Asia Mabry remembered thinking "it's just glitching."
She couldn't believe it when she opened the website on June 10 to pay her rent and discovered if she wanted to stay in Unit 13 at Willowbrook Apartments another year, she'd need to cough up $353 more each month.
After days of no response, she got in touch with someone from Brookside Properties, which manages the building in Buechel. Her options: Pay the increase, from $876 to $1,229, or leave. As a Jefferson County Public Schools employee making $35,000 each year, Mabry knew she would be crazy to take on the hike.
So, 30 days later, she packed up the home she shared with her 17-year-old daughter. On July 14, they left for good.
"I'm just trying to make it," Mabry said, voice cracking with sadness. "They're not making it any easier, and it's not like my paycheck goes up. There was no 'I'm sorry.' There was only 'pay up.'"
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The week of the increase, Mabry had approached her next-neighbor and asked if her rent had gone up too. Her neighbor nodded, saying she'd tried to contact management all day. If Mabry had left Willowbrook Apartments to go door-to-door throughout Louisville, she'd have found rental increases in every corner of the city — emptying the wallets of even middle-class residents.
A Courier Journal review of rent prices found rates are rising faster than salaries can keep up, even while housing quality remains the same.
It's now more expensive to rent a one-bedroom apartment, averaging $931 per month, than it was to rent a two-bedroom apartment in 2019, when the average rent was $911, according to the Louisville Metropolitan Housing Coalition. ApartmentAdvisor now lists the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Louisville as $1,097 a month. And these increases are still picking up speed — with average rent rising 15% faster in the first half of 2022 than in 2021.
Meanwhile, the median salary for hourly workers in Louisville increased just 3.4% between 2019 and 2021, with that figure standing at $38,750, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But MIT's living wage calculator found a single parent with one child in Jefferson County, like Mabry, needs to make $31.77 an hour — roughly $66,000 a year — to fully support themselves.
These disparities mean the nearly 40% of Louisvillians who rent are often forced to put more toward housing each month than they can afford. And that's even taking into account that Louisville "typically ranks as one of the least expensive large cities for rent prices," said Amy Mueller, an ApartmentAdvisor spokesperson.
Over the last month, The Courier Journal spoke with multiple landlords, housing experts, government officials and more than a dozen Louisville renters to learn how rent increases are affecting our community.
The landlords said any increases are just following "the market," and they have no plans to slow down any time soon. The experts said Kentucky lags behind much of the country in protections for renters. And every renter said the same thing: The system cannot go on like this. Someone needs to fix it.
"I see people starting to reevaluate and asking, 'Why do we let people financially exploit others on a life necessity?'" said Art Crosby, director of the statewide nonprofit Lexington Fair Housing Council.
Landlords say increases come from 'the market'
Robert Massey doesn't like the word "tenant." He prefers "customers."
Massey runs Robert Massey Co., a family-owned fee-management company that oversees nearly 500 units in Louisville’s East End. The locations range from single-family homes to a 50-unit apartment complex. Almost all of the owners of the rental properties live out of state, he said.
For occupied units, his company's rent increases are standardized at about 5% every year, well below the 40% increase Mabry faced. Other factors taken into account in annual assessments include property taxes, maintenance and the unit’s dollars-per-square-foot property value, Massey said.
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However, he stressed the company never wants to push an increase that causes someone to move. That would result in pesky turnover costs, an additional expense for the company.
"The time to look at a more significant increase is when a property is vacant," Massey said. And the single biggest factor in these price increases when properties do become vacant, he added, is other landlords.
"We always get a really good picture by looking at what others around us have set," he said. "And you're never going to put someone in there who can't afford that new rent."
Such price matching is also used by smaller-scale landlords, like Travis Silvers, a retiree who entered the real estate market less than 10 years ago. He owns and rents out two houses in Louisville and typically aims to increase rent 8% to 10% each year.
When it comes to setting prices, Silvers' philosophy mirrored Massey's.
"Lots of time you just look on Zillow and see what's being asked nearby," Silvers said. "I guess if nobody rents it, that's when you'd obviously lower the price."
Massey and Silvers said these standardized increases are necessary to keep up with inflation's effects on property taxes and repair costs, which typically eat up half of their earnings from rent.
However, Massey also said he has turned down working with more than two-thirds of property owners because they're unwilling to pay for upkeep, meaning that in his experience the landlords who actually do devote that amount of their earnings towards expenses on their properties are in the minority.
Landlords, generally, keep the other half of the earnings they make for themselves. And Silvers, who does not have an outside job, said he has made more than $40,000 in profit from just one property he bought for $25,000 in 2015.
Rental property owners don't want this profit ratio to change, said Massey, and he emphasized his management company's "higher duty is to our owners."
Ultimately, he said, this means his tenants will always be a secondary priority.
Mabry, the tenant who moved from the West Buechel apartment, said she always pays her late fees when she gets behind on rent, without complaint. She understands her responsibility. And she said the hierarchy Massey described represents a lack of basic human respect.
"All of it feels like a blatant money grab, without any empathy," Mabry said. "It feels like there's really no resources for me to turn to. I've been so stressed I started losing hair."
Ben Carter, a senior litigator at the Kentucky Equal Justice Center, began working in housing justice during the 2008 foreclosure crisis and said Massey's and Silvers' philosophies don't surprise him.
Carter said he has observed what he calls a "permission structure" when it comes to rent increases, under which landlords prioritize making as much profit as they can while news of inflation grips the nation.
"In many ways, inflation is a self-fulfilling prophecy," Carter said. "Because now, people expect rents to rise. So then landlords say, 'this person's renting a similar unit near my vacant one for $800. Maybe I set my prices at $900 and see what happens.' Under the current system, they can all separately, slowly, raise rents."
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Massey and Silvers said by roughly price matching neighboring rentals, they are following "fair market rent."
But Carter said the increases are inflicted on a "captive market" — a group of people unable to afford any home without renting one, forcing this 30% of them to bear these costs.
"In order for there to be such a thing as fair market rent, the market has to be fair," Carter said. "What we have now is not a fair market."
Massey and Silvers' faith that the housing market is functioning properly remains strong, however. Massey said "supply and demand have a way of sorting themselves out," and Silvers said "the market takes care of itself."
The Courier Journal asked both if they would consider putting a cap on rent increases, especially if people's wages are stagnant.
They said no.
Renters forced to battle for same roof
Jackie Campbell refreshed Zillow, sure she was seeing things. The number didn't change. There were 50 contacts and 14 submitted applications on an apartment posted 24 hours ago. No one had even viewed it.
Campbell, who’s in her 30s making $75,000 annually, said she's spent time every day for a month scouring single-family home rentals. A longtime New York resident, she said Louisville attracted her as a less competitive market where it seemed possible to affordably rent a house in a walkable area.
Instead, she's watched apartment after apartment, with prices often mirroring her first home in Brooklyn, get snatched up instantaneously.
“I really didn't think it was going to be this hard,” Campbell said, laughing in exasperation.
For Lucy Boyd, her search got to the point that she thought it might just be easier to get a Planet Fitness membership and live out of her van.
The only reason she isn't, she said, is due to "dumb luck.” When she spotted the listing for her $800-a-month apartment in Old Louisville, she had the day off from her 60-hour work week, which allowed her to lease it immediately.
But now, Boyd, 24, said she'd rather own a home than spend more than half her income renting that apartment, where the roof began leaking shortly after she moved in. And she wishes the world promised to members of her generation by their parents was a world that was actually there.
"It's so cheesy, but it's the American dream," she said. "We should be able to live where we want to live. It's disappointing. It's so disappointing to be in my mid-20s and come to the realization that my friends and I are never going to own a home."
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This pressure Campbell and Boyd felt comes back to the same phenomenon Massey, Silvers and Carter all identified: demand. According to Carter, Kentucky has not built enough housing in the last 40 years to keep up with the demand.
So, as Louisville's population grows, competition grows with it — with apartments going to the highest bidder.
Silvers believes if landlords were setting prices too high, nobody would be renting. But Carter said the idea that people can simply choose cheaper landlords, who uniformly raise rents, does not reflect reality.
Landlords "may think they're jacking up prices in a way the market can bear, but people will always have to have a place to live,” Carter said. “It’s heartbreaking to watch.”
How people can see a way out
After all he’s seen, Ethan Lawson said he has become a “very anti-landlord type of guy.”
The 26-year-old saw the rent at his Germantown apartment jump $200 after he moved last year. He said he saw the rent at his new apartment rise $250 in April while he tried to deal with flooding from plumbing issues. And he saw his landlord explain they were just following what other properties in the area were doing — all while he worked two jobs as a full-time law student at the University of Louisville.
He said friends are beginning their careers as attorneys and unable to afford a place to stay without roommates. So he has started to ask himself why he isn't seeing what he calls a “100% political issue” being solved.
Other states are far ahead of Kentucky when it comes to tenant protections.
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Under Connecticut law, for example, cities must have a "Fair Rent Commission," which Wildaliz Bermudez, director of the commission in New Haven, said is "tasked with controlling and eliminating excessive rental charges." If a tenant feels their rent is unfair, they can file a complaint with their local group, which will immediately begin to gather evidence — looking at the tenant's income, the landlord's expense reports, code violations at the property and even doing its own property assessment.
Bermudez said the commission then facilitates a negotiation between landlord and tenant. If there is not mutual agreement, the commission issues a ruling, setting the rent for the next year.
"Without a Fair Rent Commission, it would be a lot harder for tenants to figure out what kind of reprieve they could have when their rent is at an unconscionable amount," Bermudez said.
The Connecticut commissions can only address increases that occur in occupied units. But in Oregon, a statewide rent control program allows the government to limit exactly how much a landlord can charge.
Louisville's Metropolitan Housing Coalition, in its 2022 state of housing report, has proposed Kentucky adopt a rent-control ordinance as well. And Lawson, who used to live in rent-controlled Washington, D.C., said he seconded the coalition's proposal.
Still, other groups, such as the Louisville Tenants Union, a grassroots group founded in March working to improve tenants' rights, believe the extent of the problem necessitates more aggressive measures. These include making housing a human right under federal law and adding a Tenant's Bill of Rights to city law.
Anything less, they argue, only puts a Band-Aid on the system.
"Rent is the primary means by which tenants are exploited under capitalism," tenant organizer Jonathan Meador wrote in a statement to The Courier Journal. "Until we decommodify housing by putting it directly into the hands of communities, we will continue to see the abuse of tenants by private capital in Louisville."
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At heart, Mabry isn't asking for vast riches. For her, it all comes back to her daughter.
She spends a lot of her day as a renter trying to make sure she doesn't see "mommy breaking down," but doesn't want to be. Yet she does it all so that she might show her daughter not only that a better life is possible for her now, but to show her how to fight for a better future. To show her such a future, one without crushing price increases, can still be possible.
"What if you were in my situation?" Mabry said. "If you were going through this, how would you feel? And if you can't feel that, feel a little bit of compassion, then what can you have?"
Correction: This story was updated to reflect the Louisville Tenants Union effort to establish a Tenant's Bill of Rights would be put in place in city law, and to reflect the Willowbrook Apartments complex is in Buechel.
Reach reporter Thomas Birmingham @TBirmingham@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @cthomasbirm.
