Profiting from Human Suffering

The property management company that manages the apartment I live in raised my rent this year. Previously I was paying $1373 a month for a 2 bedroom, 1 1/2 bath two story townhouse in far outer Southeast Portland; after the raise it’s $1508/month; essentially a 10% increase, $135/month more. The last time my rent was raised was April 2022, when it went from $1250 to $1373, another 10% increase.

I am not a researcher, so I tried some google searches to see how the cost of living has increased in the Portland, OR area over the past four or five years, but google is useless now, full of crap results that are there because search is no longer a core feature of Google; advertising and artifically-generated plaigarism has taken the top priority. But I do know it’s gone up; it’s gone up everywhere in the US, by, like, a lot. And I can find that Portland currently has a cost of living index that’s almost 25% over the average for the rest of country. It’s expensive to live here, even more expensive here than a lot of other places.

And I have to point out that the cost of living index is calculated on prices for real things. The index is based on things like rent, utilities, groceries, gas; real things everyone needs to buy in order to, y’know, live. Saying “the rent has gone up because the cost of living has gone up” is putting the cart before the horse. Raising the rent has the direct effect of increasing the cost we all pay for living.

There’s another direct effect of increasing rent. Every time average rent goes up in an area, there’s a marked and measurable increase in homelessness. That makes sense, right? Don’t sit there and tell me that homeless people are just lazy and don’t want to work and are a drain on society, because none of that is true. People are homeless because they can’t afford housing. And they can’t afford housing because we treat housing like a reward. It’s not a reward. It’s a fucking human right recognized by nearly every nation on earth by way of the United Nations; a right ignored by the bully on the block, the United States, because our oligarchs can’t hoard our wealth if we don’t pay them for something that should be every human’s birthright.

I wonder if the people who work in the property management company that manages my apartment complex make that connection when they drive to and from work, past the encampments and crumbling motorhomes and cars parked surrounded by the trappings of people trying and often failing to live their lives. Do you think they realize that raising rent for me and my neighbors directly results in more homeless people? I know it nearly put me out on the streets; luckily I have family to fall back on for now, and I (probably) have skills that an employer will need and hopefully eventually agree to pay me to use on their behalf.

If they do, I hope they feel shame, at the very least. It won’t stop them from increasing rents, not soon. The sickness of feeling entitled to make a profit off of things human beings will die without is endemic to our society and it would take a lot of long-term effort (and probably violent protests, if past human rights fights are any indication) to alter that entitlement. But here’s the thing: the people that work for the property management company might not have been the ones to decide to raise the rent, and they might not have picked the amount the rents go up. They might have offloaded that decision to… an algortithm. They get to keep their hands clean, and at least one company, RealPage, can make a profit by charging profit-making landlords for the service of abstracting their profit-taking. This is the horrible cyberpunk dystopian future I read about back in the ’80s.

Haha, sigh.