In 2019, scoring a rental applicant on anything past income and a credit file took a vendor, a contract, a minimum seat count and a budget line. Four property groups in the city could carry that. Everyone else read the references and formed an impression.
By 2026 the model runs on a laptop, and the woman applying for the two-bedroom is scored four times before anyone meets her. The letting agency scores her ability to pay. Her name goes into the block's risk pool at the insurer underwriting it. The management company estimates how much of its staff time she will take. And the landlord, who has never scored anyone in his life, runs something a friend sent him. None of the four knows the others did it.
%% title: Four grants, one tenant %% caption: Each arrow is a relationship the sequence's tests can read: one institution, one grant, one exercise. The count of arrows is a fact about her, and no test on any single arrow reaches it. flowchart TD classDef inst stroke-width:2px; classDef unread stroke-dasharray: 6 4; A[Letting agency<br/>ability to pay]:::inst --> T((The applicant)) B[Insurer<br/>block risk]:::inst --> T C[Management co.<br/>staff time]:::inst --> T D[Landlord<br/>own model]:::inst --> T T -.-> E[Jurisdictional density: 4<br/>read by no test above]:::unread
Fewer hands, then more hands
The old arrangement kept the capability inside four firms. The new one puts it within reach of every agency, every underwriter, every managing company and every landlord with a laptop. Measured the way concentration is normally measured, this is a clear improvement. The vendor's pricing power is gone. So is the lock-in. Four companies no longer decide who in the city gets scored and who gets read by a human.
Yet her exposure went from one score to four. Both sentences are true at once, and the tests this sequence has built can see only the first of them.
Each one passes
Run the tests on all four and they come back clean. The agency assesses whether an applicant can pay the rent, which is what a letting agency was authorized to do before software existed. It treats her the way its grant allowed, on the features that justified the grant. Its question, decision and consequence are unchanged, and only the estimate is sharper. The insurer prices risk, the managing company forecasts its own labor, and the landlord chooses a tenant, each inside its own grant.
Across four grants and four exercises inside them, nothing reaches past what any one of these actors was always entitled to decide.1 Every test this sequence has built takes one institution and one person and asks whether that grant still covers what is being done, so each reads one arrow and has nowhere to put the other three.2
What four scores do
The four scores do not fail independently. Suppose her file carries one bad entry, an eviction case filed against her six years ago and dismissed. Tenant screening reports carry records like that, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that an eviction record tends to end in a denial whatever the outcome of the case.3 The agency's model reads the entry, and if the insurer and the landlord pull from the same screening bureau, their models read it too. An error a person reading her references might have asked about once is counted against her four times by parties that never compare notes.
The next application runs through the same kinds of models with the same entry in the same place. If she finds the error and gets the agency to fix its copy, the other three still hold theirs. Contesting it means four procedures with four sets of forms and four clocks, and she has to know a score exists before she can contest it. Usually she learns of one, from a denial letter, and never of the rest.
Legitimacy does not sum
The sequence already holds that legitimacy does not travel, since a grant covers what it covered and thins with every step past it. Density shows a second problem, because legitimacy does not add up either.
Jurisdictional density is the count of institutions that govern one person at the same time. It is a fact about her, and it belongs to none of the four. Nobody can see it, her included. Each institution sees its own arrow, and she sees at most the one that sent her a letter.
Four adequate grants do not make an adequate situation for her, because no grant was ever measured against the others. Every legitimacy test runs down a single arrow, from one institution to one person. None runs across institutions to ask what they add up to at the point where they meet, and non-aggregative legitimacy names that blind spot.
It needs no villain. Four parties produce it by each doing exactly what the tests require, and the dismissed case counted four times lives entirely in the space between their grants.
Not a case for the four firms
None of this means the capability should have stayed with four firms. For years the landlord did not score anyone because of the budget, not because any rule said he may not, and a price is a bottleneck rather than a boundary. Concentration rationed her exposure as a side effect of protecting four companies' margins. Anyone who wants that back is asking for the same scoring sold at a markup, reaching fewer people by accident.
Breaking a capability out of a few hands redistributes who holds it and says nothing about how many institutions end up governing any one person, so deconcentration by itself points nowhere in particular. Those two quantities were always different, and they have been treated as one because, for most of the history of the argument, concentration was where the cases were.
The count, and who could act on it
An individual right works one institution at a time, which is the shape of the problem rather than a solution to it. She can contest the agency's score with the agency and ask the insurer for its reasons, four times over, each time from scratch. None of the parties produced the condition alone, and they owe each other nothing and owe her nothing jointly.
What is missing is collective leverage, meaning a way to make the hidden count visible, gather the people who carry it, and give that group standing because of the total rather than any one score. The closest existing forms gather many people against one institution's rule.4 Density needs the reverse, several institutions answering together for one count, and no such body exists yet.
All four could produce their grants on demand. She could produce nothing, because what happened to her happened between them.
Notes
The grant covers what it covered, and usefulness does not extend it: Justification Is Not Contagious. The refusal underneath: Five Ways a Fact Becomes a Right.
Justification-equivalence, least jurisdiction and the adequacy test, and who has to show what once an exercise moves: Same Charter, Different Office. The same tests, and the reference point none of them reads: Refusal Is Not a Counteroffer.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Tenant Background Checks Market (November 2022), on outdated, incorrect and incomplete eviction records in screening reports.
Who gets to hold many cases together against one rule, and whether the assembly carries standing: Filed at the Wrong Size.