But why do people think the economy is not good? (boldface mine)

It now requires $119.27 to buy the same goods and services a family could afford with $100 before the pandemic. Since early 2020, prices have risen about as much as they had in the full 10 years preceding the health emergency.

It’s hard to find an area of a household budget that’s been spared: Groceries are up 25% since January 2020. Same with electricity. Used-car prices have climbed 35%, auto insurance 33% and rents roughly 20%…

Many Americans have seen their pay rise rapidly since 2020, but much of those gains have been gobbled up by inflation. Some of the fastest wage increases in decades have left the average American largely no better off than before…

For most Americans, the cost of housing is by far the largest expense in any given month. As a result, the run-up in rental prices — which looks even more acute when using data from private companies like Zillow Group Inc. — has made it harder for many to save or have enough left over for other spending.

Here’s the Zillow chart mentioned above:

Housing prices (i.e., stuff people buy) is a hard nut to crack politically: someone’s lower entry housing price is another person’s lower value savings vehicle–or worse, underwater mortgage. But rents are much easier, even if it pisses off some economists and editorial boards. Unlike housing prices which many homeowners don’t follow in as much detail (other than the price of their house, of course), rents change every year.

And despite the Econ 101 claims, it has been clear for a while that the rental market is rigged*:

D.C.’s Attorney General Schwalb is bringing a lawsuit against fourteen D.C. landlords and the ‘tech’ company Real Page, who are accused of price fixing (boldface mine):

The rent is too damn high in D.C., and Attorney General Brian Schwalb claims in a new lawsuit that a tech company illegally colluded with 14 of the city’s largest landlords to keep it that way.

Schwalb announced Wednesday that he’s filing a federal lawsuit against RealPage, a Texas-based company that works with big commercial property owners to help them set rent prices, for a series of antitrust violations. He alleges that the firm and 14 of its clients exchanged confidential pricing information to jack up rents for more than 50,000 apartments across the District, forcing tenants to pay millions more than they would’ve in a traditional real estate market.

The use of the company’s software, which recommends rent prices for apartments by using an algorithm to calculate what the market will bear, has become so widespread in the D.C. area that Schwalb argues it has ripple effects for tenants beyond just those renting apartments from RealPage’s clients. His attorneys charge that this is “potentially impacting all market participants” and “illustrates the significant, widespread effects of collusive adoption of RealPage’s algorithmic pricing models,” according to a release shared with Loose Lips ahead of the lawsuit’s filing.

“RealPage and the defendant landlords colluded to forgo traditional market competition in favor of a centralized, price-fixing scheme that artificially raises rents for District tenants, causing residents to pay millions of dollars above fair market prices,” Schwalb says in a statement. “They communicated openly about their anticompetitive scheme at public events and through advertising campaigns, and actively worked to recruit new members into what amounted to a District-wide housing cartel.”

…Much of this attention sprung from a ProPublica investigation of RealPage last year, which found evidence that the company’s executives and their clients have spoken openly about how this software has empowered them to raise rents higher than they would have otherwise.

…Combined with its “unrivaled access to proprietary data,” this has helped RealPage achieve a “dominant market position,” Schwalb argues. He believes something like 30 percent of D.C. apartments in buildings with five or more units and 60 percent of apartments in buildings with 50 or more units are controlled by RealPage clients. The latter figure shoots up to 90 percent when evaluating the D.C. region, more broadly.

To its credit, the Biden administration has launched an investigation into Real Page, though it’s unclear how that is proceeding (BuT tHeRe’s No DiFfErEnCe BeTwEeN tHe TwO pArTiEs). But state and local governments, a fair number of which could institute other reforms, such as rent control–no one should be able to increase rent by twenty-two percent when there are no noticeable improvements**. And landlords aren’t beloved, except by other landlords and the recipients of their political largesse (got Green Team [cough] Bowser [cough]?). If they’re viewed as predators–and the Real Page lawsuit suggests they are predators in many urban areas–it wouldn’t be hard to run against them.

A boy can dream, anyway.

*Before he became a Bloomberg pundit (and now a Substack boi), Noah Smith actually followed me, and I remember him telling me I was crazy for arguing that rents would never decline because the rental properties are used as collateral, and if rental prices decline, then their interest rates would increase, even though I had been told this very thing by a vice president at Archstone, which, at the time, had over 90,000 rental units. The only economist I’ve seen who has an understanding of the natural history of renting is J.W. Mason.

**I would argue that, in an attempt to cut costs, the building isn’t as nice as it once was (yes, I’m thinking of moving).