Competition is a farce in this space. I lived in rental accommodation in the 80s (a time of high inflation) and I recall well the price excess a local shop charged to keep open. Facilities like cheque cashing, breaking cigarette packets and selling single smokes, they all leverage huge profit for a service you can't really go and find competition for, in any real sense.
you might as well ask why loan sharking exists.
Rentiers do not normally want to rent to people on state benefits. When they do, they maximise the rent to the amount the state will pay, plus a small increment. Competition keeps that increment small? sure. But if you increase the benefit, suddenly, rents go up "everywhere" as a non-collusive event (non-collusive? hah)
We see this in Australia in the cost of childcare, and the cost of any service where the government gives a your-choice voucher to the client: the service fees go up beyond the voucher.
Price/Cost disjoin is a thing. Rental is not a "goods" in that sense, its a location-dependent (non) monopoly. So, rent, which was one of my primary concerns, is one of the things which absent rent controls does this. And, if you don't have a car, then if you live in a housing estate a long way from supermarkets you are caught behind the effort to shop cheaper, rather than pay the premium to the small number of local stores who will sell you goods you can carry home.
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Competition is a farce in this space. I lived in rental accommodation in the 80s (a time of high inflation) and I recall well the price excess a local shop charged to keep open. Facilities like cheque cashing, breaking cigarette packets and selling single smokes, they all leverage huge profit for a service you can't really go and find competition for, in any real sense.
you might as well ask why loan sharking exists.
Rentiers do not normally want to rent to people on state benefits. When they do, they maximise the rent to the amount the state will pay, plus a small increment. Competition keeps that increment small? sure. But if you increase the benefit, suddenly, rents go up "everywhere" as a non-collusive event (non-collusive? hah)
We see this in Australia in the cost of childcare, and the cost of any service where the government gives a your-choice voucher to the client: the service fees go up beyond the voucher.
Price/Cost disjoin is a thing. Rental is not a "goods" in that sense, its a location-dependent (non) monopoly. So, rent, which was one of my primary concerns, is one of the things which absent rent controls does this. And, if you don't have a car, then if you live in a housing estate a long way from supermarkets you are caught behind the effort to shop cheaper, rather than pay the premium to the small number of local stores who will sell you goods you can carry home.
its not a monopoly, until it is.