As AI makes it increasingly easier to build in-house systems, it seems like this kind of issue -- funneling billions of dollars to private contractors for eligibility verification software -- should be easily resolved. It would be cool if more tech people brought their skills to government in a constructive (non-DOGE) way.
As always, the most important aspect of this story is scale: "Given the scale of the deportation agencies, there is simply no way for legal responses to keep pace with the lawless mass lockup. Unlike ICE, the habeas bar did not receive a multi-billion dollar investment to underwrite limitless expansion."
"In our recent research, we document that mirroring the general rise in income inequality (documented by Piketty and his collaborators, among many others), there has been a similar concentration in individual campaign contributions. Figure 2 shows that the share of campaign contributions coming from the richest ten percent of Census tracts went from about 40% of the total in 1980 to almost 55% in 2020. Meanwhile, the share of the bottom fifty percent of tracts halved, from almost 30% to less than 15%."
Note that the article itself distinguishes between short-term and medium-to-long-term solutions. In the short-run, rent-control simply shifts power away from landlords. In the long-run, to maintain supply, you need to build more housing through both re-zoning and social housing, as the article states.
Furthermore, most policies of this nature are stupid because they assume that everything except the target of the policy (in this case rent) stays the same, and this is obviously not true. A lot of policies meant to help tenants involve moving additional costs onto the landlord... Who then increases the rent to cover them, and yet remains competitive because every landlord has the same costs imposed on them, and so makes the same decision.
The article does point out some problems (like the high cost of moving as a renter causing an imbalance) and then instead of directly addressing those issues, leaps to a completely unrelated "solution". From personal experience with agents, there's a hell of a lot that could be done to make that process smoother and cheaper...
