Category: Original Research

The Campaign Donation Habits of America’s Top 50 Landlords

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We use a lot of open data here at RentConfident to create our reports. We always bear in mind that the open data on building safety that we use is a byproduct of the movement to make campaign contributions publicly accessible. Therefore, given the season we thought we'd use open data for once the way it was intended - to look at the political campaign contributions of landlords.

Methodology

Chicago's heavy tilt towards the Democratic party made us decide to step outside our normal local focus and look instead at the apartment industry nationwide. We took the National Multifamily Housing Council's 2016 list of the top 50 apartment owners in the country, and looked up the campaign contributions of all 51 of the people listed in the "Corporate Officer" column.

We did give some thought as to whether or not Corporate Officers of billion dollar publicly traded companies can really be considered landlords. But their business is still property management even if their jobs are very far removed from that of the building superintendent who lives in the basement. Together with their staffs they are responsible for the management of just shy of 3 million apartments, housing about 2% of the total American population.

Using Open Secrets we looked up and tallied the donations by party for every one of the CEOs on the NMHC's list. Open Secrets lists all contributions over $200.

The people on the list also made contributions to 6 industry Political Action Committees (PACs) so we also took a look at how those PACs distributed their donations.

We restricted our survey to donations made since January 1, 2011. This covers three federal election cycles - 2012, 2014 and 2016.

You can download a spreadsheet of our data here. Note that we have removed all names but can certainly provide a copy with names if you need it for research. Just drop us a note on the Contact page.

The COs

Of the 51 Corporate Officers (COs) we surveyed, 14 made no political donation in the past 6 years. 31 of them made direct donations to individual candidates, political parties or candidate-specific Super PACs. Continue reading The Campaign Donation Habits of America’s Top 50 Landlords

Published by

Kay Cleaves

Craigslist Rent Rate Survey, Chicago, Summer 2016

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I've written before that no source of rent rates in Chicago is entirely accurate. But let's be quite honest – if Craigslist ever released the stats on the rent rates of listings posted to their site we'd come pretty close. Over 2500 apartment listings appear on Craigslist every day. Many of them are duplicates and some of them are fake, but they do have the most listings in the city.

So I decided to create a script that checks the rent rates on … well, let's not say that I checked Craigslist. Because using automated methods to crawl through Craigslist is completely against their terms of service. I coded up a crawler that browsed through apartment listings site that was absolutely NOT Craigslist.

This crawler grabbed the last 2500 listings posted in a day, and then crawled through each of them (automatically waiting between 5 and 15 seconds per page) to grab the rent rate, bedroom count, latitude and longitude. It discarded any listings that didn't have maps. I ran it 2-3 times a week for a month, starting around 5-6 pm each time. It captured data from 13,356 listings, which I then sorted by neighborhood and averaged.

I then cross-indexed it against my database of neighborhood boundaries to come up with a bunch of maps. They're quite large, so I've posted them on a separate page. Included are color-coded maps of both rent rates and total listings available, broken down by individual Chicago neighborhood and by apartment size.

Chicago Rent Rates Summer 2016

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Published by

Kay Cleaves

We Analyzed 100 Crowdfunding Campaigns for Victims of Apartment Fires. Here’s What We Found.

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Content Warning: This article may be upsetting to those who have lived through apartment or home catastrophes.
Editor's Note: The quotes included in this article have been included without alteration from their respective campaigns. We have chosen to leave spelling, grammar and profanity intact out of respect for the victims.

“The couple did NOT have renters insurance. They literally lost EVERYTHING, Car keys, drivers lisence, credit cards all personal items gone. They had $100 on the dresser and ran without thinking of grabbing it. Can you imagine loosing items that was your grandmothers, your family items to be passed down for generations to come? ALL GONE.” - https://www.gofundme.com/jeffshannonfire

Renters insurance exists to help you recover your lost and damaged items after major apartment catastrophes like fires, floods and hurricanes. Savvy renters know that renters insurance should be on their list of things to obtain immediately upon signing a lease. It Some landlords have started to require proof of insurance. It's relatively inexpensive – according to the Insurance Information Institute (iii.org), the average cost of renters insurance in Illinois was $172 per year in 2013. Even so, III estimated that only 37% of US renters had renters insurance in 2014.

Lately those who find themselves struggling to recover from major catastrophes have turned to crowdfunding site GoFundMe to help solicit cash from friends and family. We decided to turn to GoFundMe to see what sort of impact apartment fires had on those with and without apartment insurance. Continue reading We Analyzed 100 Crowdfunding Campaigns for Victims of Apartment Fires. Here’s What We Found.

Published by

Kay Cleaves

Chicago Bulk Cable Providers Compared

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Google announced last month that they're considering Chicago as a testing location for their wireless version of Google Fiber. Until they get here, Chicago renters are stuck dealing with the same old internet providers we've had in the area for years - or are we?

Your average homeowner or renter in Chicagoland small buildings and single family homes is pretty restricted when it comes to choosing an internet provider. You've got Comcast or AT&T citywide, and in some sections of the city there's also WOW and RCN.

Big apartment buildings and condo associations have more options available to them for broadband - they can buy bulk (or "MDU") internet for the whole building. The MDU internet scene in Chicago has a lot more vendors. But not all of these bulk internet providers are created equal. So if you're a renter that's considering a building that offers "free internet" or you're a property manager looking for a new provider, check out our comparison of all the bulk internet providers we could find that serve the Chicago area.

Notes: We only looked at providers of bulk internet, so companies like Dish that only offer TV are not included. If we missed a provider and you would like us to add them to the list, leave it in the comments and we'll check them out! Continue reading Chicago Bulk Cable Providers Compared

Published by

Kay Cleaves

Stereotypes, Status Symbols, and the Failure of the Section 8 Voucher Program

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A friend of mine has a condo that he rents out on the south side of Chicago. Recently he contacted me with a question. The condo association had decided that it wanted to ban rentals to section 8 tenants. He wanted to know if this was legal.

The short answer? No. Section 8 voucher holders are a protected class in the City of Chicago. Condo associations must follow fair housing laws just like landlords, real estate agents and everyone else involved with residential real estate transactions.

But the question requires some unpacking of the ongoing war between landlords and government subsidized renters since the start of the Section 8 program.

What is the Section 8 program?

Section 8 Housing in Chicago is made up of multiple programs, including public housing projects and home purchase assistance for the poor. The part we're talking about is called the Housing Choice Voucher program, and it allows low-income renters to rent from normal apartments in the community with help from the government. It is called “Section 8” after the portion of federal law that created government-subsidized housing in 1937. Continue reading Stereotypes, Status Symbols, and the Failure of the Section 8 Voucher Program

Published by

Kay Cleaves