More inaugural-hype-busting

One piece of the general inauguration hype is that everyone in DC is renting out their apartments to out-of-towners, and fetching thousands and thousands of dollars.

Actually, that's probably not true. All we really know is that lots of people have listed their apartments on Craiglist and elsewhere for astronomical prices. Whether they are actually getting renters, let alone at those prices, is very much un-verified. The City Paper has done some reporting to suggest that responses to these ads are few and far between.

As Matt Yglesias puts it today, "despite widespread rumors of people reaping windfalls by renting out their houses for Inauguration Week, I have yet to encounter real hard evidence of any such thing happening."