Optimum regulation

[pktechgirlbackup]

My municipality has public (government funded) assistance programs to help people make the balloon payment required to rent an apartment (security deposit/first + last month's rent, etc). As assistance programs go, I'm pretty okay with this one: it's a one time investment that helps people get into long term better, more stable, cheaper living arrangements. It increases mobility and threat of exist from bad situations. I like all those things.

But why is it necessary? At least part of the reason is the insane tenants' rights laws. If it takes three months from missed payment to eviction, landlords will demand three months rent up front. A friend of my is being evicted because he missed a payment. The landlord isn't out any money yet because my friend paid last month's rent when he moved in, but he doesn't want to risk a repeat next month. If they could evict on two day's notice, the economically optimal thing would be to take a more wait and see attitude.

Except those rules didn't come about for no reason. I couldn't move on two days notice, and allowing my landlord to force me to do so would give him an extraordinary amount of power. It becomes trivial to extort people, and it's most effective against the most vulnerable, which is the opposite of how I like my extortion to go.

Full disclosure: I already dislike laws that give tenants substantial lead time before eviction, because 1. they're unfair and 2. they push us towards more professional landlords and fewer individuals renting out spaces, and thus hurt both small time capitalists and renters, to the benefit of large capitalists.

This is a thing I've been thinking about a lot since I read Debt. It makes the point that medieval European peasants tended to be heavily involved on both sides of the free market. A household was extended credit by the miller, but they were themselves extending credit to the cobbler. It kept the system from spiralling into wage slavery* or debt peonage, while still giving useful signals about what things were and weren't wanted. It bears a striking resemblance to the ghetto economics described by Sudhir Venkatesh in Off the Books. I'm hoping that things like lyft and airbnb will move more of us back to that, but as they grow they're running into tax and regulatory obstacles.

And we have those regulations on hotels, and taxis, and restaurants for reasons too. Food poisoning, bed bugs, and kidnappings are real things that I think the government should work against. Regulatory capture makes it worse, but that's a distraction from the fact that every safety regulation disproportionately discourages new and small entrepreneurs.

Third, initially unrelated thing: I've been thinking a lot about parenting lately, and how we tend to emphasize protecting children from dangerous things, or teaching them to protect themselves. Avoiding dangerous situations costs them a lot, both in good things they miss out on, and bad things they would have learned from. If I have kids**, I want to emphasize resilience and recovery from trauma, not avoidance out of fear.

This is relevant because the government's current tact is a lot more like wrapping your kid in bubble wrap, and a lot less like teaching them to stand up and brush themselves off. Speculatively, what if we lessened food safety restrictions but provided free treatment for food poisoning? What if anyone could run a cab but everyone had a panic button that could summon the police immediately? I already think the government should spend infinite money in the War on Bed Bugs because fuck bed bugs it's a public safety issue. New reputation mechanisms are arising that could substitute for the closeness of a medieval village.

Once again I have no closing paragraph, just a bunch of thoughts.


*A phrase I still find ludicrous and diminishing to the horror of genuine slavery, but am now beginning to see what it's getting at.

**A thing I have been feeling more positive about since the hypochlorhydria was treated.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

I assume you'red still a renter, so this stuff still directly affects you? One thing to consider is that moving gets more difficult the more family you've got. I'm not sure a family with two kids could move on a month's notice, especially given that moving also involves finding a new place.

I've had much better experiences with professional landlords than amateur ones, although I've only gone through three landlords at this point. We lost power to half our upstairs, and our landlord took two weeks to fix it. Tenants' rights is supposed to protect people in situations like that. But we couldn't have just up and moved to show the landlord they were doing a bad job — it was during the school year and I was working long hours. And there was a lease and a security deposit to lose. We're also pretty sure our last place was an illegal rental — unlicensed and never inspected. It is my impression that Philadelphia, at least, needs to do a better job of enforcing the regulations they have, and that less regulation would lead to even more abuses by landlords.

It seems really strange to hear somebody talk about tenants' rights like they're a bad thing. I don't think I've ever heard anyone do that before. But then, I've always rented in cities (NY, Philly) with strong tenant protections. What city does your friend who is being evicted live in?

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

i'm not saying all tenants rights laws are bad, but that they have negative consequences that tend to be harder to see than their positive ones.

your ex-landlord was atrocious, but I don't see how laws that let people stay in apartments they're not paying forF for months, would have helped you. I fully support laws that require reasonable turn around times for livability issues like that.

[crystalpyramid]

They do end up being connected, though — the two cases I know of where friends of mine lived somewhere without paying rent, it was because they were withholding rent due to major building code violations. Slowing down the process of evictions while that gets sorted out is useful. (In one case, the building turned out to be illegally patched into the electrical grid; in another the ceiling and walls were visibly falling down around them.)

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Yup, they are, and yes, I'm glad people have the ability to do rent strikes in those situations. But that doesn't mean the laws can't be (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Landlord-nightmare-in-eviction-attempt-3849250.php) abused (http://articles.latimes.com/1993-08-08/realestate/re-21713_1_rental-property-owners) or that this doesn't have unintended consequences (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/us/01bcstevens.html?_r=0).

[crystalpyramid]

You're saying "the laws" as though they're the same everywhere, but all your examples are from California, where the laws are in fact much more pro-tenant than they are on the East Coast. And then you're using that to argue that the basic protections that apply everywhere — like not being able to evict someone on two days' notice — are unreasonable and unfair.

I think it must be pretty easy to set up as a landlord in Philadelphia. Friends have stories of renting from college students, and a lot of landlords seem to be pretty young people who are just renting out one building, or part of a building. I'm not seeing the negative effects you claim are caused by basic tenant protection laws.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

The only thing I've said was outright unfair is laws that let people stay in property they are not paying for (baring previous contract violations on the part of the landlord, such as prolonged power loss). I never said laws requiring a certain amount of notice of eviction were unfair, just that they have consequences, such as landlords starting eviction proceedings earlier.

I believe some tenant protections are good, and that even the good ones can have negative consequences, and that people will trend towards overprotecting tenants because the costs of underprotecting are more obvious. I don't know exactly how far the law should go, especially because enforcement varies so widely. My gut sense is that SF and Seattle have gone too far, but I don't know about other municipalities, and there's a wide range of protection level that I don't think I'm competent to asses, because the signal is so noisy.

[crystalpyramid]

When you say you dislike laws that give tenants lead time before eviction because they're unfair — who are they unfair to?

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

laws that let people stay in the property when they're not paying are unfair to the owner.