An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right

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Regular_Atheist said:
As someone who has had a number of landlords, I find that they will always be money grabbing, desperate to charge you for something or steal your deposit. Then you report some kind of damage and it takes them weeks to deal with it, and they rely on some cheap handyman. I have no sympathy for them. They are the natural enemy of any tenant.
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You seem to think that every last landlord is a Daddy Warbucks dripping with cash that you feel entitled to expropriate from him. Got it.

Many landlords of single family homes are themselves small time proprietors. They have to deal with fixed expenses like mortgage, HOA fees, insurance and property tax. Then they may deal with additional fixed expenses like property managers and gardeners depending on their circumstances. Then there are the variable expenses like maintenance and repair. After all that, the margins may not be that good.

I’ve been a landlord when I needed to rent out my home for a period of time while I was working out of state on extended temporary assignments (look that up in the IRS regs). While it helped my bottom line, I was most definitely not getting rich from this and my tenants were not always good to my margins.
 
The most egregious case was that of Mark Zuckerberg who purchased land in Hawaii and then suing his neighbors, most of them native Hawaiians, in order to force them to sell their land to him.
 
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Regarding the $600 per week compensation, that was likely too much in addition to the state’s own compensation.

$600 per week = $15 per hour for a forty hour workweek.

Add that to a state’s standard compensation and even with the lowest compensation in the country, someone can easily collect over $20 per hour for staying home.

In CA, the max compensation is $450 per week. Add the $600 to that and the recipient was getting $1050 per week. That’s $26.25 per hour for 40 hours!

Now does anyone not understand the problem with coaxing people to get off the couch and apply for a job?
 
You seem to think that every last landlord is a Daddy Warbucks dripping with cash that you feel entitled to expropriate from him. Got it.
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I haven’t said that at all. I have had a landlord who only owned a single property that she rented out - she rented the flat that she actually lived in. She was probably the most money grabbing that we had, though. In a way the poorer landlords are worse, because they really need the money and they can’t afford to fix the house you live in themselves. My issue isn’t so much that all landlords are personally entitled and mean (though many of them certainly are), but more that the logic of property and of profit forces them to exploit their tenants. The solution is to abolish the basis of rent, which is property, profit, and the capitalist economy.

Basically I don’t care about the personal virtue of any individual capitalist or landlord or any other Christian concern, but the social relations that bring about exploitation and crisis.
 
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Regular_Atheist said:
The solution is to abolish the basis of rent, which is property, profit, and the capitalist economy.
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I agree maybe not an ideal situation but your remedy calls for the use of an atomic bomb when a negotiation and/or change of providers would do.

As outlined above, there are two aspects that have characterized every government that called itself communist or socialist. Every single one.
  1. Capital isn’t abolished. It is just expropriated and recharacterized by the rulers. As Orwell once said, “some are more equal than others”. There are always going to be rulers. That is human nature.
  2. If positive reinforcements are removed for working hard, then negative reinforcements will take their place. That is human nature. As characterized by the saying “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.
 
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“Teen Vogue” is basically the preteen equivalent of “Weekly World News”.

Most preteens and teens take it as seriously as most grownups take “Weekly World News”.

I would not worry too much about it.
 
Regular_Atheist said:
As someone who has had a number of landlords, I find that they will always be money grabbing, desperate to charge you for something or steal your deposit. Then you report some kind of damage and it takes them weeks to deal with it, and they rely on some cheap handyman. I have no sympathy for them. They are the natural enemy of any tenant.
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You must have horrible luck. I have had only one bad landlord that I though was the money grubbing type. Every other landlord I’ve had has been honest to a fault, generous when we had unforseen circumstances, and very responsive. I once lived with 3 other guys in a 4 bedroom townhouse. One of the guys was severely injured in a car accident and was hospitalized for months, and then when out moved in with his parents. Our landlord adjusted our rent to accommodate us by only raising our individual rent by a very small portion of the the 1/3 missing (total rent was $3200/mo–$800/ea–but she only raised our rent to $900/mo/ea). I even had a landlord stop by while I was re-doing my brakes in my driveway and chat, then stop by later that day with 4 new tires with wheels he “had lying around in his garage and was always looking for a good use for them.” The only bad landlord I had charged us for missing screens on the house that were never installed and told us we failed to note it on our check-in list.

I am now a landlord and have a property management company take care things. I chose the company because they are responsive and maintain the property. Nothing hurts property faster than ignoring an issue. When a tenant calls about a leaky faucet, that might turn into a major leak that can damage property. When a tenant calls about the mailbox having fallen off the post (probably due to vanalism), that’s a quick way to get a nasty note from the postmaster. Landlords that care about their property, care about being responsive and care about quality repairs–so they don’t happen again. Crappy landlords don’t care about their property. The root of the problem is not that they don’t care about the tenants, but don’t care about the property.

Finally, when COVID hit, long before the governor instituted a ban on late fees, evictions, etc, our management company had already contacted us requesting that we be lenient with the tenants, many of which are college students with very limited income, usually supplemented by work in the very service industries which were the first to be labeled “non-essential.” They reminded us that “1/2 rent is better than no rent when they can’t pay.” I agreed. I remember when I got laid off back in the dot-com bust, and how my landlord worked with me to to get through until I found new work. And when I couldn’t, let me out of the lease with only a lost deposit (rather than the usual 2.5x monthly rent for cancelling). We didn’t announce it, but we were prepared if our tenants were struggling, we’d help them out.

Note, we had a mortgage to pay. And my understanding is that the payment “move to the end of the loan” touted was only for primary residences, not investment properties.
 
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Regular_Atheist said:
I am a Marxist, essentially.
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I see. I myself am more sympathetic to Proudhon’s philosophy. Kropotkin is another favorite. I’ve never understood the marxian response to them, really. It seems like the anarchists made mincemeat of Marxist apologetics.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I know plenty of 40somethings who would have been on board with that at age 25, but now at 40 with a wife and kids and perhaps a house that they worked very hard to buy and fix up, don’t support it any more.
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lol true… they say the hippies of the 60s became the yuppies of the 80s
 
The only landlords/ladies I would want to see gone are those who discriminate against renters with pets (it’s illegal to do so with children, though at one time, they could refuse to rent to people with children, as well). The exception to that are retirement communities, which are by nature adult only.

Even when renters are willing to pay a pet deposit, and are good, conscientious people who take care of and supervise their pets, many landlords/ladies will refuse to rent to them simply because they have animals, without even giving them a chance to prove their pets aren’t destructive.

And what is really galling is when the landlords/ladies themselves own pets, but won’t allow their tenants that privilege. I say that if they won’t let anyone else have pets, THEY shouldn’t have them, either.
 
That’s counting on people being responsible pet owners. I have two dogs, but I don’t let other people bring pets to my house, if I was a landlord I wouldn’t want other people’s pets in my rental property either.
 
Ridgerunner said:
he regulators would consider this a delinquent loan. They will stand for only so many delinquent loans on a lender’s books, and then they’ll shut them down. All of this stuff is fragile.
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Fragile as it is, we’re in unprecedented times.
 
upant said:
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Ridgerunner:
Seize existing rental properties and nobody will build any more of them.
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who will maintain the existing buildings, when you have no investment, you generally have no interest, your money is better spent on other things. look at some current examples in some of our cities.
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If you can force people to give up their property, it isn’t much of a step to force people to maintain them.
 
JanR said:
The only landlords/ladies I would want to see gone are those who discriminate against renters with pets (it’s illegal to do so with children, though at one time, they could refuse to rent to people with children, as well). The exception to that are retirement communities, which are by nature adult only.
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Their property, their rules.
 
Yes, but they don’t have to be unreasonable about it. Some of them have a really contemptuous attitude toward prospective renters wanting to have pets, almost as though there’s something dirty about it. Makes me wonder if they even appreciate animals.

But, yes, it is their property, and if they insist upon imposing such rules, they may find it harder to obtain renters, and thus, rental income. If they can live with that, fine.
 
I have heard it said that pets, particularly cats, will leave dander behind that is almost impossible to get rid of. People with allergies react to it immediately upon entering a house or apartment where there have been pets even if there is no other sign of their having been there, and won’t rent no matter what.
 
JanR said:
And what is really galling is when the landlords/ladies themselves own pets, but won’t allow their tenants that privilege. I say that if they won’t let anyone else have pets, THEY shouldn’t have them, either.
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I don’t understand why this is galling. They are not renting out their own residence in which they live.
A landowner, in their primary residence is the owner, and will likely live there long term.
In contrast
Rental properties, by there nature, have a big turnover rate. They constantly have residents move in and out. The owner has to take into consideration not only current people who are renting but future renters as well.
Pet damage, pet dander, and pet odors, are things that landlords need to take into consideration because these things negatively affects their investment and future rentability of their investment.
 
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