by Tom Barnard

In Seattle, many of us encounter our actual landlord maybe once, if at all. Most corporate landlords hire a combination of software portals and property managers that handle rent, maintenance, fees, and anything else that empties your bank account. Often you don’t even know who actually owns your unit. You pay your rent; next year (or next month), you pay more rent, and you hope your income keeps up with it. When it doesn’t, you move. Your rent increase, affordable or not, is always blamed on that endlessly repeated fable you learned in Econ 101: the law of supply and demand. Like gravity, it’s presented as an eternal principle. What’s never talked about is what determines supply and demand: market dominance and bargaining power.