By Erin McElroy, Meredith Whittaker, and Genevieve Fried
The following is excerpted from a piece we wrote in the Boston Review on how property technology (proptech) is leading to new forms of housing injustice in ways that increase the power of landlords and further disempower tenants and those seeking shelter. To learn more about how real estate technology companies are expanding surveillance, data accumulation, and algorithmic means testing, read the full article here.
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As millions worry about sickness, layoffs, and paying rent on the first of the month, tech companies are positioning themselves to profit. Some are rapidly spinning up new technologies, while others are repurposing old ideas, taking a page from the disaster capitalism playbook with slogans like “through crises, there are opportunities.”
As anxious landlords contend with tenant rent strikes, eviction moratoriums, and remote property management, property technology (proptech) companies are pushing surveillance and data-driven tracking technologies as effective ways of dealing with rent strikes, eviction moratoriums, and remote property management. They are even promising to suppress rent strikes and prevent COVID-19 from entering buildings.
While proptech and its problems are not new, companies today are using new and deceptive COVID-19 marketing tactics to expand the reach of these technologies. Some of the more nefarious examples include neighborhood surveillance systems, facial recognition entry systems, virtual landlords, e- carceration technologies, and tenant screening apps.
With an increasing number of tenants around the world unable to pay their rents, we are also seeing a rise in creative tenant organizing against proptech data collection, previewing a future in which pushback against surveillance and data-centric tenant control is connected with the global movement for housing justice.
Read the full article here.
