [-]
Berlin wants to do that to enforce rent control more effectively.
zhivota 8 hours ago [-]
Americans are too privacy focused to accept this, but I could easily see a cottage industry of "registered agents" popping up around it who sign leases on behalf of individuals and shield them from public scrutiny.
Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.
tmpz22 7 hours ago [-]
Are we privacy focused? Look at products like Facebook Muse, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Whatsapp, or the perv glasses, or or or
georgel 7 hours ago [-]
See RealID for how long certain states has been kicking that bucket down the road.
wyre 6 hours ago [-]
American's seem to only care about privacy from the government, but wanting privacy from trillion dollar corporations? They keep the stock market high and provide value to their major investors and everyone's retirement accounts so obviously its fully within their rights to spy on us 24/7. /s
eru 6 hours ago [-]
I think publishing your own rental contract is already legal?
(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)
Onavo 7 hours ago [-]
Well, a Torrens registry systems still isn't universal yet in the US.
ihsw 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
exabrial 9 hours ago [-]
_thats it_ ???
georgel 8 hours ago [-]
I filed my claim, and based on their calculator this might be the most serious check from a class action (assuming I get the full amount). For me its ~1.5k between 3 named landlords.
jadenPete 8 hours ago [-]
Where is this calculator?
georgel 7 hours ago [-]
There is no calculator per se, in the settlement they explain the formula for payouts.
throwitaway222 8 hours ago [-]
I've been saying this for a while, but there is a cottage industry like RealPage in pretty much every industry. These companies need to be slammed out of existence for anti-competitive pricing and collusion. So much corruption. I'm so sick of fraud and corruption.
crazygringo 6 hours ago [-]
I really can't think of any others. Which is why RealPage has been so newsworthy.
If you have examples of such a company in other industries, please share.
Companies like Radford collect salary information aggregated and sell it to other companies trying to set salary levels for similar roles.
These companies buying services from Radford are indirectly colluding through Radford, just like RealPage.
mmooss 7 hours ago [-]
Could you give us other examples?
skew-aberration 1 hours ago [-]
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Land ownership is the biggest business and the source of the biggest conspiracies.
4 hours ago [-]
aetherspawn 7 hours ago [-]
Yep sue propertyme next
mmooss 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder what empirical and theoretical substance there is to the idea that the cost of living is due to lack of competition (in zero-to-one markets), and that competition is the solution to much of this.
On that basis, the 'free market' should be called the 'free, competitive market' - without competition, it has little value. Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets. Anything anti-competitive should be treated harshly.
bruce511 6 hours ago [-]
>> Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets.
I'm not sure I understand where you are going with this? Are you suggesting that a new product cannot enter a market without a number of simultaneous competitors?
If I want to roll out fibre to an area that doesn't have it, can I? If I want to build a fresh-produce store in a town that doesn't have one, then I need to find someone else to compete with?
Lots and lots of businesses operate as quasi-monopolies if you look hard enough. Especially in smaller and rural environments. Lots and lots of places have one gas station, one mechanic, one vet, one doctor, one diner and so on.
Your use of the word "require" seems difficult to implement. What if no-one wants to compete with me? If Apple stops making Macs, does MS have to stop making Windows?
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
I agree that those are challenges. Maintaining competition in markets is well-studied; I wonder what has been found - what can be done, how can the scope be limited without failing on the outcomes, etc.
dsr_ 7 hours ago [-]
Even without outright collusion, a market without at least seven viable suppliers is not really competitive. Current "monopoly" policy is corrupt.
(Seven has been experimentally determined, but I can't recall where.)
gavmor 6 hours ago [-]
I was curious, so I looked this up: Section 5.3 of the 2010 U.S. merger-guideline explicitly classified markets with a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index below 1,500 as “unconcentrated.”
I can't quote the formula here, but HHI is, apparently, the sum of squared percentage market shares. Six equal-sized suppliers give an HHI of approximately 1,667, while seven give approximately 1,429—on opposite sides of the 2010 threshold.
Is that where you got the number?
genxy 3 hours ago [-]
U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, Statements of Antitrust Enforcement Policy in Health Care (August 1996) is also a good read page 44.
> In assembling information to be collectively provided to
purchasers, providers need to be aware of the potential antitrust consequences of information exchanges among competitors.
> the collection is managed by a third party (e.g., a
purchaser, government agency, health care consultant,
academic institution, or trade association);
> although current fee-related information may be provided
to purchasers, any information that is shared among or
is available to the competing providers furnishing the
data must be more than three months old; and
> for any information that is available to the providers
furnishing data, there are at least five providers
reporting data upon which each disseminated statistic is
based, no individual provider's data may represent more
than 25 percent on a weighted basis of that statistic,
and any information disseminated must be sufficiently
aggregated such that it would not allow recipients to
identify the prices charged by any individual provider.
> The conditions that must be met for an information exchange
among providers to fall within the antitrust safety zone are
intended to ensure that an exchange of price or cost data is not
used by competing providers for discussion or coordination of
provider prices or costs.
Damn. From 1996!
genxy 3 hours ago [-]
I am seeing a funny skit where the city is busting some bougie coop for having way too high of prices.
robbiet480 3 hours ago [-]
I leased at two RealPage properties for a combined 151 months. Both of them were confirmed to be colluding with one another and they were both confirmed as “high software collusion” by an expert. I calculated that the max payout I could get is ~$83,000 for the estimated amount I was overcharged rent for those ~12 years.
Can’t wait to get like $300 out of this. /s
jmyeet 7 hours ago [-]
It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.
Housing needs to be decommodified. It needs to stop being a retirement plan. We need to stop letting people hoard it. We need to stop subsidizing exurbs and making it illegal to build the kind of walkable communities people actually like. Case in point: Red Vienna [1].
As another commenter noted, this is in every industry. Utilities are a particularly bad one including telcos. All the best ISPs in the US are municipally owned. Chattanooga was the first really big poster child for this.
Privatization of all these things is just rent-seeking behavior.
So many of society's problems come down to housing being too expensive. Anything that makes it expensive needs to be stamped out and that includes RealPage as well as Airbnb/VRBO.
It is not just housing but all land - the grocery store ups prices without increasing profit because every landowner in the supply chain (who they rent their stores from, their warehouses, the factories that process and package foods, the farms themselves) ups rent too.
This is a predictable outcome of commerce due to the limited supply of land and is described in some detail by Adam Smith and developed by later thinkers like Riccardo and George (who took it to its logical conclusion and inspired the board game Monopoly).
During the 20th century, economics was wholesale rewritten to blur the lines between land and capital so as to bury this awkward conversation.
The general recommendation of these early economists was taxing land - moderate in the case of Smith, up to 100% per George. This amounts to public ownership of part of the profits of land ownership.
ExoticPearTree 24 minutes ago [-]
> It's both funny and sad to see the mental gymnastics of people trying to find solutions to this when the solution is real simple: it's public ownership.
No, it is not. Communism tried that and all communist countries failed spectacularly. Public ownership in practice means that everyone has rights but zero responsibilities.
Taking people's private property is not a solution to any crisis. This whole housing thing looks like "I want to have my cake and eat it too".
dsr_ 7 hours ago [-]
... and the term for this behavior gives it away: "rent-seeking".
altairprime 7 hours ago [-]
Which major metropolitan city in America is building half a dozen or more entire apartment buildings in its downtown inner and outer rings, specifically to implement what you’re describing?
Hint: it has an international airport :)
Your comment is so outrage-focused that I’m not inclined to help you make your argument. I largely agree with your point, but dialing back the rhetorical pathos would make it more persuasive.
Rendered at 10:42:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Okay but Realpage has a decade of real pricing data that it can use to continue informing these rental companies and outside of them having extremely hard boundaries in their service this is just going to happen again.
This doesn’t do a whole lot to address the actual issue, and these companies aren’t going to stop colluding over a wrist slap like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
Basically when somebody makes a pricing error on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange there's a mob of automated arbitrage bots that try to trade against it. Who wins and actually gets to make the trade is mainly determined by how high of a transaction fee your bot is willing to pay.
You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee.
Instead what happens is bots offer the lowest possible fee, then immediately increase their fee as soon as they see a competing bot try to take the trade with a higher fee. This results in the bot offering the highest fee changing every several milliseconds as the fee quickly grows.
The way Ethereum mining works, this results in the winning bot being randomly selected from among the set of bots "bidding" up the transaction fee: blocks are mined at random intervals of iirc about 20 seconds, and whoever had the highest bid at the time the next block is mined wins. <20 seconds of bidding is short enough that even with the bidding, the transaction fee doesn't get bid up particularly high, and the winner makes out with a highly profitable arbitrage trade.
By giving up a guaranteed win and instead rolling the dice against other bots, transaction fees stay low and everyone has a higher expected profit. It's coordination that happens without any communication between the participants and quite possibly the participants didn't realize they were in effect cooperating when they added the high speed bidding behavior to their bots.
This is like 1980s sawtooth algos in real finance.
A lot of crypto is former HF folks taking old strategies to a dumber field.
Yes. That’s a problem.
Landlords have an inherent trade off between holding out for a tenant who would pay a higher rent and not having the unit vacant in the meantime. Holding out for longer than that helps the other landlords at your expense. Meanwhile there are a large number of landlords, there is no way for the ones using a given system to force the others to do the same, and a significant percentage of them don't.
So if the system tells the landlords using it to do the thing that would increase rents if every landlord was using it, the "defectors" who don't use the system win out over anyone using it, which means using the system rather than defecting would cause you to lose money and everyone would have the incentive to defect.
Whereas if all the system is doing is suggesting the optimal point in the trade off between holding out for a higher paying tenant and renting the unit sooner, without assuming the other landlords are being required to use the same system, that's the same thing an individual landlord would do if they're not colluding.
The actual way landlords collude is through zoning boards, because then they have an enforcement mechanism, i.e. if someone is trying to defect by adding new units to alleviate the limited supply then the other landlords can sic the government on them, having passed the various laws against constructing those units there.
However, that's not a systematic method for lower prices. It just prevents individual cases of price gouging.
There is enough turnover with new listings to find the market rate while preventing existing tenants from being screwed over by unreasonable prices.
Australia also almost entirely works off rentals owned by individuals who own 1-3 properties rather than corporate owners so no one landlord has any sway over the market.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
Second, the historical database should be deleted. And if they can't survive that, so be it. Keeping the spoils of crime should be the crime. Justice still isn't finished.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_venom
Not clear to me that is the right approach, or if owning rentals should be more of a fixed income approach (or even speculative - profits only come from the sale of the property).
This actually works unless you inhibit the construction of new units. Naturally that's what we've been doing, which is why it isn't working. But the solution is to stop inhibiting the construction of new units.
Because the alternatives don't actually work. Unless you can build enough units to meet demand, there aren't enough units. Which means you either have high prices which suppress demand because people who can't afford them are forced out, or shortages because you're imposing some inadvisable price controls and then instead of being unable to get a unit because you can't afford the rent, you can't get a unit because they're all occupied and no one is adding more.
https://rentregistry.dc.gov/
Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.
(Unless the other party to the contract deliberately asks you in the contract to keep it quiet. But that's something you need to actively agree to.)
If you have examples of such a company in other industries, please share.
These companies buying services from Radford are indirectly colluding through Radford, just like RealPage.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Land ownership is the biggest business and the source of the biggest conspiracies.
On that basis, the 'free market' should be called the 'free, competitive market' - without competition, it has little value. Businesses should be required to compete and to opeerate in competitive markets. Anything anti-competitive should be treated harshly.
I'm not sure I understand where you are going with this? Are you suggesting that a new product cannot enter a market without a number of simultaneous competitors?
If I want to roll out fibre to an area that doesn't have it, can I? If I want to build a fresh-produce store in a town that doesn't have one, then I need to find someone else to compete with?
Lots and lots of businesses operate as quasi-monopolies if you look hard enough. Especially in smaller and rural environments. Lots and lots of places have one gas station, one mechanic, one vet, one doctor, one diner and so on.
Your use of the word "require" seems difficult to implement. What if no-one wants to compete with me? If Apple stops making Macs, does MS have to stop making Windows?
(Seven has been experimentally determined, but I can't recall where.)
I can't quote the formula here, but HHI is, apparently, the sum of squared percentage market shares. Six equal-sized suppliers give an HHI of approximately 1,667, while seven give approximately 1,429—on opposite sides of the 2010 threshold.
Is that where you got the number?
> In assembling information to be collectively provided to purchasers, providers need to be aware of the potential antitrust consequences of information exchanges among competitors.
> the collection is managed by a third party (e.g., a purchaser, government agency, health care consultant, academic institution, or trade association);
> although current fee-related information may be provided to purchasers, any information that is shared among or is available to the competing providers furnishing the data must be more than three months old; and
> for any information that is available to the providers furnishing data, there are at least five providers reporting data upon which each disseminated statistic is based, no individual provider's data may represent more than 25 percent on a weighted basis of that statistic, and any information disseminated must be sufficiently aggregated such that it would not allow recipients to identify the prices charged by any individual provider.
> The conditions that must be met for an information exchange among providers to fall within the antitrust safety zone are intended to ensure that an exchange of price or cost data is not used by competing providers for discussion or coordination of provider prices or costs.
Damn. From 1996!
Can’t wait to get like $300 out of this. /s
Housing needs to be decommodified. It needs to stop being a retirement plan. We need to stop letting people hoard it. We need to stop subsidizing exurbs and making it illegal to build the kind of walkable communities people actually like. Case in point: Red Vienna [1].
As another commenter noted, this is in every industry. Utilities are a particularly bad one including telcos. All the best ISPs in the US are municipally owned. Chattanooga was the first really big poster child for this.
Privatization of all these things is just rent-seeking behavior.
So many of society's problems come down to housing being too expensive. Anything that makes it expensive needs to be stamped out and that includes RealPage as well as Airbnb/VRBO.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY&t=191s
This is a predictable outcome of commerce due to the limited supply of land and is described in some detail by Adam Smith and developed by later thinkers like Riccardo and George (who took it to its logical conclusion and inspired the board game Monopoly).
During the 20th century, economics was wholesale rewritten to blur the lines between land and capital so as to bury this awkward conversation.
The general recommendation of these early economists was taxing land - moderate in the case of Smith, up to 100% per George. This amounts to public ownership of part of the profits of land ownership.
No, it is not. Communism tried that and all communist countries failed spectacularly. Public ownership in practice means that everyone has rights but zero responsibilities.
Taking people's private property is not a solution to any crisis. This whole housing thing looks like "I want to have my cake and eat it too".
Hint: it has an international airport :)
Your comment is so outrage-focused that I’m not inclined to help you make your argument. I largely agree with your point, but dialing back the rhetorical pathos would make it more persuasive.