Affordability

Whether it's groceries, insurance, or utilities, it costs more just to get by today than it ever has before. Economists like to blame inflation, but the truth is there's no such thing as inflation, it's just been greed the whole time.

Note: this section will be updated frequently as there's a lot to do to make things fair and truly affordable here in HoCo.

Let's start off with the term "affordability". It's universal right? Yes, it is, in terms of being subjective

Affordabile Housing

Rent Stabilization

This isn't rent control, it's modern, and it's used around the world to protect renters from predatory landlords and property management companies.

Tenants will not be able to have their rents raised more than 2.5% year over year. Landlords may raise rent at the annual Baltimore-Columbia-Towson Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U) or 2.5%, whichever is lower.

If this year your rent is $2000/mo. next year it can't be higher than $2050/mo.

If you move, that doesn't mean the landlord gets to charge whatever to the next tenant. The rates will be tied to the unit, not your lease.

Expand and enforce consumer protections

We need consumer protections because businesses behave badly. If someone can get in trouble for stealing from a store, why can't the store get in trouble for stealing from their customers?

Surveillance pricing

Earlier this year the County Council passed legislation that prohibits surveillance pricing, which was great news for consumers. The catch is, it only applied to grocery stores, which was bad news to consumers.

We need to expand the prohibition of surveillance pricing to include all retailers, not just the folks who sell you bananas and bread.

Prices do need to change from time to time. For most cases, it should be reasonable for a retailer to update their prices outside of store hours. Nobody wants to pull something off of the shelf to have it ring up for a different amount.

Unpriced Goods

All physical goods need to be priced. There's been a trend with some retailers to not provide pricing on the shelf or on a clearly marked label. These retailers are pulling a "trust us bro", and I'm saying "we have no reason to trust you bro", followed by a "now just cut it out bro".

Click to cancel

If you can sign up with a click, you need to be able to cancel with a click. There isn't a consumer who wouldn't benefit from a service, account, subscription. We can estimate that by making it easier to end unneeded or unwanted accounts or subscriptions we can save Howard County residents over $6.6 million annually.

Self checkout

Convincing customers that being their own cashiers is a feature of convenience, not a strategy businesses have implemented to avoid having to pay employees or even hire people in the first place. Customers have been tricked into doing the jobs of store employees for a few years now, and we're not even getting paid to do it.

Self checkout is bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for community

It can be tremendously convenient to fly throug a checkout process when you're in a rush (who isn't these days?) or just have a few things, but stores need to offer at least the same number of staffed cashiers as available DIY consoles.

Retailers cry that'll be forced to raise prices if they have to go back to actually employing people, but we have all seen that retailers have been raising prices on anything they can as high as they think they can get away with for years. Consumers have a right to not be prayed on or manipulated. We can do something about this.