The San Francisco city council is smashing the mirror because it doesn't like the face staring back at it. The council just approved a ban on websites that offer data about local rental markets and help landlords set their rents. The council blames these tools for exploding housing costs. It's a classic case of killing the messenger that will do nothing to fix a problem of the city council's own creation—and it violates the First Amendment.
Landlords often use websites like RealPage and Yardi that suggest rent prices based on local market data. Recently, activists have started blaming such websites for inflating rents, simply because they provide accurate data about rent in a local market. The San Francisco city council has now joined the party with an ordinance that would ban "algorithmic devices [that] perform calculations of non-public competitor data concerning local or statewide rents or occupancy levels, for the purpose of advising a landlord whether to leave their unit vacant or on the amount of rent that the landlord may obtain from a tenant." Under this ordinance, websites cannot offer such devices and landlords cannot use them.
