alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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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.
... and the term for this behavior gives it away: "rent-seeking".