[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. And welcome to Data Nation, a podcast from MIT's Institute for Data Systems and Society. I'm Liberty Vittert. And along with me is my cohost Munther Dahleh, the founding director of MIT IDSS. In this episode, we are talking about the national affordable housing crisis with US congressional representative Maxwell Frost and MIT associate professor of urban planning and science, Catherine D'Ignazio.
With high interest rates and low inventory increasing competition for housing, many people are struggling to find a place to call home. And any negative on a housing application, such as a low credit score, can eliminate a candidate. Representative Frost experienced this directly. And we asked him to share his story. I want to go back to the time when the coverage was going on about you not being able to rent an apartment because of your credit scores.
And we've talked a lot in this podcast about technology and credit scores. So tell us about that and tell us how that impacted what you were doing about housing these days. Yeah. Well, I mean, it had a big impact on me. And a lot of people don't realize that, obviously, that's what ended up making the news when I was first elected. But I dealt with housing insecurity before that and during the campaign because as a candidate, you don't get paid.
So before I ran for office, I was the Organizing Director at March For Our Lives. It's a nonprofit. And I quit to run for office. And a few months in, we had a rent hike freeze in Florida that was then lifted during the campaign. And my rent went up. I think it was like 30%, 33%. I got a notice about that. And my lease was up in about a month. So I had a month to figure that out and did not have enough money to stay, so I was priced out.
And for about two months, I was houseless during the campaign. I took all the money in my savings account, literally all of my savings account. And I put it into an Airbnb for a month. And I said, you know what, I'll figure it out. I need a place to sleep. And I didn't figure it out after that month. And I spent that next month couch surfing, sleeping in my car, et cetera. Just the rent was just too, high. And the problem isn't just the rent being high.
And that was the problem with me moving to an apartment in DC I hadn't been making my salary yet. People don't realize that as members of Congress, you don't get paid until February. You get sworn in January 3. You get elected November 6, or 8, or 7, whatever it is. So that's actually several months where you're just not making any money. But you're still expected to have two households starting in January in your district and wherever, in DC or in Orlando is mine. And so my problem was twofold.
One, being able to afford rent and furniture and everything like that. But number two, which will actually prove to be the hardest one, I couldn't even get to number one, because I kept getting denied from places. And when I inquired about why they said it was because of my credit score, because of my credit history. And during my campaign, I had to run up a lot of credit card debt to pay for medicine, food, my rent, et cetera, because I wasn't working.
And it's unfortunate because this is just a reality for so many people across the country. We want to talk about young people especially being able to accumulate wealth and get into home ownership. But oftentimes, a precursor to ownership is being able to rent. And especially for young folks who don't have a credit history or have bad credit, they're finding that they're not able to rent either.
So it creates a bad situation where you have a lot of young folks especially subletting, figuring other situations, et cetera. Catherine, that brings me to this question of, what is the data really showing that's happening now? And where will this sort of housing crisis for young people be if we don't do anything, if nothing changes? Yeah, I think that's where Representative Frost's situation is not uncommon right now.
And one of the things that's happening-- or maybe one of the fundamental problems behind this is that we have right now and then historically also treated housing as a commodity, something to be bought and sold rather than something that is a right for all people. And so when something is just pure commodity, then that means everything is dictated by the market.
And we are witnessing really the failures of what happens when you treat something as a purely market phenomenon in the sense of what Representative Frost just described, but things like rental and purchase prices skyrocketing. People's wages have not risen as fast as housing prices. Both rental and ownership have risen over the past decade. So like, literally, people cannot afford. They can't afford to rent. And they can't afford to buy.
And that's not only, let's say, low-income people, people who are really vulnerable. It's a lot of middle-class people and middle-class families, young people, as we're talking about here, they can't even break into this market. And so this means we have these waves of crises like foreclosure crisis, eviction crisis, displacement crisis, homelessness crisis. And if you're unhoused, as we know, this connects to every other thing in your life. You can't do anything without a stable place to live.
And then I think on the alternate side of that is then we have these actors in the market that are folks like the corporate landlords, platforms like Airbnb, venture capital, and hedge funds moving into housing as seen as an investment vehicle rather than a place for people to live, really like a profit making endeavor. And then so what happens then, the properties get even more jacked up in terms of prices. So it's like very much rich get richer kind of model while other people suffer.
But one of the things I was very excited to learn about was Representative Frost legislation, the bill that you introduced, the End Junk Fees for Renters. This is what we need in this space. What we need is actually governance in this space. The market is failing us. It's failing us. The vast majority of us are being failed by the market. And so this is what we need right now, is we need better governance models that keep people in homes and give them access to homes.
So I will segue exactly from Catherine's statement here, Maxwell, and ask you about that legislative and then your efforts in the public housing, and not just the success stories but also the challenges that you're going against markets. And so how is that working out? Yeah, so this is the-- thank you so much for bringing it up. This is the End Junk Fees for Renters Act, which is my third piece of legislation. It's directly connected to what happened with my housing story in January.
And I just realized I didn't fully answer your question, which is how did that impact the work we're doing? And the way I did is when that went viral and everything, we received like thousands and thousands and thousands of emails, Facebook messages, DMs, mail of people telling their own renting story and a lot of people saying, hey, my cousin lives in DC and has a couch, if you want to crash on it.
So thank you to everyone who made amazing offers, but a lot of stories and a lot of stories in Florida. And Florida's experiencing, like everywhere else-- in 2021, we experienced one of the worst hikes in the country as far as rent's concerned to where we were before. And people are feeling it. I mean, when I knocked doors, this is what people want to talk about. And it's not just renters too, right. This is like a holistic crisis, especially in Florida.
We're having a property insurance crisis right now where people who have been owning their homes for a long time, seniors, are now facing some serious problems because they're on a fixed income. And a lot of them are not even able to get their houses insured anymore. So it's not just about-- it is young people. It's seniors. It's what I'll call intermediate homeowners, which are like families or like young professionals. It's a problem that's really impacting everybody now.
But the End Junk Fees for Renters Act is simple. And what it does is, to what Catherine was talking about, it steps in where we feel like the market has been failing the country and consumers and where we feel like government needs to step in to ensure that we have good oversight and regulation, which is something that's really missing in housing in general, but especially in the renters market and especially in the state of Florida. We really don't have renters' rights in Florida, to be honest.
We lack that. And so it does a few different things. Number one, it cracks down on junk fees by banning application fees and screening fees, things like that. We believe that that is not a burden that a consumer should have to take on. Especially when you apply, you're usually not applying to one apartment. You're usually applying to several. And it creates a burden. Now, yes, a lot of these screening fees sometimes are refunded within 7 to 14 business days.
Like, for instance, mine here took a month to get back to me. When we're talking about working class families, people who are having trouble, that could be dinner on the table or no dinner on the table, medicine or no medicine. And so we don't think that should be a burden on consumers. The other thing it does is crack down on all these fees that landlords charge you that actually legally they already have to provide that service to you.
Like when you move into an apartment, apartment complex, there has to be a trash service that is operated by the complex. So people should not have to pay $50, $60 a month to throw the trash down the chute when legally that complex has to take care of that process anyway. And there's a lot of different instances of this.
For instance, we actually did a lot of research in the state of Florida and found that there are a few apartment complexes that charge their tenants between $40 and $60 every time they email, text, or call the landlord. That should be illegal as well. So it's really getting in on these junk fees. The other thing that it does is ban credit score screening in the application process as the end all be all here.
And I'm sure everyone on this podcast is very familiar with the extensive research into credit scores and how it really is not a good indicator on whether or not someone's going to pay their rent. Oftentimes we know that the primary way people build their credit score or tank it is going to be via a credit card.
And oftentimes, when it comes down to paying your rent of where you live, medicine, and stuff like that versus whatever purchases you made on a credit card, sometimes when your money isn't-- when you're living paycheck to paycheck and you're not able to cover all your bills, the first thing people are going to pay is their rent. 98% of the time. This is what every study shows us.
So credit scores are just not a good determining factor to figure out whether someone is worthy enough to rent in your apartment. And what it ends up being is a redlining to keep poor people, oftentimes people of color, away from certain types of buildings. And this would also ban the ability for people to advertise that if you have a certain credit score, you should apply, et cetera. So we are really excited about this piece of legislation.
The last thing I'll say is, some folks have brought up, well, what about won't this make rent more expensive, because they'll just lump the fees into the overall rent cost? OK, sure. I mean if they do that, at least we have transparency. I mean, I just moved into an apartment that was listed in Orlando. It's for my girlfriend. I was listed at like $2,000, which is really good for like a two, two in Orlando right now.
And by the time we got all the paperwork done and everything, a week before, I found out about another three junk fees I had to pay that totaled up at $300. I mean, that's a complete change in the rent cost. So it's about transparency and about ensuring that we have some regulation here to protect consumers. And we got to think federally here because the fact of the matter is it's a lot of states. It's just not cutting it and especially in a lot of these red states.
I think that's such an important concept, especially what you said at the beginning about how your story resonated with so many Americans and how you got thousands of emails and texts and DMs. And I think that really brings us to Catherine's first book, Data Feminism. And there was this critical insight behind the thesis that understanding of emotion drives the way we interpret data. And so how is it that data isn't just data?
And how can this be affecting Americans' mindset around something as basic and something as emotional as where you live and having a home? Sure. Yeah, I think one of the things we try to talk about in Data Feminism is that data are not as neutral, quote unquote, neutral as we commonly think that they are. And this doesn't mean they're not useful. But it's important to think about how we make data in the first place. So data are expensive. They're expensive to collect, maintain, and analyze.
So there's a kind of imbalance of power with who has the power and the resources really to collect such data and about what, like, what do they think is important to measure? And then this is a phenomenon-- when we don't measure all of the correct things, this is a phenomenon we call missing data. So the missing data are data that you think would exist because they measure very important phenomena in the world.
So, for example, in the case of housing in the US, it would be like the-- you would think we have a national evictions database that would help us understand variable eviction rates across different states. But in fact, these are data sets that actually don't exist. And my understanding is actually HUD is working on this right now. So there's actually exploratory study going on to potentially create such a database. So this is one phenomena.
We don't always have the data that we need to have in order to understand a problem structurally and systematically. But then secondly, there's also issues of bias and discrimination with data that are collected. And so the bias and discrimination could be in the data set itself. And I think that's a really important phenomenon that Representative Frost was pointing out with credit scores, for example. The phenomenon in the world is highly biased. It's racialized.
Low income people also don't have access to credit often. And so it's a phenomenon in the world which is already discriminatory. And then you measure that in a data set and use it as an input into other systems, and it is going to discriminate. It will be biased because the phenomenon itself is biased. But then on the other hand, you also have ways that data are used, that can also be very biased as well. An example of this in the housing space relates to credit scores.
But it's a little bit broader. It's tenant screening services. And so these are these screening services. This became a whole cottage industry recently where these are the background checks that landlords run against tenants. What they use as their input data sources are credit scores often.
So it's really exciting to hear that those would be like-- if this bill goes through, it'd be amazing to have credit scores be taken off the table because so much research has demonstrated they're not a good indicator of whether people pay their rent. But what credit screening services also use are evictions. And they also use criminal records. And they scoop those up from public data sources like housing court records. And then they put those into their predictive algorithm.
And then they use those to determine whether or not a particular tenant is risky or not to rent to. So what's the problem with that? On the face of it, it sounds fine. But evictions are highly racialized in this country. So a lot of sociological work has shown how-- and they're also gendered.
So I've shown how Black women in particular disproportionately, egregiously face evictions, not to mention that eviction laws, depending on the state, are highly variable, so tenants are protected from evictions more in some states rather than others. And so that means that people living in states with low tenant protections will get these serial evictions filed against them because landlords can just file them.
They can just be like, oh, that person is one day late with their rent, I'm going to file an eviction. And so it's used as a tactic, even when it doesn't result in an eviction. And yet once that eviction record goes on their record, that follows them. That is something that even if it wasn't even completed, it looks like an eviction in these tenant screening services. And so these are just some of the ways in which, again, these services that we think of like, oh, background checks.
That sounds like a very reasonable service. But then when we actually peer a little bit deeper into it, into, what are those data? What are the sources of those data? What are the structural biases that are represented there? And then how are those being wielded against tenants?
They are being wielded in such a way as to perpetuate a cycle of discrimination and exclusion from housing and disproportionately will be against low-income people, people of color, and women of color, particularly when we're talking about evictions. And so this is a choice. It's a political choice. We don't have to let these services reenact and scale that type of exclusion. We can choose to not do that. So yeah. I guess it makes me wonder, maybe, OK, I'm a small business owner, Maxwell.
I have a couple apartments I'm renting out. Maybe I could believe, OK, the credit score system is bad. Somehow I've been convinced that credit score is not a good way to figure out if someone's a good tenant or not. I'm convinced. But what do I use? How do we actually make this work so that Americans buy into this idea that we should eliminate the credit score system as a way to not screen people? What do we use? What works? Yeah, there are many different points that we can use here.
And here's the thing, too. What the numbers show is, number one, most small mom and pop landlords don't charge junk fees, to begin with. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. I mean, this whole thing about junk fees has really popped up. I mean, it's always been around, but even more recently, as private equity has bought up every apartment, every house, anything you can think of, especially post-COVID.
So just mom and pop landlords usually are not charging junk fees and really won't be severely impacted by this. But what else can we look at? I mean, I personally don't believe credit score should really exist. It's made by an entity for an entity. But something that we've pushed for is like, how can we ensure that if this is the number that we're using, that if we take a step back, it's going to be holistic in what it includes?
But we think that people should take a step back, especially landlords, and just look at the full breadth and depth of people. And if you are going to use credit scores at this point, not using these third-party websites that Catherine was talking about, these algorithms, which essentially will screen an applicant using a credit score of a few other factors, too, and just spit out a result.
And the problem is many of these huge private equity companies, there's no appealing process or anything like that. I mean, you're going to send in $50 to $80 to this website. It's going to tell you whether or not you're going to be able to live in a home. And it's going to give you the result, and that's it. And a lot of time, they don't even give you the reasoning for it. And if you want the reasoning, you have to call some line and wait.
So I think the first step here is trying to get companies to step away from this process of using these algorithms. Before I was elected, I used to work at the ACLU. And something I learned a lot about working there is how racist and messed up a lot of these algorithms are. So there's are many different factors we can use to determine whether or not someone is going to pay their rent or not. And a lot of us don't believe that credit score should be the end-all, be-all.
I want to say one more thing real quick, because I have a pretty nuanced opinion and position on how we're going to solve this. And it's such a crisis right now that we need every actor we can get at the table, not every single actor. There's a lot of bad actors that I think don't belong there. But especially our more local developers have a role here that they need to be included in. And so my bill I think is really important. I hold to two truths that I think are really important.
I think we need very strong consumer protections, very strong consumer protections because I believe, like Catherine said, that housing is a human right. So if that's your foundation, it helps set up the type of legislation you want to introduce and that you want to support to protect people for their right, their human right.
I also believe that even though the market has failed us, these protections, coupled with the ability to give the local market the opportunity to build more housing, I think is also important and not just build housing because housing is being built. But for instance, part of the problem in Florida is our population is rising. We have more people moving to the state. But we don't have-- or housing is not being built at the same level. And this has to do with a lot of different reasons.
I'm not going to blame one actor here. I like the YIMBY groups that talk a lot about exclusionary zoning laws and the need to build more mixed-income housing and et cetera. And I'm on board with that 110% This is the part that when I'm meeting with our local realtors and folks, they like this part. And I'm like, all right, cool, we'll work together on this one. Might not agree on rent stabilization, et cetera. But I think that's important. These things need to go hand in hand.
I think when these things go hand in hand, our realtors and landlords and developers can make a living, make a good living. I believe people should be able to make a profit off of something but not profiteer off of something. And what we're seeing is profiteering. And so these things have to go hand in hand. So I'm for getting rid of exclusionary zoning laws. I'm for more mixed-income housing so people can live near opportunity. I'm for these things, and I'm also for strict consumer protections.
I think they have to work together to get where we want to get. There's not going to be a world where the United States Congress passes so much money that we just build public housing for everyone who needs it. The public housing is important. It needs to be, yes, expanded. But it also needs to be improved because public housing shouldn't equal a certain type of housing. And we all know what that is. So there's a battle there to do that.
But at the same time, we also-- we can't just completely dismiss the market is what I'm trying to say. We have to try to reform here and work with it and make it work for our current world, not the world of 50, 60 years ago, which I think is what it's stacked up to be right now. So either way, I just wanted to throw that in there for anyone listening. I do think the response here is holistic.
But oftentimes, there are certain groups that just are-- groups of people that want to focus on one thing, which is fine. Me as a legislator, I really want to talk about all of it. Catherine, because there was a lot of conversations actually about the groups, this group and that group, I think there were multidimensional, multiagent problem when you about housing.
And you have repeatedly talked about identifying the who, who is responsible, who is part of the team, who is going to be benefiting, who is going to be harmed. Give us an example in this setting of this housing problem, maybe the rental, maybe the credit scores, that gives a lot to the different agents that are involved and how they all get to win, or is there a system for everybody is a winner or everybody is actually reasonably participating in good faith?
So yeah, Lauren and I and Data Feminism, we talk about these who questions. And so for us, these are questions that we can ask that help us understand the kinds of power relationships. And here when we're talking about power relationships, it's with respect to data and information. And so when we ask who questions, it's about how do we analyze these asymmetrical relationships of information. And if you look across the whole sector, you'll see we have lots of algorithms.
We have the credit scoring algorithms. We have tenant screening algorithms. We have what's being increasingly called proptech, so like these advanced technologies for like facial recognition, for accessing properties. We have remote property management dashboards, various kinds of networked cameras and doorbells and et cetera. So if we look across that whole space of proptech innovation and we say, who's benefiting from that?
It is by and large-- it is the landlords, and it's the property owners in these cases. And so why is it that the landlords and the property owners, they can know almost everything about tenants, they can look at a tenant's whole background history, know everything about a tenant and their services that do that for very low cost, basically, whereas tenants can know very little about landlords?
They don't know a landlord's history of filing serial evictions, evicting people unfairly, whether or not they fix stuff when stuff is broken in the apartment. And so why aren't we building those tools and technologies? So where are the tools and technologies that actually help tenants build power? There are groups that are trying to rectify some of these asymmetries of data and information and technology.
And I'll just mention one here, which is very interesting from the activist space, which is the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. They have various chapters. But this one is out in Oakland and San Francisco. And one of the things that they did is they built this tool called the Evictorbook. And so this is basically a tool that allows tenants to look up their landlord. So prior to trying to rent a property, they can look up their landlord. And they could see all these different aspects.
They could see, is this person a serial evictor? How big is the company? How many properties are they managing? What have been other people's experiences with them? So it's like a Yelp for landlords. So that's great. But that's also in one specific city. And so this is why I think it's back to the question of governance. So how do we protect tenant information from being exploited by landlords and these new technologies but also publicly disclose lots more information about landlords?
And so this is where things like rental registries come in. And those are happening again in a very piecemeal way. But I really agree with Representative Frost when he was talking about how we really need this to operate at the federal level because if we don't, it's going to be super piecemeal being municipality by municipality or state by state. And there's wide variability in the approaches to how much we protect tenants' rights on a state-by-state basis.
And my position at least would be that all tenants' rights should be protected and that these asymmetries of data and information should be first analyzed and then rectified both through technology and through legislation. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you to Representative Maxwell Frost and Professor Catherine D'Ignazio. And thank you for listening to this month's episode of Data Nation.
You can get more information and listen to previous episodes at our website, idss.mit.edu or follow us on X and Instagram @mitidss. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to leave us a review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to Data Nation from the MIT Institute of Data Systems and Society.