> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.newmexicomadness.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 15 Cities Banned Rent Fixing. New Mexico Already Passed the Renter's Bill of Rights. Rents Went Up Anyway. - URL: https://www.newmexicomadness.com/haaland-rent-fixing-renters-bill-of-rights/ - Published: 2026-09-13T14:57:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-13T14:57:52.000Z - Author: Duke of New Mexico - Tags: State ### Deb Haaland's two headline housing promises have both been tried. Neither has a success story anywhere in America — including here. Deb Haaland's affordability agenda opens its housing section with two promises to renters. She will make it illegal for landlords to set rents using AI algorithms and collusion. And she will require a "Renter's Bill of Rights" that plainly outlines rental application requirements, fees, and costs. Both sound reasonable. Both are already reality somewhere. So there is a simple, fair question to ask before anyone votes on them: where has either one worked? The answer, after looking at every jurisdiction that has tried, is nowhere. Not one city, not one state, not the federal government. There is no documented case in which banning rent-setting software or enacting a renters' bill of rights lowered rents, increased housing supply, or reduced homelessness. That is not a partisan claim. It is the absence of a single example. ### What rent fixing is The underlying concern is real. A company called RealPage sold software to large apartment owners that recommended rents using nonpublic data drawn from competing landlords — letting rivals coordinate pricing without ever speaking to one another. The Justice Department sued. On November 24, 2025, DOJ and RealPage filed a proposed settlement. RealPage paid the federal government nothing and admitted no wrongdoing. It agreed to stop using competitors' nonpublic runtime data, to age its training data, and to accept a three-year compliance monitor. Separately, 37 property management companies settled private claims for a combined $359.9 million. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated that eliminating algorithmic coordination would save affected renters about $70 per month. Note the verb. That figure is a projection of what a ban should accomplish. It has never been an observed result. ### Fifteen cities. One track record. Nothing. At least fifteen jurisdictions have banned algorithmic rent-setting: San Francisco, Berkeley, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Diego, Jersey City, Providence, Santa Monica, Hoboken, Portland, Spokane, Santa Ana, Evanston, Seattle, and King County. San Francisco went first. Section 37.10C of its Rent Ordinance took effect October 14, 2024 — the only ban old enough to evaluate. Two years later, San Francisco has brought zero enforcement actions under the law. Rents in the city rose to record highs over the same period. The only legal test came in July 2026, from a private tenant suing a landlord — not from the city that wrote the ordinance. A researcher who studies the practice put it plainly: banning pricing software is "barking up the wrong tree, and that's why it hasn't fixed the problem." New York's statewide ban took effect in December 2025\. California's followed in 2026\. Neither has produced outcome data yet. Which means that as of today, the entire evidentiary record for this policy consists of one city where it accomplished nothing measurable. There is also a live dispute about whether the harm is as large as advertised. A 2025 University of California, Berkeley study found a correlation between RealPage usage and higher rents — about 23 cents per square foot monthly — but when researchers applied difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods, they found no consistent, statistically significant evidence that the software caused rent increases. ### The Renter's Bill of Rights is already New Mexico law This is the part her campaign does not mention. On April 8, 2025, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed Senate Bill 267\. It requires landlords to disclose all rental costs in plain language, provide an itemized fee list, give 60 days' notice before changing any fee, cap tenant screening fees at $50, and refund screening fees to rejected applicants within 30 days. Now read Haaland's plank again: a Renter's Bill of Rights that "plainly outlines rental application requirements, fees and costs." That is existing New Mexico law, signed sixteen months ago by the governor Haaland is running to replace. And there is a federal precedent worth knowing. In January 2023, the White House released a "Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights" — five principles including the declaration that renters should pay no more than 30 percent of income on housing. The document stated its own limits in writing: it "is a statement of principles; it is not binding and does not itself constitute U.S. government policy." Housing law analysts noted at the time that the administration "fell short of issuing any mandates," and that many of the agency commitments simply restated initiatives already underway. What happened next is the measurable part. National homelessness rose sharply in the two years following, with HUD's annual assessment showing a roughly 17 percent single-year increase from 2023 to 2024. A bill of rights governs how a landlord must behave. It does not govern how many houses exist. It was never designed to, which is exactly why it cannot fix an affordability problem caused by a shortage. ### The New Mexico test we can already grade New Mexico did not stop at a disclosure law. It built the administrative apparatus too. The state stood up an Office of Housing, which joined the Department of Workforce Solutions in April 2025, tasked with developing strategies to address the housing shortage and homelessness. It oversees the distribution of $140 million appropriated over two years, with $120 million allocated in August 2025 toward projects in Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, Las Cruces, and Doña Ana County. Here is the output. Between 2022 and 2025, Housing New Mexico supported the creation of an average of 1,000 affordable housing units per year. The state's own 2026 Housing Strategy estimates New Mexico will need nearly 58,000 new units by 2045\. A separate estimate presented at a 2025 state housing summit put the current shortage above 90,000 units. At a thousand units a year, the low estimate takes 58 years. The high estimate takes 90. Meanwhile the numbers moved the wrong direction. New Mexico's median monthly gross rent reached $1,021 in 2023 — up 5.7 percent in a single year and 23.3 percent since 2018\. Renter median income rose 4.8 percent over the same year. Rents outran incomes with the office open, the strategy published, and the money appropriated. Albuquerque's unsheltered population grew 40 percent in two years. Nearly half the people counted in 2025 were homeless for the first time. The fastest-growing barrier they reported to getting housed was missing documentation — a lost ID — cited by 47 percent, up from 35 percent the year before. A state that cannot reliably replace an identification card is promising a multilingual calculator to help residents locate their tax credits. ### The pattern Line up every rule-based intervention on the board and the same result appears: A ban on rent-setting software: fifteen cities, one measurable case, zero enforcement actions, record rents. A renters' bill of rights: enacted federally as non-binding principles in 2023, enacted in New Mexico statute in 2025, and rents rose faster than incomes anyway. A housing office with $140 million: 1,000 units a year against a gap of 58,000 to 90,000. None of these policies is radical. That is not the criticism. The criticism is that each one regulates conduct or paperwork while the binding constraint is the number of homes that exist, and not one of them has ever been shown to change that number. ### Three questions What does it cost? No published price tag accompanies any housing plank. What recurring revenue funds it when oil and gas revenue softens? How many housing units will exist in New Mexico by 2030 — and what number would count as failure? Haaland's plan does contain two items aimed at supply: requiring housing project applications be approved within a set time period, and making land site-ready while cutting gross receipts tax on construction materials. Those address cost and delay, which is where the shortage actually lives. They are also the last two bullets on the list, with no unit target, no cost estimate, and no deadline attached to any of them. The first two items on the list are a rule fifteen cities have adopted and none can show worked, and a law New Mexico already passed. #### Sources 1. Haaland campaign, "Haaland to Ban Rent Fixing, Address Housing Shortage," June 22, 2026 — debhaaland.com 2. Wilson Sonsini, "DOJ Settles Its Algorithmic Price-Fixing Case Against RealPage," Nov. 30, 2025; ProPublica, Nov. 26, 2025 3. RealPage class action settlement — $359.9 million, 37 property management companies 4. White House Council of Economic Advisers, "The Cost of Anticompetitive Pricing Algorithms in Rental Housing," Dec. 17, 2024 5. Local Progress, municipal algorithmic rental price-fixing ban tracker; Stateline, Mar. 28, 2025 6. City of San Francisco, Rent Ordinance Section 37.10C, effective Oct. 14, 2024 7. The San Francisco Standard, "SF tried to ban its way to lower rents. Then the AI boom hit," Aug. 21, 2026 8. UC Berkeley School of Information, "Investigation of Alleged Rental Price-Fixing via Algorithmic Collusion," Apr. 14, 2025 9. Morgan Lewis on New York S.7882, Nov. 2025; Arnold & Porter on California AB 325 10. National Low Income Housing Coalition, "New Mexico Passes Legislation to Disclose and Limit Certain Rental Fees," Apr. 28, 2025 (SB 267, signed Apr. 8, 2025) 11. The White House, "Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights," Jan. 25, 2023 12. National Housing Law Project, analysis of the Blueprint, Feb. 2, 2023 13. HUD Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, 2024 14. New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, Office of Housing 15. Housing New Mexico, "2026 updates to New Mexico Housing Strategy," May 20, 2026 16. Source New Mexico, "NM home shortage could be as high as 90,000 units," Sept. 18, 2025 17. Housing New Mexico, 2025 New Mexico Housing Needs Assessment, Key Facts 18. New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority, Statewide Housing Needs Assessment, July 2025 19. CityDesk NM, "ABQ street homelessness grows 40% since '23," Nov. 21, 2025