Anyone who has checked Zillow recently knows that Maryland is in the midst of an affordability crisis.
The numbers are grim: The state faces a housing shortage of about 100,000 homes with some estimates suggesting we need to build as many as 600,000 by 2045 to keep up. Ninety percent of Marylanders say buying a house is too expensive while half of all young professionals say they’re considering moving out of the state over housing costs.
The barrage of ever-increasing prices makes accusations of collusion hard to ignore. Those concerns drove Rockville to pass a law earlier this year that will ban landlords from using algorithmic pricing that employs non-public data. Montgomery County is looking to pass a broader law that would extend this ban to all pricing algorithms, including ones that rely solely on publicly available information. But that would go too far. Such a broad ban would likely harm renters and small landlords while avoiding the reforms our housing sector so desperately needs…