That's it. Works like a charm. No bullshits like rent control or whatever.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.