Jay Parsons, the economist and price-setting software cheerleader who left RealPage right before it started getting sued by tenants and state AGs across the country for allegedly colluding with landlords to raise rents, joined JPI last week. If JPI rings a bell, perhaps it is because it is the development company that Scott Turner just left before his improbable nomination and confirmation as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Just a few days ago (while at his old job at a different Texas development company, Madera) Parsons was singing praises of Turner.
JPI and Realpage have done business together: Realpage piloted its short-term rental management platform, KigoHospitality, on a JPI property in 2018. In 2023, JPI partnered on a multifamily housing development project with Waymaker, a “faith-based real-estate investment fund” that created its platform “in partnership” with RealPage.
Scott Turner says he wants to “cut back on waste, fraud and abuse” in housing, measuring his success by “how many people we can uplift to get off HUD programs.” And yet his professional ties via his most recent gig at JPI leave him squarely associated with the corporations that are exacerbating the housing crisis. RealPage’s alleged rent-setting scheme and the millions of dollars it has potentially cost everyday Americans is apparently not the type of abuse Turner is worried about. Now that Jay Parsons has conveniently jumped to Turner’s former workplace, who do we think Turner will be listening to more often – the recipients of federal aid, which Turner has called “bondage,” or his former professional colleagues?
Photo: The White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, April 4 2019 via Flickr