For full disclosure’s sake, let me state that I rented for 17 years. I was a tenant in Allston, Brighton, the Back Bay, Fenway, Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Dorchester and South Boston.
I rented some dumps and some great places. I can tell you who Harold Brown was and I know what industrial strength roach spray smells like.
That said, I am a rent control opponent who believes that if you really want to help renters, then help them become homeowners.
The logic behind proposals to cap rents borders on the idiotic by disregarding the expenses building owners shoulder. Rent control proposals also ignore a little thing called inflation.
If I’m a landlord and you’re a government official who tells me, “You can only charge this much for rents,” what am I going to say? “OK, well I provide my tenants with water, but if I am only collecting X amount in rents then, according to my budget, I’m going to have to stop providing water after 10 months because my rent income won’t cover my costs.”
You can extend this logic to building maintenance, snow removal, common area electricity, and a number of other expenses.
What really bothers me about pro-rent control arguments is the assumptions made by proponents. They portray rent control as a solution to a problem as immensely complex as a housing crisis.
They portray landlords, with a few “mom and pop” exceptions, as Snidely Whiplash characters intent on dumping unsuspecting and desperate tenants into crappy apartments and charging them exorbitant rents.
I’m guessing that for every underhanded greedy landlord out there, there are two professional problem tenants who know how to use the system to live free.
These vermin concoct a code violation or personal hardship and announce, “Nope, not paying this month.” The landlord tries to reason with them to no avail and takes them to Housing Court where only the most naïve landlords think a request for legal redress is going to end up yielding a rent payment.
What it is more likely to trigger is a months, maybe years-long, slog through the courts with no-show tenants wasting the landlord’s time and monetary judgments rendered by the court not worth the paper they are printed on because the tenant has no money.
If you’re a landlord stuck with a dishonest tenant, you’re lucky to lose a few months rent before you get rid of them: forget about recovering your security deposit and, oh by the way, those legal bills are yours to pay.
We can get rid of bad tenants and a lot of other problems by tackling the multi-faceted challenge of making people owners. This is a challenge that should be squarely placed in the hands of the private sector because the public sector has failed at substantially improving the lives of American renters.
Progressives will tell you carving a path to ownership won’t work because tenants will be at the mercy of predatory banks and mortgage companies and unscrupulous developers.
What they won’t tell you is that they secretly like the fact that tax dollar spending on rent subsidies keeps many people who could forge a path to ownership with professional guidance stuck on the rent merry-go-round or dependent on housing vouchers to keep a roof over their heads.
We can do better. We can help tenants secure a small ownership stake that can grow into full-fledged home ownership.
Being an owner means being an equity holder which is another way of saying you can look to a future that doesn’t include endless rent payments.
It’s a future that can include paying for college and saving for retirement.
Let’s not defy the most basic market-economics logic and embrace rent control when we can put a lot of smart people in a room and come up with a way to brighten the future for many other people.
