HLF president Mario H. Lopez recently sent a letter to the editor, in response to a recent op-ed in California calling for ban on the use of artificial intelligence to set market-based rent prices in the state. Published in the Mercury News and East Bay Times, HLF’s letter highlighted that California’s housing affordability crisis will require a concerted effort to increase housing supply, not policies that target algorithms. Said policies are based on the flawed assumption that algorithms themselves enable collusion or price-fixing.

San Francisco, for example, restricted the use of rental pricing software in October 2024, yet rents there are climbing faster than in any other U.S. city. Banning modern management tools does nothing to address the underlying shortage, and risks disincentivizing the new construction that Californians so desperately need.

Read the full letter in the Mercury News and the East Bay Times.  

In addition, Lopez has written on this issue in the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Orange County Register, and the Los Angeles Times.