The landlord-tenant relationship is one of the most basic economic transactions in our society, and we are concerned that it is under siege or facing an outright threat.
Tenant and homeowner-rights advocates, along with allies in the state legislature, want a law providing a year-long protection for tenants from eviction and rent increases and foreclosure protection for homeowners.
There is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic cost millions of Americans their incomes and threatened their ability to pay rents and mortgages. Thankfully, federal economic-stimulus money and eviction moratoriums like one in place in Massachusetts protect tenants who lost jobs.
But landlords have mortgages too — and utility bills, building maintenance costs, insurance payments and property taxes. Denying them rent means denying them income which means building maintenance declines and neighborhoods decline.
Gov. Baker on Tuesday extended the state’s eviction and foreclosure moratorium through mid August to Oct. 17. With coronavirus by no means conquered, most tenants and landlords can agree additional tenant and homeowner protections make sense.
What does not make sense is a legislative initiative threatening to dismantle the economic relationship between landlords and tenants by providing a year-long protection for tenants and homeowners from eviction or foreclosure.
The definition of landlord in a city like Lynn includes businesspeople who earn their livings from real estate and who own dozens of buildings with hundreds of apartments. But the definition also includes the building owner relying on rent from two or three buildings with a dozen tenants.
Most tenants pay their rent and, if they have trouble paying, they contact their landlord and discuss mutual arrangements to defer or redistribute rent payments.
Mutual respect underpins the tenant-landlord relationship. Providing tenants with sweeping, long-term protections allows irresponsible tenants to become scofflaws to the detriment of landlords and, ultimately, to the communities and businesses that rely on taxes paid by building owners and the services they contract in order to maintain their property.
It also scares away potential developers and builders who are desperately needed to tip the balance away from a lack of housing production that has plagued Massachusetts for decades.
Legislators must listen to landlords before, in the words of one landlord, problems caused by tenants not paying rent and landlords not maintaining buildings “spiral out of control.”
Creating a year-long eviction and foreclosure moratorium is bad policy.
We hope legislators are not doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.
