Still Rotting
US aluminum consumers – beer and soda drinkers, car buyers, homeowners
Aug 2026
In the summer of 2011, Coca-Cola quietly complained to the London Metal Exchange. Not about the price of aluminum futures – there was plenty of metal sitting around. The problem was getting any of it out. The queue to pull aluminum out of a Detroit warehouse had stretched to six months or more. “It takes […]
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Still Rotting
First-time homebuyers / working-class families in Sun Belt metros
Aug 2026
A starter home used to be how a family got on the ladder. You bought a three-bedroom ranch with a yard, made payments, and built equity. Over the last fifteen years a large part of that first-rung stock was bought, not by families, but by institutions with a different goal: turning shelter into a rent-yielding […]
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Still Rotting
Apartment renters
Aug 2026
In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued RealPage, a Texas software company, for operating what it described as an unlawful scheme that helped apartment landlords fix rental prices. The software in question is Revenue Management, the umbrella brand for YieldStar and AI Revenue Management (AIRM), and the core idea is simple and corrosive: […]
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