Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)
Maison des Sciences Humaines
11, Porte des Sciences
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette / Belval
Salle de conférence (1st floor)
seminars@liser.lu
Abstract
In critical algorithm studies, the concept of ’opacity’ has been widely used to describe the many ways in which modern technology is black-boxed. Recently, housing scholars have also started to talk about housing markets in terms of opacity, in particular in relation to the rapidly growing sector of landlord tech. Nonetheless, there have been no real efforts to elaborate a definition of opacity that would be specific to the housing sector, forcing housing scholars to either draw on conceptualizations from other fields or leave the concept entirely undefined. Opacity generally alludes to an asymmetry of some kind, but even within algorithm studies this asymmetry is usually defined only indirectly or anecdotally. Embarking on a critical reading of notions of information asymmetry and opacity in both micro-economics and information theory, we introduce a theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded definition of opacity for the rental housing sector which we apply to a nearly complete snapshot of the Montreal rental market. In brief, we suggest that rental housing markets are characterized by five types of opacity: First, one landlord usually controls the fates of many tenants, suggesting a fundamental asymmetry and many-to-one opacity in the landlord-tenant relationship. Second, information about who owns what in most markets is spread across many datasets and challenging to access, imbuing rental markets with various kinds of data opacity. Third, landlords can live and register their ownership far from their tenants, including in other countries, establishing a form of geographic opacity between tenants and landlords. Fourth, the structure of private companies—where one company can be a subsidiary of many parent companies—creates organizational opacity by obfuscating the final beneficiary of a given rental property. Finally, all of these opacities are grounded in particular jurisdictions which establish various types of legal opacity. While theoretically informed, this typology of opacities emerges organically from our Montreal case study, which combines data that was accessed by scraping nearly all property records in the city along with near complete information on stock ownership of companies associated with these records. Different types of opacity tend to be correlated and, furthermore, real estate ownership tends to concentrate among companies that engage in the five practices of opaquing. Combined, these results suggest that opacity is not just a fundamental characteristic of but also a driver of wealth-concentration in rental housing.
Biography
David Wachsmuth is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Governance at McGill University, where he is also an Associate Professor in the School of Urban Planning. He directs UPGo, the Urban Politics and Governance research group at McGill, where he leads a team of researchers investigating pressing urban governance problems related to economic development, environmental sustainability, and housing markets. He is the co-founder of Curbcut, an award-winning online platform for deep, dynamic, and intuitive exploration of urban sustainability in Canadian regions. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the impacts of short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb on cities around the world, and consults widely with municipalities and community organizations on designing appropriate regulations. Dr. Wachsmuth has published widely in top journals in urban studies, planning and geography, and his work has been covered extensively in the national and international media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post.
