This is a big problem in a lot of places. It's really hard for cities to strike a good balance between renters and owners, and I think few do it well. Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters).
That's it. Works like a charm. No bullshits like rent control or whatever.
There is no reason either should take 6 months+ to litigate (real world example). I even had an email from the tenant stating they would start paying again if we would reduce the rent.
No damage, no question about the facts, just someone who knew that worst case scenario is 6 months free housing for them, simply because that’s how long paperwork apparently takes.
End result? I’m even more selective to who I rent out to, and the costs are borne by innocent people who just don’t happen to have sufficient history.
They’d much rather pass on the cost of higher rental insurance, or failing that an income tax hike.
But anyway, generally speaking, I think they benefit on average more from a slow and inefficient judicial system. The occasional 6+ month eviction battle is a rare negative outcome that comparatively few landlords have to deal with.
> The courts should be speedy at forcing landlords to rectify problems just as the courts should be speedy at forcing out squatters.
In France it can take years to evict people who stop paying rent. So now 90% of all rental contracts have an insurance for non-payments included in the contract.
A few bad apples forced every other tenant to pay more in rent just because politicians decided that squatters had more rights than the owners. And god have mercy on your soul if you decide to take back what is yours when you get tired of waiting for the justice system to do it's job. If you do, you'll be the one the cops will come for, not the squatters.
> now 90% of all rental contracts have an insurance for non-payments included in the contract.
Then what happens in practice is that the owner will contract an insurance policy via the real estate agency that manages the rental property. As a result of this, in the end if the insurance company deems you to be too high risk, then they won't insure you and the owner will not take the risk to rent his dwelling without it even if they like you and want you to live in their rental.
So what we have is a de-facto rental market that is controlled by a few insurance companies who decide the fate of the tenants. The owner, the real estate agency don't really have much power in terms of decision.
For the owner it makes things easier, they don't really have to think too much. Their rent is guaranteed by the insurance company and for the real estate agency, they can always turn down "undesirable" tenants by claiming that the insurance company rejected their application.
The tenants most of the time have no idea about this stuff.
As you put it, it is a hidden tax on the tenants because the price of the insurance is now baked in the rent that is paid by everyone, good tenants or bad tenants alike. When I was working in RE 11 years ago, the insurance cost something like 2 to 3% of the monthly rent and then another 5 to 7% got paid to the real estate agency managing the rental.
Today, I reckon, after all the inflation from the past few years, most likely 15% of the rent is gone before the owner sees a dime each month. As you can imagine this is not a very good incentive to put your apartment on the market. And that is not even touching on the various rent control policies that have been rolled out in the last few years in certain cities which have exacerbated the rental crisis.
The effect is that honest people find it difficult to rent an apartment because abusers run rampant and the system protects them. In some European countries you need to prove you have stable job and get recommendation from the previous landlord to even be in the consideration and then you basically have to go for an interview. It's a ridiculous and humiliating process which wouldn't exist if landlords could throw out abusers without much hassle.
As long as RealPage and friends exist, market rates are whatever they say they are. There’s no free market in real estate.
Sadly, courts move slowly so it will probably be years before a decision.
According to who? Landlords already tend to exaggerate to try to keep your security deposit, tenants would have no motivation to admit to damages after the lease ends. If the answer is "go to court", then "evictions are fast" will have to be amended.
Also, while reasonable people can agree that there's room to improve the balance on tenants rights, the idea of swinging from "total" to "0" rights based solely on payment status doesn't strike me as the debate's end.
If you lose a job and miss a paycheck this month, maybe you need an extra month to get back on your feet. If you lose housing right away, it's gonna be harder to find a job ("why is your suit wrinkled? why do you smell like you haven't taken a shower in a week?"), which makes it harder to get an apartment that would stabilize things.
We have safety nets so the smallest bump doesn't shoot you right to the bottom.
It shouldn't be indefinite, and the problem is finding how many months of friction should exist before we reach "this aint gonna get better", but instant-cutoff quickly becomes a feedback loop of shit.
I can stop paying my electricity bill in november and our state's utility companies CANNOT cut me off until the spring, because without heat I would literally die in Maine. There are similar laws for gas utilities.
I can have a billion dollar bill with Verizon, but if I dial 911, they are legally obligated to connect me to emergency services.
Also, ask people who work for utility companies how well any of this works to actually compel payment from the kind of people who are good at abusing debt.
Answer: Fucking not at all. My brother worked for the cable company, rather limited regulation in terms of requiring the company to continue servicing someone who was delinquent. 95% of his job was still disconnects, often involving someone showing up to the door with their rifle to make a point.
Yeah, I know, Berkeley. Rent control was very anti-landlord. But "rents have total rights as long as they pay" sounds too harsh to me.
You think something other than renter protections was stopping her from kicking her squatter out?
They seem to want the landlord to take on the government's role to provide social housing and therefore you shouldn't be able to kick them out for non-payment, contracts should be very long (>5 years, or even indefinite), there should be rent control instead of market rates etc.
This can have lots of issues. Imagine something like a good school zone changing, an event that may not be accounted for by the index. Insurance and taxes are determined by current value, that is partially determined by market rent, but the landlord cant adjust.
This also hurts a specific landlord when it comes time to sell, making a tenanted property potentially less valuable (and reducing the incentive to take on a tenant at all). This does not impact the general property value mind, as the tenant only benefits and creates this problem if the index is below the market.
If you want a fair balance, "its mine as long as I pay market rent" is pretty good. "its mine as long as I pay indexed rent" is not great, as it removes the financial benefit of capital investment from the landlord.
If you as a tenant want to lock a rate - sign long term contract. Then a year or six months before expiring start renew talks. Don't forget that market also changes - you may be in a better position too.
Look - I support the idea of people owning their own homes and renting being the exception than the norm. But you can't solve housing shortage by making the market for whatever stock there is even more inefficient. The brejnevki in the soviet union were terrible quality wise, but they get the job done in providing shelter from the elements for the rapidly urbanizing country.
In East and South East Asia they are also quite proficient in building massive 30 stories high rises.
Plus, the policy goal of allowing small-scale stuff like ADU's is to encourage people to become landlords. "Your tenant has total right" rules have the opposite effect.
I'm a renter and always have been a renter, but it has always been crazy to me that the cost of people without a house is dumped on the unlucky landlord. If the decision is that this cost must be put on society, at least it should be spread among all citizens/landlords (e.g. with a tax on rent).
Not having the government paying while waiting for the eviction is the same as now: the government can just take ages.
The risk to landlords when the renters doesn't uphold the contract needs to be limited. This is also the reason why an insurance would be an inferior solution: there is still no incentive for the government to intervene fast.
We might find out that it's preferable to build social housing rather than paying rent to landlords, and the government starts actually doing something about it
Where is your evidence of this "big problem"?
No state allows what you describe. This being some sort of widespread problem is a myth that's been running around for decades after Pacific Heights which was part of Hollywood cashing in on white fright in the late 80's early 90's.
For example, in super-liberal Massachusetts: if you are one day late with your rent, the landlord can start eviction proceedings. The tenant is given time to find legal assistance and respond - shockingly, you can't just slap an eviction notice on the door and bounce someone onto the street. You have to prove to a judge that your tenant isn't doing what they should be doing, or is doing things they shouldn't be. Shockingly, your tenant has a right to defend themselves. Do people abuse the process? Sure, some do. They get away with it at most once, because...there's a record of it all in housing court and eviction proceedings are pretty much a deathblow with any landlord doing their homework.
> the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.*
...which is why landlords screen tenants for employment/income and renting history, search for records under their name in housing court, and google them to see if they have any arrests in the news, etc. Come on.
> Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters)
Bad landlord far outweight bad tenants in this housing market. Whereas one tenant might make one landlord's life difficult, one bad landlord can make hundreds if not thousands of people's lives miserable and dangerous. Daniel Ohebshalom is a great example:
https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/017-24/nyc-s-infamous-wors...
That press release is the culmination of something like a decade of housing rights advocates trying to get the city to do something about him. And what did he do? Soon as he go out of jail, he started harassing his tenants:
https://nypost.com/2024/05/01/us-news/nycs-worst-landlord-in...
This isn't some anecdote.
Barry Singer, with an average of 1,804 open HPD violations across seven buildings
Alfred Thompson, with an average of 1,285 open HPD violations across 15 buildings
Karen Geer, with an average of 1,193 open HPD violations across seven buildings
Melanie Martin, with an average of 1,132 open HPD violations across four buildings
Claudette Henry, with an average of 1,130 open HPD violations across 15 buildings
That list is a "hundred" of the top violators and it's likely the list of landlords with more than a dozen violations is probably more like "thousand" range or higher.
In my city, landlords are infamous for charging all sorts of illegal fees and also stealing people's security deposits under the guise of made-up cleaning and repair expenses; the courts have repeatedly ruled normal cleaning and simple repair (like fixing picture hangar hooks) is not valid reason for using someone's security deposit - it's part of the cost of doing business.
You can take them to housing court - and maybe eventually get your money back - but in the meantime you're definitely not getting your lease renewed so you're left needing to find a new place...without a reference, which pretty much tanks your chances of finding another apartment because the market is so tight.
The problem is that for large corporate landlords this is a statistical risk that can be priced in and accounted for across hundreds of units.
For small mom-and-pop landlords renting out their basement, it's a roll of the dice on whether any given tenant will completely ruin their life and be impossible to get rid of.
Of course many people will respond to this by saying that the rights of people to have a place to live are more important than the rights of homeowners to have a bit of side income, but if the law makes it too risky to rent out a second suite, nobody will want to do it -- which makes the housing crisis even worse for renters as there will be fewer places available to rent.
Being a small-time landlord is unreasonably risky due to tenant friendly laws and backed up courts.
Similarly, I've found renting from small-time landlords to be a worse experience. They tend to do things that a large corporation would eventually face lawsuits over - discrimination, demanding more money up front, keeping deposits, poor upkeep of units, etc.
So I'm not even sure I want to encourage small time landlording anyway.
Some things maybe really are better managed by big, lawsuit-averse, emotionless companies.
The problem is that in cities that have regulated apartments out of existence it's the only existing place for renters to live, so we should be mindful of things that will squeeze its availability before enough apartments can be built to take up the demand.
In expensive Brooklyn all the dense, high-rise new construction is along the water front .. 15 minutes walk from the trains. The buildings are so far from the trains, that many of them advertise private shuttle services to entice buyers/renters.
Meanwhile the subway stations that the shuttle take you to are surrounded by blocks and blocks of 3 story buildings.
Its all completely backwards, except that there was no existing constituency living on the water front to protest & block new development.
Completely disagree. Every poor experience I had renting was with a big emotionless company. I have never had a poor experience with a small time landlord.
Just like landlord vet their prospective tenants, you should be vetting your prospective landlords. Someone with a few units is pretty easy to track down folks for references.
The problematic ones tended to be the ones in the "midrange" - between small time and big company. Using horrible management companies as contractors to farm out the dirty work, and generally getting away with it since they were big enough to throw their weight around - but not big enough to care about being squeaky clean to the letter of the law.
I'd rent out my basement mother in law unit, but due to tenant rights in my city there is not a single chance I will ever do so. From direct personal experience I know how difficult it is to remove a problematic tenant from a living situation no matter how much impact they may have on your life.
The outcome is that there is one less extremely affordable unit in the area for living in.
The solution is to make the rules different for small landlords.
How do you quantify small - number of units or dollar value? What is small - 1 unit? 2? 5?.
What stops a larger landlord setting up 1000 LLCs each managing 3 unit?
As soon as you get into "different laws apply to different people" you run into problems.
But when you don't do that, you run into different problems, which is what we have run into already.
Every time US tax code gets more complicated, it usually doesn't help the bottom 50%.
Actually funded court system?
Having to wait months to evict a tenant for legitimate reasons is a huge issue if it's affecting >50% of your rental units.
The risk of legal costs are basically passed along in the cost of rent. And bigger corporate landlords are naturally going to have a bigger advantage because they can pool their risks.
The point isn't that there are bad landlords. It's that you are creating a treadmill. The more you add tenant protections, the more costs you add to housing. And the more incentives you give landlords to screen tenants and otherwise behave badly.
What this means is that you can rent somewhere, not pay, it will take a minimum of 6 months to get rid of them since they can request RAFT and you must wait until the application is processed before the trial can proceed. After they're successfully evicted, after 4 years of no evictions, they can have it sealed, regardless if the judgement is paid or not.
Or, you can pay the judgement and have it sealed immediately, effectively getting a free loan. Not to mention, if you don't pay and proceedings are brought against you, if you pay to cure, prior to going to trial, you can have those sealed immediately with or without the landlord, so other landlords can't even know about that either.
Repeat. Free rent.