Part One: Why is the Rent So Damn High?

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Well, you know, I just I don't know, Sophie. I
think that you're kind of being unfair when you say
the audience is just terrible people and you hate them
and you want to throw boiling water from a cast
iron skelet on them. I don't know that that's fair, Sophie.
That seems kind of mean to me. But Robert, I
would never say that was a direct quote from your diary.

(00:23):
That was that was weren't my words. That's what you said,
so you can't prove that. I mean, it was in
your blog. Well, who knows what's a blog it was?
I remember I followed you. Wow. Wow, I feel attacked
in my own podcast, my own podcast that I don't

(00:45):
with my own two hands. Unbelievable. Welcome to behind the mastause.
I guess it's Samantha big Bay. Robert evans Am slandered
to a terrible degree unfair early despite having never done
anything wrong never How are you doing, Samantha McVeigh. Hello.

(01:06):
I know again I aged myself with the zango reference,
so I know people are going to be like, oh
my god, what is wrong with you? You're welcome. I'm
really glad to throw it back at this early. Yeah, Samantha,
what's what's? What is? That's that's your whole that's your
whole question. What is? How is what? What is? But

(01:30):
how is it? Yeah? Exactly how is what? And what
is how? Is there an answer question? There never was
a r Are you asking if she's the host of
a podcast called stuff? Mom never told you? Is she? Well?
Is she? This is why I keep you around, Sophie.
I know that you've got this better than I do.
This has been a great introduction. Robert would never have

(01:53):
gotten there. I would have gotten there. I I love
our audience, I of all of everybody the statistically speaking,
So this is a podcast, it's about bad people. Normally,
we're doing a little bit of a different thing today, Samantha,
and I've brought you on. I've brought you on because,

(02:15):
as I can tell right now, you exist in a
black void. Based on your and I assume that that's
what goes on in the heart of anybody who understands math.
I feel like that was racist. Is that racist because
I'm a whoa? It's because you exist within a black void? Oh? Okay, okay, Jesus,

(02:39):
that is how we we have, like obviously for the
people listening to this podcast, there's a pretty good chance
they're renters. They're about third rent. Renters are about thirty
six percent of households nationwide, or or renter's head thirties
percent of households nationwide. Um, although those numbers are a
couple of years old. I don't know if it's that
was like pre pandemic. Um, do you rent or do

(03:01):
you own? Samantha, I now officially own because we were
kind of pushed out from the rental that I had
because he went up by Uh. I want to say
on our rent, Jesus Christ. So yeah, you have been.
That's what we're talking today about why the rent is
so damn high. Um, and some of the people who
are responsible. We're gonna try to drill into specific people

(03:24):
whenever possible, because that's our our bit. But I am
also in my first year of homeownership. I've been a
renter the first fifteen years of my adult life. UM,
And for me, I don't know about you. Most of
the living situations I was in were like the broadly criminal,

(03:44):
like illegal, like like the the landlord was breaking a
law and so my rent was cheaper. We actually liked
to tell this story a couple of we had to
like talk a City of Los Angeles inspector out of
reporting fire hazards in our apartment because we were like, dude,
i live a minute and a half away from santam
Anka and we're paying like a thousand bucks a month
for a room each, Like you gotta you gotta, like,

(04:04):
you gotta just keep quiet, Like we'll burn to death
if we burned to death. We'll risk life or death
for the situation because it's cheap, because it's cheap um.
But nothing is cheap anymore. It has gotten Rent has
gotten higher at a ridiculous rate since the pandemic, in particular,
not that it wasn't raising before, but it's really raised

(04:24):
a lot. Say, as you just said, you just we're
about to go up forty year over year. In Miami
and Tampa, rent is up about fifty of its pre
pandemic numbers, and nationwide, median rent has topped two thousand
dollars a month for the first time ever, which is
inside when I was, you know, a kid fourteen fifteen
years ago living in my first apart, two grand a

(04:46):
month is like that's a rich person's rent, Like like
that's a crazy rich. But I remember going to like
a friends apartment in Manhattan that was bucks a month
and being like, what the funk is wrong with you people? Right,
I'd be seven dollars a month for a three bedroom
like UM. Now, the fact that media and rent has
topped two thousand dollars a month is heavily influenced by
the poll of the big cities. These are very skewed

(05:09):
numbers that may not reflect most individual people's experience because
of how big some of the big cities are and
how high the rent is there. So San Francisco, Seattle,
New York, Los Angeles, Miami, etcetera. Are the places that
are skewing the numbers and the places where rent has
surged the most. But rent is still up basically everywhere.

(05:29):
It is currently increasing at the fastest rate since nineteen
eight six UM. And one of the things that happened
during the pandemic is we had all these people moving
to cities that they thought would be a better place
to live because it was remote work UM, which helped
spread out some of the increases UM. And there was
a brief period of time where evictions were tamped down
on somewhat by federal rental assistants, So even though rent

(05:50):
was rising, it was hard to kick people out of
their houses. But that has started to run out this
year and in eviction filings hit pre pandemic levels and
in many play has exceeded them greatly. So does that
have an impact. Does the impact of like what's called
pandemic pricing on rent have have an influence there where?
Like a lot of places, they especially in big cities

(06:12):
such as Los Angeles, New York, they were trying to
fill places, so they gave a lower price and then
the next year the increase was um offensively high. Yeah,
that's one of the things that experience. It's it's one
of the things that's contributed to evictions some cities. It's
like like Houston in particulars is one city I know
where eviction rate filings are like pre pandemic levels. Like

(06:34):
it's massively higher in a lot of cities. And this
is all that hit hard with that, And immediately as
as soon as it dropped, the amount of evictions that
came it was absurd and obscene. Yeah, and it and
that that's fed into the homelessness crisis. That's this huge
political thing. And also just like thing thing everywhere in
the country right now. Um, and it's you know, kind

(06:57):
of difficult to grock an absolute numbers how many house
those people and encampments and other situations, because those aren't
easily recorded in federal and state statistics. But homelessness is
surging in a number of American cities. And all of
this is ancillary to the question why is the rent
so damn high? Now, if you go to like the yeah,
exactly why is there? I know we're about to go
down to this. There's gonna be black Hawk mentioning, Zillo mentioning,

(07:21):
Airbnb mentioning. Are we going down these routes. We're gonna
be talking about some of these. We're gonna be talking
about a number of those. This is I want to
say right now. We're not gonna be this isn't going
to be a comprehensive list of all of the different
things affecting rent prices, focusing on some particularly bastardy ones.
But we'll cover a lot of it. So please don't

(07:42):
get on and be like, well you didn't cover this
or that. It's like, yeah, man, it's a big topic.
Like do you do you want us this to all
be just one boring broad overview of problems. You do
want us to drill into some weird, fucked up assholes,
which is what we're gonna Yeah, I got time today,
so let's go. Yeah. So, if you go to say,
the New York Times or most other big legacy see
publications to try to, like, you know, type into Google

(08:03):
why is the rent so damn high? You'll get various
versions of the same answer. And I'm gonna quote from
a New York Times article here. The origins of the
current homelessness crisis go back decades to policies that stop
the US from building enough housing. Experts said, seven million
extremely low income renters cannot get affordable homes, according to
the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Now, experts like these

(08:24):
tend to place a lot of the blame on what
we call nimbies, which stands for not in my backyard,
and it references the fact that in cities like San Francisco,
there's a lot of like upper class liberal types who
make it very hard to build anything besides single family
housing because they don't like big buildings and they don't
like being in a dense urban environment. Los Angeles County

(08:45):
devotes seventy six percent of its residential land to single
family homes, which is bug fuck uh. This leads to
sprawling cities, which also require huge road systems, lots of parking,
YadA YadA, and it leads to higher rent prices because
there's simply less space to build housing. The New York
Times also notes quote homeowners also often protest proposed housing,

(09:05):
effectively blocking it. They fear that more housing, particularly for
low income families, will change the makeup of their communities,
will reduce the values of their home. Now in San Francisco,
what David Chappelle did, supposedly, I know that was like
a small blue but it was a misunderstanding. But he
like blocked a housing, like yeah right, yeah, he said
it was a misunderstanding. George Lucas built a bunch of

(09:29):
low income housing specifically to funk with his neighbors, his
rich neighbors. He had had like noise complaint problems with
his rich neighbors as a result of like the studio
he ran, so to funk with them, he built a
bunch of low income housing in the neighborhood because he
knew it would piss off the other rich people. That's
so nice, yeah, based George lucast dot dot. Um, he's

(09:54):
a he's a he's a perfect unproblematic king. So yeah,
and there's like, are not the New York Times and stuff.
They're not wrong when they say that nimbies are part
of the problem. In San Francisco, there were recently a
bunch of protests to stop a project to convert a
hundred and thirty one room hotel in japan Town into
housing for homeless people. Um, like a bunch of ships

(10:16):
like that happens. California has about twenty three available affordable
homes for every hundred extremely low income renters, which is
makes it one of the worst of any state and
in terms of that problem. Um, so they're not wrong
when they say that, Like, yeah, the the nimbies are
a problem. People pro not allowing like multi family development
and lots and stuff is a huge problem. And I've

(10:37):
reluctantly come to see that. Like they have a point,
Uh I have. I don't want to I don't like
living in high density areas. I would prefer to live
out in the woods. Um. But but this argument is
broadly broadly correct. A huge part of the problem is
that there's denser cities is that we need to have
denser cities with more multi family z owning and residential areas. However,

(10:58):
there's also a lot of bullshit in the argument that
The New York Times is making here and in this
argument in general, because the way it tends to get pushed,
and it gets pushed by people like developers and by
intellectuals who take on the attitude of developers because the
developers are their uncles or whatever, is that all of
the homelessness problem is to blame on these liberal city
policies that just aren't letting developers develop enough. Um And

(11:21):
And while again zoning is a part of the issue,
this analysis excises a great deal of the actual problem.
For one thing, the whole we're not building enough housing
thing tends to lay all the blame on zoning and
these darn nimbies. Um. But one of the other problems
is that like there's not actually people to build that housing. Um.
This is this is a major problem in the industry.

(11:43):
And I'm gonna put from a right up on NPRS website.
By one estimate, the US is more than three million
homes short of the demand from would be homebuyers. Pandemic
related supply chain problems aren't helping. They're adding tens of
thousands of dollars in costs to the typical house. But
the roots of the problem go back much further to
the housing bubble collapse in two thousand eight, what I
call a blood bath happened, says Klaus, who's a contractor.

(12:04):
It was the worst housing market crash. It's the Great depression.
Many homebuilders went out of business. Claus was building houses
in Florida when the bottom fell out. A lot of
my trades people found other work, went and got retrained
for new jobs, in law enforcement, all sorts of jobs.
So the workplace force was somehow decimated, so more cops,
less construction workers, nobody to build the fucking houses that

(12:24):
they want to have build, which is not a problem
that you can lay on zoning or nimbies. That's because
we It's because there was a fraudulent like banking industry
that existed to sell people's subprime loans on houses that
were low quality, massive and built in terrible locations. And
when that fell apart, suddenly all of these people had

(12:45):
to find something else to do. And you can't blame
that on the fucking Nimbies in San Francisco, right, I mean,
there's all this conversation about funding as well as who
is actually going to be able to afford it? Is
it is it truly affordable in actuality, which it often
winds up not being because like we we have, there's
like loopholes a lot Like in Portland right now, there's
a building that's supposed to be affordable housing, but one

(13:08):
of like the deals the city gets as they get
or the gives the developers that they can increase rent
at a greater rate than other places could for a
certain set amount of years, which like, yeah, it's all
there's all these fucky ways that it affordable housing winds
up not being affordable that is not due to zoning
or they just back out of this. So we had

(13:29):
a whole project here called the Atlanta belt Line, which
is supposed to stretch around um our metro area, and
it was supposed to build up the city, have this
walkable area, maybe get a rail stage, and I don't know,
all these great things, but they had to buy out
a lot of the areas which is predominantly urban and therefore,

(13:49):
you know, it wasn't it was red line. Once upon
a time, and it's now valuable because it's within the city.
So they bought out these houses, pushing people out the
low um. But the deal they had was we're going
to put in affordable housing as well. They did not.
They actually backed down that they'll sub deal so much.
The originators who proposed this plan created this huge plan

(14:10):
that was gonna be a thirty year plan. It's still ongoing,
by the way, multi million dollars from the city, so
many things that they stepped down and said they were
no longer a part of this project because it went
so ugly and that people had come back with sorry,
just kidding, We're not giving you this property back. We're
just gonna make millions and millions and millions of dollars
without any going back to the city or the people

(14:31):
who we promised that we would help. Bad shocking. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, that's that sounds like the way it
tends to go. Um. So, yeah, we have this fucking
financial crash and home buying eventually slowly recovers after it,
but building rates never do right. They stay below normal
after the crash. This continues for like, you know, more

(14:52):
than a decade because the workers simply aren't there to
buy houses. So when millennials start to hit what should
have been their prime home buying years, not only our
houses more expensive than they had been, but there's less
houses being built. And that's again it's it's just not
due to zoning. It's the result of the home building
industry tanking because a bunch of people who should be
in prison sold and bundled up sub prime loans. And
then those same people go to people in the New

(15:12):
York Times pretending to be experts and say, no, we
gotta change the zoning so I can develop cities more.
And it's frustrating that that's the only argument you tend
to fucking here now. Even then, even if you like
because again the New York Times, the angle here is
not entirely wrong, but it also leaves a lot out,
even if you're just looking at their numbers, because the

(15:33):
numbers we see that are like, the US is missing
this many million homes, right, We're short three million homes
or seven million homes are if not kind of fucky,
which I would argue then at least presented in a
way that does not provide people with clarity as to
what the numbers actually mean. When I say the US
is short three million homes, which is something you here
on the New York Times a lot that suggests that, like, well,

(15:54):
there's three million people who don't have who can't get
housing because of sheer lack of availability, right or at
least x number of people. However, many people fit into
three million homes, and that's not really true. Uh, there's
a lot of people who they started, Yeah, from where
are these numbers? And who? I'm kind of confused. I'm like,
who actually says, all right, I've gone and taking a

(16:16):
statistics and we figured out that yes, this amount of
people need as much many houses. But do we actually
have a number on how did it come up to that? Yes,
we're about to get to that. I'm going to talk
to It does not work the way you would think
it does based on the way it tends to get summarized. Right. Um,
but yeah, there's there's folks will argue, just in general
that the problem is not the way it's often presented.

(16:39):
Kevin Drum is a writer from Mother Jones and I
think kind of on the more libertarian end of things
with a lefty tinge. His big claim to fame is
that he helped solidify the idea that there's a connection
between the drop and violent crime and the removal of
environmental lead, like getting lead out of gas. He's like
the journalist who is big on that, And he points
out that while construction never recovered after the two thousand

(16:59):
and eight crash, that's because the crash led to the
bursting of a housing bubble. And since housing was indeed
a bubble in that period, why would construction have returned
to the rate that it was being added at when
everyone lost their minds building trash houses as part of
a shell game, right, Like, maybe it's not, it's not.
The problem isn't that housing construction didn't return to previous
levels because those levels were insane and fundamentally based on

(17:21):
a rationality quote. During the early aughts, housing supply grew
far faster than population. After the bust, household formation caught
up by around two thousand thirteen, and since then, housing
supply has matched household growth and has exceeded population growth.
So do we have a housing shortage? Everyone keeps saying
we do, and the housing groupies keep yelling at me
that my chart is meaningless, But why, it sure looks

(17:43):
right to me. By the way, I was browsing through
some O e c D stats the other day looking
for healthcare information, and I happened to run into their
league rankings for housing. Guess how we compare based on
indicators such as rooms per house, basic facilities, and affordability.
The rankers is number one in the entire O e
c D group of rich countries for the year to twenty.
We must be doing something right and something wrong. According

(18:03):
to the O e c D, we rank second from
last among housing affordability for low income tenants. So what
he's saying is that, like, well, the evidence that like
we're short on housing is weaker than the evidence that
prices and housing are being jacked up and inflated. It's
like the there is inflated. It's like with the grocery store.
There is inflation that's affecting the price of your groceries.

(18:25):
Those grocery stores are also making record profits because they
have jacked up prices specifically to make more money with
the cover of inflation. Um yeah, drums Work is quoted
favorably by Brian Potter, who works in the wonky side
of the construction industry and writes a popular sub stack
for weirdo construction nerds who want to know about things
like why has wood gotten so expensive and why did

(18:47):
agriculture mechanize and not construction. He those are the kind
of things he writes about. He's also a member of
the Institute for Progress, which is a right wing libertarian
shaded think tank who pushed the idea that a lot
of social and political policy should be tested by being
prominent people tweet shit. What I'm trying to say is
that I'm not going to totally back this guy up,
but he certainly knows more about construction than me. He

(19:08):
has an angle, which is why I laid out what
he writes for. But he does. He does the best
job I've seen of answering the question of like, what
does a statistic like we're three million houses short really mean? Quote.
We'll start with some context. The US has roughly three
dred and thirty million people living in roughly onety one
million homes, or about point four two homes per person.

(19:29):
This puts the U S slightly before below the O
E c D average of homes per capita. One thing
worth noting about this is that previous rates of homebuilding
in the U S were partly driven by falling average
household size. But there's a limit to how much average
household size can fall. You can only add so many
new households to a given population size. At the extreme end,
you can't have more households than there are people. Average

(19:50):
household size can't be less than one. And in a
world where a children live with their parents until they're
eighteen and be most people live with a romantic partner,
and see the population isn't declining. Is a world with
a higher floor on how small the average household can get.
What happens if this world changes to one where the
average household sizes too. In the final condition, you'll be
building twice as many houses. If you add four people

(20:11):
to the population, you're now building two homes instead of one.
But to get to that second world, you need to
build one hundred additional houses. Even if this process takes
fifty years, that's an extra two houses per year on
top of the ones you're already building, which will temporarily
juice your building rate. But once you work through that backlog,
you're building right will drop off. Turning back to the
real world, in nineteen sixty the US had a population

(20:33):
of a hundred and eighty million with an average household
size of three point three three. By nineteen eighty, average
household size had dropped to two point seven six. This
means that between nineteen sixty and nineteen eighty, over five
hundred and fifty thousand homes per year were needed just
to keep up with changes in household size. By contrast,
from two thousand one to twenty one, average household size
only went from two point five six to two point

(20:55):
five one. We thus can't infer much from the fact
that US home building rates per apoda are lower than
they were in the past, because we would expect that
to happen at some point soon regardless are you are
you do you see what he's saying there? Explain it
to me because I'm trying to Yeah, this is very
this is this is this is very wonky. I don't

(21:15):
know any other way to say. But the gist of
what he's saying is the average from like the the
sixties to the eighties, household sizes on average got smaller,
which means more people were living in more houses, so
there were fewer people on average per house that the
number of like people per house. By comparison, barely changed

(21:37):
at all from two thousand and one to two one,
so we didn't. It would have been unreasonable for the
housing rate to continue at the same rate it had
been from the sixties to the eighties, because we were
not like, the household size was not decreasing by a much, right,
the social changes that led to us having more smaller
households had already happened, and so it would have been

(22:00):
unnecessary housing to a large extent. Um, it's you basically,
you can't infer a housing shortage by looking at housing
construction rates in isolation, which a lot of people do. Um,
And it's it's you know. I think the point here
is that there's a lot of money in convincing you
that this problem is simple and that the only thing

(22:20):
to do is deregulate. Right, If we deregulate construction, if
we deregulate zoning restrictions, that will solve the problem. Right
And and what what and obviously, like Potter I think
is because he does conclude that like zoning changes are
one aspect of helping with the crisis that we're in
right now. But the thing that he and Drum are

(22:41):
both saying is that the people who are saying this
is just about a lack of households or a lack
of quote unquote affordable households aren't actually looking at the
numbers as they really exist. They're they're taking like these
kind of broad summaries, um, and they're trying to torque
the actual numbers to say something that they don't, um,

(23:01):
in order to make a more simple in order to
present a simpler picture. Right. And it's a picture, specifically,
it is a picture that reduces the problem and removes
solutions like rent control and eviction moratoriums. Right, That's what's
going on here. Um. And yeah, there's there's a lot else.
One of the other major issues here is that And

(23:23):
this is something that Potter points out. When we're talking
about missing housing, we're not talking about a lack of houses.
Like you'll hear a lot of people say there's x
number of empty houses in the United States, more than enough,
and and that is true, but that's not necessarily vacant housing. Right.
Vacant housing is housing that is on the market and
available for people to purchase. And right now, the US

(23:44):
does have a historically low vacancy rate, so there are
fewer houses like per capita, fewer houses available for people
to rent than there have been in the past, even
though there's plenty of actual empty houses, because if those
houses aren't available to be rented, they're not vacant. And
a big reason why there's so much empty housing that
is not technically vacant is Airbnb. Yep. Yeah, so that

(24:06):
is a major factor here. Yeah, yeah, and we're going
to talk about that. But first, you know what's not Airbnb?
Maybe we were awkward. Any of our sponsors, probably Sophie.
Are we sponsored by Airbnb? Not that we would were,
not that we would have approved or signed off on,
but like we don't. We don't have control of the

(24:28):
m's randomly and Airbnb. Yeah, look, if you if you here,
here's what I'll say. If you hear an Airbnb ad
on the podcast, um, find your nearest Airbnb rental and
Hukamolotov cocktail through the window, whether or not there's people inside,
it doesn't matter to us legally. This is a joke. Yep.

(24:52):
I'm just gonna send the background here. Yeah, it's fine,
it's fine, it's fine, said something on fire today. Yeah,
I feel like I feel like that mean, if everything's
fine with the dog in the fire, and that's my
face right now. Everything's fine. That is your face right now.
You know what, I'm going to enjoy this moment. Oh gosh,

(25:19):
what a great day to be an American? When well,
I did when I watched those Philly fans sliding down
those greased up light poles. Every time I see Philadelphia
celebrate anything, I'm proud to be in a manner. I
was proud of the uh the New Yorkers at the

(25:40):
Yankees Astros game that heckled Ted Cruz. Proud of that too.
And I'm proud of Forbes for reporting on how bad
airbnb s are for housing vacancy rates, and I'm gonna
quote from them now. Research conducted by the Harvard Business
Review across the US found that airbnb is having a
intrimental impact on the housing stock as it encourages landlords

(26:03):
to move their properties out from the long term rental
and for sale markets and into the short term rental market.
A separate US study found that a one percent increase
in Airbnb listings leads to a point zero one eight
increase in rents and a point zero to six increase
in house prices. It may not seem like much on
the surface, but there's a cost creep for those looking
to rent long term or buy. So it's just again,

(26:26):
I'm not saying The Times is wrong when they say
that nimbies are part of the problem we have here,
but be cautious whenever somebody talks about the housing shortage
issue and just throws that out there or just frames
it as a how to housing shortage issue, right, rather
than a costs are creeping up because a bunch of
different kinds of capitalists are finding new ways to fund people,
which is the thing that's actually happening. Yeah. Um, Another

(26:50):
thing that's happening is that rent, like the rent surge,
and like the way it looks and stuff. And the
fact that the fact that the rent surge is being
attributed to a lack of housing construction and whatnot and
zoning issues, Um, that's heavily skewed by outlier cities, by
San Francisco. In other words, rent is increasing everywhere, right,
Everyone in every city is dealing with rent prices that

(27:11):
are surging. Rent prices that are surging in San Francisco
and a couple of other big cities because of zoning issues.
But rint prices in Atlanta or in Houston are not
necessarily surging because of those issues, but because of how
big like San Francisco and New York are and how
much it their outliers, And they fucked the data up,
and so the picture they present in large is not

(27:34):
accurate to why is most people's rent raising? Right? Does
that make sense? Yeah? And I'm gonna I'm gonna quote
again from Potters analysis here there's essentially zero correlation. The
metros with the largest rent increases had added population and
added housing ratios no different than metros with smaller rent increases.
For example, for instance, between two thousand and one and
two thousand nineteen, the San Francisco Bay Area added around

(27:56):
three hundred and thirty six thousand people, but only built
nine thousand new housing units. This gives an added population
added housing ratio of about three point five four, much
higher than both the national and regional average household size.
This seems like it would indicate many more households than
homes got added, which we'd expect to push prices up,
and indeed, San Francisco saw a rent increase of over
fifty three during this period, one of the highest in

(28:19):
the country. The problem. The Atlanta metro area saw almost
the same added population over added housing ratio, but it
had a much lower rent increase. Atlanta added six hundred
and fifty three thousand people over the same time period
and only built a hundred and eighty six thousand homes
for an added population added housing ratio of three point
five one, and Miami added almost five hundred thousand people

(28:39):
but only ninety eight thousand homes for an added population
housing ratio of over five. But Atlanta and Miami saw
rent increases of just two and seventeen percent, respectively, So again,
it's just not as simple as that number alone. And
I don't know, I'm probably harping on this too much,
so we're we're going to get out of the number
ship now. I I apologize. I just wanted to make

(29:00):
the point that the people who just say this is
all about zoning, this is all about housing construction, are
trying to funk you, right like they are trying to
enable others to fuck you, and you should not take
them at their word. I mean, this is the classic
trick and trying to blame someone else so that the
people who are actually profiting and making the most money
look innocent, kind of like the whole recycling bit. We know,

(29:22):
we know what, Like they're trying to blame the individual
and severalizing these huge corporations are fucking over the environment,
but they don't want to talk about it because they
don't want to lose money. So this is how we're
gonna we scope this. Yeah, we're going to We're gonna
scope this is like there's too much regulation, not like yeah,
but you guys are also jacking the prices up, right,
like you're you're also like you're also like colluding to
fun people over by. Yeah anyway, and you're doing ship

(29:45):
like Airbnb, like you've done a capitalists that found a
bunch of different ways to funk with housing in the
last fifteen years. And it's not just a construction issue
or z anyway saying that rents high because of the
lack of quantity of places available, but like it's really
not the case. No, otherwise it would be raising its
similar rates in these other cities where the numbersome. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(30:11):
So anyway, you can whatever umi rent you wrote that
your rent is too damn high. Is too damn high,
And there's a number of reasons for it. And anyone
trying to say it's this one simple thing that is
also really good for developers is probably trying to fuck you.

(30:31):
So now we're going to start talking about assholes, which
is fun and more more are strong suit than numbers.
So the first thing you need to know about, or
the first person you need to know about, is a
guy named Jeffrey Roper. Jeffrey is a businessman who describes
himself as a numbers nerd and formerly worked as Alaska
Airlines as director of revenue management in the nineteen eighties. Now, anybody,

(30:54):
anybody who says there are a numbers guy to you,
just like them immediately. I don't know, I like, I
like my accountant, the guy who does something. But if
somebody like if that's their first thing that they want
you to know about them, red flag, red flag flag
date that person. Okay, So having the last name Roper,
that makes me think of the guy who used to

(31:15):
be Ebert's friend and probably killed him. That's my head.
They mentioned anything about like their credit throwback, I'm just
I'm just saying they mentioned anything about their credit score,
if they mentioned anything about numbers, that they sure anything
like that in their dating profile. Do not match with them. Wait,
have you had someone girl put the credit score? Gosh yeah,

(31:36):
more more more when I was more, when I was
living in Los Angeles. But okay, yeah, that was a thing.
Maybe maybe Lantis are not impressive, so therefore they out
on purpose. I don't know, because I did not say that.
That's a new one to say. All right, Robert tell
us about the numbers. Get our money is what we're
calling him. Actually our money. Okay, tell us about our money. Yeah, yeah,

(32:01):
so he's a numbers nerd. He used to work as
Alaska Airlines director of revenue management in the nineteen eighties.
And look, Alaska is like the least shitty domestic airline
that we have, but when dragging people off the plane,
So yeah, they don't do that now, I will say this.
They absolutely while Roper was director of revenue management, robbed

(32:23):
us all of about a billion dollars back in the
nineteen eighties. So we're gonna talk about how that happens,
like robbed us consumers, like stole illegally, criminally stole a
billion dollars. It's cool, Yeah, so compete. They're not the
only actually with a number of airlines stole collectively a billion,
but Alaska was kind of leading the pack anyway, competing airlines.
What happened is competing airlines started using price setting software

(32:45):
and they're different computers would all kind of share data
on planned routes and prices with each other to make
sure that like nobody was undercutting anyone else. And Jeffrey
was a big part of this. He brings in price
setting software to Alaska and he helps set up this system,
which they're very happy with because it helps avoid a
price war in the nineteen eighties. And when you frame

(33:05):
it as a price war, it sounds like, oh, they
avoided a price war with this software. That's good. No,
it's not. What a price war is is companies competing
to give you the best price so that you will
choose their service. Right, it's good for consumers when a
price war occurs. When you avoid a price war, it
means you're getting fucked, right, price war amongst each other.

(33:26):
So they cannot have to compete for businesses unless they're
in like I'm guessing they're doing like the prices right
type of where this's just a dollar less Yeah. That
that well, that normally what would happen is you would
not it would kind of be a little bit of
a black box, and they would set their rates just
based on this is what we think is fair, and
then kind of over time as they see what consumers

(33:46):
are choosing, you know, than like maybe we need to
lower rates or maybe we can raise them a little.
What they're doing with these softwares is they're all communicating
with each other to be like, this is what we
are charging. Oh, we can all afford to charge more,
So the prices just start raising, and just start raising,
and just start raising. Right. Price wars occur when corporations
fight to lower prices while still staying profitable. Um, this

(34:09):
is good, broadly speaking for consumers. If capitalism worked the
way my high school textbook said it did, then this
would this would be an example of why it's a
good system. Right. But that's not what happens. What really
happens is that companies like these airlines do things called
do so what's called price fixing, which is illegal Alaska
under while you know, this system that Roper helps set

(34:30):
up is illegal price fixing. The Department of Justice says
these companies are all illegally fixing prices. I'm not like
declaring this price fixing because I don't like it. The
Department of Justice says they did a crime. Did anybody
actually get absolutely not, well a little bit so. The
d o J accuses Alaska and several other airlines of

(34:52):
artificially inflating prices using this system, which costs taxpayers about
a billion dollars between nineteen and nineteen or ninety two.
The government gets settlements and consent decrees out of eight airlines,
including Alaska, which is like, again, when you're a big
company and you have lawyers, nobody goes to prison for
this ship. Sometimes you'd kick a government some money. Yeah, exactly. Now,

(35:15):
during this investigation, federal agents remove a computer and documents
from Roper's office because again he's kind of one of
the ringleaders of this. He will later claim in an
interview quote, we all got called up before the Department
of Justice in the early nineteen eighties because we were colluding.
We had no idea, of course, of course, Yeah, sure, buddy, Yes,

(35:36):
I'm certain you had no idea what that was. Oh
my god, we were price fixing. I don't know all
our price fixing was price fixing. I didn't know. It
seemed like we were just making a lot of money.
We're just so good. It's very funny that he says that, um,
nobody gets really punished again. Whatever. Whatever settlements they make

(35:57):
are kind of slap on the wristy. After the Roper
leaves the United States for Central and Eastern Europe to
funk with people's lives in post Soviet Europe, he's he's helping.
He's one of these capitalists who goes over there because
he's like, there's a lot of money to be made
in setting the stage for Vladimir Putin's rise to power
by fucking with all these newly privatized industries and siphoning

(36:20):
money and access to future money away from any kind
of like regular people or social safety net that might
be built, which will create ideal grounds for authoritarianism. Anyway,
it's whatever, it's good. Stuff made money, he made. He
makes a lot of money doing this. And then he
gets back to the US and he's like, you know what,
I realized, the US apartment rental industry is stuck in
the past. It looks like these emerging markets over in Europe.

(36:43):
You know, it's it's old fashioned, it's too slow. And
the thing that he finds that really discusts him is
that apartment managers are quote basically pricing their product on
a paper napkin, which he seems to have found viscerally offensive. Now,
what's going on here is that to some extent, renting
is more of a human business back then, so people
are like coming in and sitting down and their landlord saying, well,

(37:06):
like this is what again? You know, there's haggling and
stuff and back and forth. And you know, if you've
ever haggled with a small landlord or gotten going to
give you a break because like ship got sucked up
in your life, you know what I'm talking about. Right.
You can say what you will about how inherently predatory,
you know, landlording is or isn't or whatever, But like,
at the end of the day, it's better when you

(37:27):
can be a human being sitting across the table from
another human being, because sometimes that matters, right like sometimes
sometimes like small landlords can be shitty and terrible too.
But as a general rule, I always every time I
had the least from a huge company, I found the
monolithic slow to respond to problems and cruel in their
application of things like fees and penalties. Where I was

(37:47):
able to like talk shit out of little landlords. And
and you know now that I never had a small landlord.
Fucking steel shipped from me. But if I prefer one
situation to the other, right, I think out of the
twenty twenty years that I rented, one one was a
big corporation and I hated it. It fucking sucks. I
want to at least be able to call my goddamn

(38:08):
landlord on the phone and get a person and deal
with a problem. You know. Well I also had the
agil problem where the guy who came to fix things,
a maintenance man, it was hitting on me. So I
hadn't just come into my house. So yeah, I had
there was that I had the handyman my last yet
and my last one didn't hit on me. No, no, no,

(38:28):
he would let He would come in and lecture me
about life choices and tell me about you know, he
was just really misogynistic. It was I think it's it's
equally bad. I had a gloriously opposite experience. And so
when I was renting a slum it was legally his
own servants quarters. It was one room. I lived in

(38:50):
it with two other men. Um falling apart the ceiling
collapsed on me while I was showering. Um, And the
next day I called the landlord and I'm like, hey,
the ceiling fell in on me. Whif I was shower well,
it was like nighttime. I tend to shower like it
was like it was like it was like something like that. Immediately,

(39:13):
I don't remember if I called him. Maybe I called
immediately and he wasn't right anyway, I get, I get
in touch with him and he's like, i'll get I'll
get my guy right over. So he sends over a
repair man and he's just kind of this like old
hippie looking dude and he comes over and he looks
up at the hole and he's like, yeah, we're not
gonna be able to fix this for a while. And
then he says, do you want to buy some weed?
And I said yes, And he was selling fifty dollar

(39:35):
rounds as of pretty solid popcorn that's like mids. It
was good, it was a good deal. It was worth it.
It was like several months where we didn't have a
ceiling over the shower, but it was a pretty good
weed hook up. We were poor as ship, so a
fifty dollar rounds and mids that's not a bad deal.
You know, well, it must be wonderful to you. Don't

(39:56):
get that. You don't get that experience with a big
corporate landlord. That's the kind of landlord you get when
your landlord is yeah, breaking a number of different laws.
But basically, chill, um, look get this is I yeah again.
You can have whatever Marxist opinions you want to have
on landlords. I'm talking about like, from a human being perspective,

(40:17):
it's always better to deal with a person than a
giant edifice. So whatever. Um. Jeffrey Roper's entire business attitude
revolves around making that kind of thing where like, if
you're living on the margins, you can kind of skate
by because you're able to like talk to someone on
a human level. He wants to make that impossible, right,

(40:38):
because that that is a barrier to profits. Exactly exactly,
you have predicted where we're going here. So in two
thousand four he gets hired by a company called real
Page as its principal scientist. They bought software from Camden
Property Trust, which is a large owner of apartment buildings,
that was supposed to help them maximize profits. Now, pretty

(41:00):
sleep back in the Napkin days will call him. Even
big corporate apartment managers had kind of been left to guests,
you know. They they Even if you were working with
a big corporation, it was still kind of like eventually
some guy's gonna sit down and just kind of guess
what he thinks he can get out of you, right um.
Roper knew that he could do better, just as he'd
done in Alaska by introducing machines and price fixing to

(41:21):
the well legally not price fixing yet, although it might
prove to be price fixing in the future. We'll see
what the d o J says. But legally he has
not committed price fixing in the rental industry to an
extent that has been proven. I'm gonna quote from a
pro publica investigation. Roper quickly realized he required data, a
lot of data to get the algorithm working properly. He

(41:42):
began building a master data warehouse that pulled in client
data from other real page applications, such as those releasing managers.
A proof of concept version of the software had performed
well in tests at townhouses Camden offered for rent in
its home city in the of Houston. At the time,
the street behind Camden's townhouses was shut down while to
grow Shy Store was being built. Leasing staff wanted to
discount rent for the town houses because of the nuisance,

(42:04):
said Kip Zacharias, who worked with Camden as a consultant. Instead,
yield Star, which is the company that's selling the software,
suggested boosting rents. We were like, guys, just try it.
Zacharias said. The units ended up renting for significantly more
than staff and expected. He said that was kind of
the Eureka moment. If you listen to your gut, you
would have lowered your price. Such agents sometimes hesitated to

(42:25):
push prints 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. This is one of
the reasons why we wanted to get pricing off site,
unimpeded by human worries. Yield Stars price increases sometimes yet
led to more attendants leaving. So He's literally is saying
what you were saying. There's too much empathy in the

(42:45):
process as it exists. We gotta get rid of that
ship so we can really fuck people right right. We
need We need to get all the human aspect. I
like that, don't be human if you're or if you're
just a person at a leasing office with discretion and
a person comes in and they're like, you know, they
reminding your mom and your aunt, your cousin and your friend,

(43:06):
or like you know you have a good rapport with them,
They're like, yeah, I want to make sure you get
a good deal, like I work. Again, I've had that
happen to me. Um It's it's like this is and
and the system, by the way, that system that when
I'm describing was not idyllic. It was still Badrick was
still too high, but this has made it much worse. Right,
So he's the one that began like, no, really, every

(43:28):
year you should increase and they'll never question it. We
just do it to every single person uniformly, and then
you know, nobody's it's not personal. This is just the
price of housing now, and this is just the way
that it works. And you know, we're just trying to
We found that you're underneath the the and this is
what it means. Also, when like you get that letter
saying you know your house is under priced or lower

(43:50):
than like market value or whatever, so we have to
increase it by x amount. That's what the value they're
quoting on is the ship that this software hands them,
which is not necessarily a real thing. It is a
thing that the machine calculated by doing a machine version
of price fixing. That again, as of yet has not

(44:10):
been ruled to be price fixing by the d o J,
but may prove to be ruled price fixing by the
d o J in the near future. We'll see, okay.
Camden noted their turnover was about fifteen percent higher in
two thousand six after it started using yield Star, which
is again that's the software that Roper is managing. Despite this,
revenue grew by seven point four percent, So fifteen percent

(44:34):
of their of their clients like leave the apartments that
they're in, or more of the clients leave their apartments
that year, like don't renew their leases. But revenue still grows.
And that all sounds fine when you treat it like numbers,
right that like, oh, we had more turnover the number,
but revenue still grew. But that fifteen percent of tenants
who turned over includes people who got evicted because they

(44:56):
couldn't pay their rent and people who had to leave
a neighborhood or even a city they loved because had
been priced out. And it also the added rent that
these people paid. The reason why profits were still up
means money those tenants aren't spending elsewhere money, They're not
saving for a house themselves or contributing to the local economy,
rather than pumping more cash into a massive corporation whose
shareholders all live far away from the communities where this

(45:18):
decision is impacted. Yep Rick Campo of Camden Property Trust
is one of the people who doesn't see things this way.
He summarized the impact of yield Star like this. The
net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was
ten million dollars in income. I think that shows that
keeping the heads and beds above all else it's not
always the best strategy. Wait, yeah, man, we put some
people on the street, but we made ten million dollars

(45:42):
the people. It's funny. So pro Publica does this big
investigation and they're the ones who bust this story. They
find this quote from Campo where he's like, heads and beds,
fuck it. Uh, and they're like, hey, this this kind
of makes you sound like a monster, kind of I think, yeah,
I'm gonna quote from their article Campo Toad Pro Publica.

(46:03):
It sounds awful and doesn't reflect how here Camden views
renters today. We fundamentally believe our customers and the most
important part of the business, he said. We're not about
pushing people out. Of course, you think customers are important,
They're the ones you're jacking money from. Like customers are
important to Camden the way somebody with a nice watch
is important to a man with a handgun and a

(46:25):
fucking desire to get a fixed by robbing him at gunpoint. Like, yeah,
that guy is important to him. The liquor store I
might rob later tonight is important to me. And this
is that same level of like child up twinning kid
children to work and you're like, yeah, about what you
think it is in their excuses, Like no, but if

(46:46):
the children didn't work for low wages, their family wouldn't
have any money. We're doing a good thing, We're helping
him out. Um yeah, it's it's it's ghoul logic, and
it's I also, I don't want to I don't want
to be unfair here and compare a guy like Rick
Campo to somebody who robs people at gunpoint or holds
up liquor stores because that individual robbing people at gunpoint.

(47:09):
You're holding up liquor stores. That's honest work, right you know? Yeah, no, no, no,
that's it's unfair to the guy with the person who
was desperate and trying to get anything. All right, I
got you down. I'll take that. Yeah, I'll take that.
And again, that's a human interaction as a general where
you can probably talk your way out of the worst. Yeah. Yeah,

(47:31):
it's not an algorithm deciding whether or not you get
stuck up, you know, because you know it's not heads
and beds. Yeah, exactly. Um, speaking of heads and beds,
we sell a lot of mattresses on this podcast, we do,
but I have yet to give one. Yeah. Yeah, they're
not get like they used to. That's what I'll say. Yeah, sounds,

(47:53):
let's get to ads. We're back. Uh good times. So
Campo Rick Campo by the way, asshole name that's a
jeris right, you can tell fucking Rick Campo. You know, Rick,

(48:14):
your job is selling time shares in Florida to elderly
people with dementia who don't know where they are. Like,
that's what you do. Radio personality that just screams at
people and then tries to like he's not a racist asshole. Yeah,
Rick Campo, the guy whose job is to get up
at six am and say the in word before playing um.

(48:40):
So obviously he says that they're not about pushing people out.
But that is objectively what the software did, and it
began to take off like wildfire in the real estate industry,
which led to articles about it like this in the
landlord focused news website yield pro. Yields is the profits
you jack out of people for housing which they will
die without. Yeah, so here's them writing about this positively.

(49:03):
Equity Residential which completed installation of l r So l
r O is the other kind of software. There's the
yield Star and there's l r RO. There's the two,
and they both do this. They're both competing at this point,
competing software, so it's talking about both of them. Equity
Residential which complete completed installation of l R RO across
across its hundred and sixty five thousand, seven hundred and
sixteen unit portfolio and Q four two thousand six found

(49:25):
it extremely useful. Through the turning point in the apartment market,
we've raised rents hundreds of dollars in some markets. And
I don't think people on site, given the way we'd
trained them to think about pricing, would have had the
courage to push it as aggressively as this program has,
CEO David neither Cut told panelists during a Deutsche Bank
conference in January. Keith Odin, Camden Property Trust President and CEO,

(49:45):
agreed it's not in their DNA to raise pricing a
hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars per unit on
a lease turn. He said. Camden completed roll out of
yield Star across its sixty four thousand, three hundred and
eighty four unit portfolio in the Q four two thousand five.
Both Camden and Equity so far report one lifts to
net operating income that they attribute to the use of
yield Star and l r OH respectively. And again this

(50:06):
is the very start of it. Because these these algorithms,
the way they work, like any other algorithm, they get
more effective at the thing they do the more often
they do it, the more data they get right. So
that's again, they get better at raising rent by more
the longer they're doing it, and the more they I'm guessing,
and the more they are rented, like raising the prices
as it gets higher and higher, they're going to use
that as all prices everywhere else, right because again they're

(50:31):
price fixing, but not legally, so don't sue us. Yeah,
I just wanted to say everything that you name, the corporations,
individuals are all the bad guys in history of the
world right now, So yeah, these are bad guys. Yes.
So if you are currently in an apartment complex that
you've seen your rise by a surprising amount, you want
to look into whether or not your landlord uses l

(50:51):
r O or yield Star. And while many companies don't
use these programs, the fact that they're in use in
major markets increases pricing for everybody. As one real estate
executive told Yield pro in two thousand seven, a rising
tide lifts all boats. The way Jeffrey Roper sees it,
landlords who don't jack their prices up are ripping off
all the other landlords. Quote, if you have idiots undervaluing,

(51:15):
it costs the whole system, which is the same logic
that led to the price fixing ga with the airlines. Right. Yea,
my face is turning red. My face is turning red.
Is this dark void of mind. My face is turning.
Why anybody who says they're a numbers nerd, because it's
one of those things if you've got if this guy's

(51:36):
logic is being I don't know, if he's like works
for a company that makes premium bourbon, right, and like
he's he's applying this logic to like get the most
profits out of people who want to buy nice bourbon whatever, right,
Like it's discretionary, and people die if they don't have housing. Like, yeah,
because a lot of this house, these houses that are

(51:58):
for red who are with the more personable, are probably
not in its safet. Yes, the fire hazards like half
of the houses I lived in when I was a
renter exactly, Like there's so many things like that happened,
and you're like, you literally are giving up safety for
the price once again, as you would say, you're like,
you know, I'm living in a place that doesn't wanted

(52:19):
in a nice neighborhood for nothing, you know, or not
that that was not a particularly nice later on, not
that we connect now it was okay, Um, so the
way Jeffrey Ropers sees it, Yeah, so anyway, initially Roper's competition,
and this horrible business was l r O or Lease
Rent Options, right. I quoted about them earlier, but yield

(52:39):
Start purchased l r O in two thousand seventeen with
the Justice Department's acquiescence. They were flagged for high level
review but ultimately passed pro publica rights. The approval allowed
Real Page to acquire its only significant competitor, Roper said,
adding I was surprised the d o J let that
go through. So did I say, are you really surprised,

(53:03):
like those organizations bought that we? I mean, that should
tell you what a fucking scam this is? Right? That
like even he's being like, yeah, man, I can't believe
they didn't call that price fixing. I can believe they
said that wasn't monopolies. It's fucked up what we did.
So Real Page was pricing one and a half million units,

(53:25):
and the acquisition of l r OH would double that. Uh.
Steve Win Real Pages CEO at the point, at that
point set into two thousand seventeen investor conference, I don't
think there's any concentration enough concentration of buying or pricing
power here to warrant the d o J stepping in Um. Yeah,
so that's cool. Um And uh they made a lot

(53:47):
of money Real Pages influence that year, like um. They
The firm's target market was multi family buildings with five
or more units UM, made up nineteen million of the
nation's forty million units UM, and a huge share of
those buildings were owned by firms backed by Wall Street investors,
who are the first adopters of this pricing software. Right,

(54:08):
so he is he is specifically going to jack up
the pricing of like housing for families that is traditional,
like should have been more affordable. Right, Like he's he's
actually directly this business directly is targeting and jacking at
the prices of what we call affordable housing. Again, not
all his owning issue. So real Page renamed its combined

(54:29):
pricing software AI Revenue Management, and by the end of
twenty the firm was reporting in an SEC Commission filing
that its clients used its services and products to manage
nineteen points seven million rental units of all types, including
single family homes. The private equity firm Tom Bravo brought
the company public a few months later for ten point

(54:50):
to billion dollars. And again, it's all that's all, that's
enough to affect everyone, right, twenty million houses units, that's
enough to raise everybody's rent price. And named Kimden, so
are talking about the Camden to apartment complexes that are everywhere. Yes, yes, okay, okay,

(55:11):
they brought this monster software into the world, like listening
right there. Burn it down, yeah, burn burnt down, burn
it down. Um, it's it's cool, so cool cool, the

(55:32):
good the good stuff is that I don't know. Um. Basically,
the attitude these companies were able to realize because of
this software is that previously, even though they all always
wanted to get as much money as they could have people,
the number one priority was keeping occupancy full. Right, So
we'll make deals with people, will cut prices if we

(55:52):
can get another person another unit, right, because the worst
thing is an empty unit, right, An empty unit is
just a total waste of money this software and Roper
comes in, and Roper's attitude is, no, it's not empty
units are fine as long as we're jacking up the
prices of other units more if we have to keep
more units empty. As long as we're getting more total
money out of the built the complex, that's all that

(56:14):
fucking matters. Um. And what this actually means in in
reality is that people are winding up on the street
or they're being forced to move or forced to double
and triple up somewhere else just to survive. And profits
still raised for the company because everyone who gets to
stay in housing is just getting built for more money.
And one analysis pro Publica did if a building owned
by a company that used yield Star next door to

(56:36):
a building that didn't rent for the yield Star building
rose since two thousand twelve as opposed to thirty three. So, like,
these are substantial increases. And you've got to also admit
or a note that like the average and that like
the gap between yield Star and non yield Star buildings
is higher because the average rental price is also being

(56:58):
affected by the fucking yield Star price. Right, Like, it's
not just that yield Star buildings are higher than non
it's that they're raising rental prices for everybody because the
whole market is. Because that's the conversation is that, yeah,
these look well, I say, that's this all inclusive maintenance
apartment complexes. They have their steady prices with no negotiations.

(57:20):
But even though they're significantly higher, whatever you were paying
with these mom and pop landlords is still going to
increase because no matter what, even if it was like
let's say it's cheap eight doing is still significantly cheaper
thanment that that's gone in. So it sounds cheaper, which
is what's happened everywhere. Yeah, because the form is that

(57:41):
I left literally is cheaper than everywhere in Atlanta. But
it's still went exactly. So everything's good. It is it
fee that's good. Things are fine. We should everything. It
should always be acceptable to turn things that to turn

(58:02):
pricing for things that people die without into a fucking
algorithm game, just like everything else that's terrible in our society. Um,
people die, and like risk, there's the safety for white
men to get continue to get rich. That's amazing. I
love that. That's my favorite thing to do. You know,
it's not just white men. You have to assume they're
not all white, you know. So that's fine, that's true,

(58:24):
that's true. Yeah, it's good. So anyway, we're gonna talk
about an even more entertaining piece of ship next episode,
and we're going to talk about some other important stuff
including uh which call it rent control. But yeah, that's
those are oh yeah, yeah. In some places, although yeah,

(58:45):
there's some fun going on there too, but yeah, this
is uh. These are some of the assholes who have
made rent be so damn high. And also the assholes,
the assholes who because the assholes in this that you know,
Roper is the one we're really digging into this episode,
but other assholes are just like all of the journalists
who blithely report like, well, experts say there's just not

(59:07):
enough housing and we have to change voting. It's like, no, no, no,
not that that's not part of the issue, but don't
pretend that that's everything that's going on, you fucking dishonest pricks.
I'm gonna have to go run or something. And what
do what do I do? Yeah? I don't know, go
rent a house. Everybody go out and sign a lease.
I quit? Yeah, Sam, anything you wanna you wanna plug? Oh? Sure,

(59:33):
um let me get gather my thoughts. Yes, you can
come find me at my podcast with Annie stuff. Mom
never told you if you like to talk about feminist
issues where you want to rage about how the US
hate women. Um, a lot of people hate women apparently
in general, and those who identify as female, you know,
they think they do essentially or any issues dealing with

(59:57):
those who identify as female. Come on over, let's to us. Um. Yeah. Also,
you can find me on Instagram McVeigh dot sam or
on Twitter I believe McVeigh Samantha. Yeah, you can see
pictures of my dog. Well, go with christ my children,
and we'll be back for for a part two on Thursday.

(01:00:19):
Hell yeah, well maybe let's just happen o Goodbye. Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Why is the Rent So Damn High?