Realistically, there's nothing I can do about it because the eviction process is so long and time consuming, that by the time I finally evict the person, my lease would be over and I'd be moving out anyway. After having given my roommate free housing for many months of course.

> "Giving people housing is important"

I agree! So let's make the government financially liable for any missed rent payments, while the eviction process is pending. After all, if providing its citizens with housing is so important, it should be the state's financial responsibility, not that of a random landlord whose contract was violated. I'm all for universal basic income, but not income-appropriated-from-a-few-random-landlords.

> "Price it into your rent"

Ah, now we get to the real rub. Everyone already does this. If you're a rich, successful individual, you have the luxury of living anywhere you want, at market prices. If you're down on your luck, but want to turn things around, you'll find that many places will refuse to accept you anyway, because the risk is too great. Or they will offer you housing at significantly higher rents, because of the additional risks involved. Either way, you're getting screwed, just because some other deadbeat thinks he's entitled to free housing at the landlord's expense.

Most people don't understand the second order effects you've described. The downside of so much renter-favorable protections is an increase in rent which prices out those very same renters.

The person whose comment you are replying to doesn't understand that. So then when the rental market gets too hot for working people, his next demand will be that the government force landlords to rent at a particular price.

So then landlords don't want to rent at that price, because they would take a loss, so they choose not to rent at all. So then the market for rental properties contracts.

Then the person asks that the state appropriate the properties and rent it out directly. So then people lose their property and have no incentive to invest in property in the jurisdiction, and future workers, not interested in living in government dormitories, choose another jurisdiction to go build their companies and careers.

Then this person, aged 60 at that time, will be sitting in their rundown neighborhood where all the young people have left to go to another jurisdiction, and will be muttering ... things used to be soooo good. What ever happened?

Holy crap, are you actually putting all those words in my mouth?

And did you learn all that from me saying why laws protecting renters exist?

> And giving people housing is important, that's why the laws > often favor the person renting, not the owner.

As though if you think housing is important, all a policy maker should have to think about is the first order effect of protecting the renter's rights.

You did a lot more than say they exist. You said housing is important, that's why they exist. As though rental protection somehow advances the important goal of providing housing. One doesn't need more than that to identify who you are when it comes to reasoning about housing.

Well, here in Uruguay, eviction is also awful, so tenants are required to pay for "rent insurance", which is awful if you're a diligent rent-payer (as it's an extra month's rent every year), but it's great for the owner - if the tenant loses one month's payments, the owner gets reimbursed for every month and the judicial arm takes care of eviction.

It has never been easier to check background, credit, rental history. Something like $30 per applicant and you can require they pay the fee.

It’s not perfect but being blacklisted as an evicted deadbeat (or being someone who won’t provide verifiable rental history / references) is a pretty big disincentive to go nuclear on your rental. Sure some people are just leeches like the subject of this story but I wouldn’t imagine that’s anything but an edge case.

If I understood correctly, OP had leased a flat and rented out rooms at a surplus. Who's the leech?

> That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.

It depends where. In France you are completely stuck when someone dies not pay. It can take over a year to finally kick someone out.

And this is just if he is not paying. If someone pays, it is simply impossible. Every three years you may take back the house for your or your close family use only. You cannot sell it empty. You cannot end the contract. You are awfully stuck.

Germany has strong tenant protection, but the situation in the article would not be protected because the tenant and the landlord share the same space. The protections are only strong if you do not share. (2 weeks notice for both parties otherwise)

So find an investment that does not amplify the housing crisis.

Takes 15 days where I live to fully evict someone.

I was going to buy a house when I lived in SF and rent out the other 2 floors (to make it both reasonable to me and renters). After reading up on the laws I noped the fuck out of that.

This is why people rent to techies among other things.

The housing crisis is that there is less housing than people who want housing. Whether the homes are rented or owner-occupied has nothing to do with it.

If someone dies and does not pay, and it still takes a year to kick them out, won't the body be severely decomposed then?

Objects don't get the level of protection people do.

s/dies/does/

And it’ll make more sense to you.

Thanks. The joy of commenting on a mobile...

> It depends where. In France you are completely stuck when someone dies not pay. It can take over a year to finally kick someone out.

But then how do you kick them out? By doing something! Which was my point. Saying "nothing whatsoever to do about it" is a lie by the OP.

I'm not saying all the rules are sane. But it's better to protect the weak that need roof over their heads, than the persons renting out a house they don't need.

One could even argue the French law is good. If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many.

Owning multiple properties and renting them out isn't a right. Having a house to live in should be.

>Having a house to live in should be.

I think their is a confusion of rights and duties occurring here.

You have a right to own a house. What you are speaking about is others having a duty to provide you with a house. In particular, we need to be clear on exactly what the duty to provide housing is. For example, there is a significant difference between the government offering safe homeless shelters because society has a duty to provide some shelter, and legally being allowed to continue living in a rental unit that you stop paying for, because this constitutes a duty of the owner providing you with that particular house.

Sex is a common idea that helps establish the difference between a right and a duty. Banning gay individuals from having sex is wrong because it violates their right to sex. But no one has to have sex with another person because there is no duty to provide sex.

>If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many.

There is also the possibility of regulatory capture. It prevents someone who happens to own two properties from being a competitor in providing rental services while companies that specialize in it and have many properties of the right value to be able to spread out the risk are not threatened by the laws.

As someone looking to buy a house, I've considered the ability to rent it should I seek to move verses having to sell it, and it seems that tenant rights where I live (which are much weaker than French law) increase my risk of renting far more than it increases the risk of a company specializing in renting. Its weird to be in a position where I rent but feel there isn't enough protection while at the same time there is so much protection that it strongly impacts the logic of if I should buy.

Every able-bodied human has the capacity to provide their own housing, given enough land area on which to build. But in most places on Earth, the local legal regime has been constructed in such a way as to provide for a means of land ownership, where other people may be lawfully excluded from using the land, or even just being present on it.

There must be a tradeoff there. Everyone requires the legal right to occupy the volume of their own body. It would be completely unethical to make it illegal for a person to exist. Any attempt to do so induces such a person to treat the legal structure as a mortal enemy.

So in exchange for respecting a land property right of another, those land-owners have a duty to provide those who might otherwise develop that owned land for their own purposes with a location on which they may exist. They don't even need to actually build any houses, just to allow for any type of housing to be built without attempting to prevent it. If they fail in this duty, they have abrogated the social contract that allows land property to exist, and those with no place to stand could ethically seize the land property.

The right to own land comes with a duty to supply living space to those whom you would exclude from it. Surface volume is a limited resource, and impossible to defend in large parcels without the cooperation of others.

It would be advantageous for the landowners to form a cartel, such that they could retaliate against renegades that undermine the collective property right by neglecting the duty, because the natural game-theory equilibrium is for everyone to be a NIMBY until the landless people reach a breaking point and murder all the landowners, just to take a reasonable portion for themselves.

If you don't build houses, you need to build strong walls.

Georgists have put a lot of thought into this concept, even if I don't entirely agree with their proposed solutions to the problem.

> ...than the persons renting out a house they don't need.

Is a camera rental company just "renting out cameras they don't need"? Maintaining rental properties is a livelihood, a bad faith tenant is just as abusive as a bad faith landlord.

People buy properties on loans to rent them out, when a tenant refuses to pay the rent, the utilities and the loan payments fall to the landlord. The obvious effect of this is that only people who can afford to lease and rent many properties out at once to spread the cost of this can become landlords.

Furthermore, if this dwelling is some part of an existing home, and you can't evict them for violating the lease agreement, then you have unwanted strangers who don't care about you, forcibly staying in your own home. You don't have to be a steenking bourgeois to own a home, and you don't need to be "advantaged" to draw the short end of this straw.

Some countries have a mix of laws for tenant relations, for example sublet agreements in some places are afforded little or none of the extreme tenant rights that direct let agreements are. That would likely have helped in this article's situation.

If it destroyed someone's life to go without a camera then this would be a reasonable analogy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing

If you want a closer analogy, we don’t require grocery stores to tolerate shoplifters; we have food stamps and soup kitchens.

Do you think immediate eviction as a remedy for late rent is comparable to fines for shoplifting?

If we had adequate state-provided housing available at short notice for any household, as a social safety net, then laws about eviction could be considerably stricter without violating renter’s basic human rights. I doubt you’ll find much support for that policy change from landlords though; the competition would likely reduce prevailing rents quite a bit.

Clearly tenant rights aren’t (and shouldn’t be) unlimited, but the protections for tenants currently in place were established to counter bad abuses by landlords.

Various measures to preventing shoplifting (whether food or cameras) are not really comparable in my opinion.

It destroys a landlord's life if their primary asset is turned unfairly into a liability.

That's what's usually known as risk. They invested in an asset to provide their livelihood, that form of income has a set of risks associated with it, just like having a job carries a risk of losing it or how investing in securities carries its own risk.

How much are we willing to protect the investor from risk, in this particular case, at the potential expense of a tenant's ability to have shelter? Obviously we need some form of balance but the finer details of it are wildly arguable.

So you're suggesting that because they have the ability to buy additional housing and charge people to use it, someone else should bear the risk?

What?

All investments carry risk.

> If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for man

Eviction control makes “some form of rent control necessary: in its absence, the landlord could charge an astronomic rent instead of sending a notice of termination” [1]. Rent controls have a documented effect of suppressing new housing supply, thereby raising rents. Furthermore, “subsequent to the introduction of [German] eviction control in 1971 and 1975, the number of evictions first decreased and then, after some short time interval, returned to its normal average” (page 473).

[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/92900/1/Homburg1993T...

> Owning multiple properties and renting them out isn't a right. Having a house to live in should be.

I’m not sure I’m reading this correctly. You believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in? Every person is just given a free home? Who would build all these homes in this utopia?

That's a very non-charitable way of reading my statement, I believe you are very sure you're not reading it correctly.

But yes, I do "believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in". Not given freely, but having the opportunity for housing. It's even in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Even if it's at the cost of someone else who does not wish to single-handedly carry this burden? I have seen first hand the damage someone can cause to a home. I really think that when they are not paying for it they have even less of an emotional stake in the livability of the home post inhabitance.

Yep, I was an accidental landlord due to the housing bubble bursting in 2008 (had to move for a job, couldn't sell the house without taking a huge loss).

Hired a property manager, found a tenant, and did my best to be a good landlord. Let the tenant pay a couple of weeks late a few times without getting bent out of shape, fixed things promptly, etc.

Then the time finally came to sell last year. The market had recovered, I could sell the house and actually make a profit. My reward for doing "the right thing" (not defaulting/short-selling/etc.) was ready to be reaped.

Tenants moved out... got our first look at the house. It was a complete nightmare. Turns out they raised rabbits (as in, to sell) in the property and trashed the place (poop everywhere, stained walls, and egads.. the smell). Ended up taking a large loss on the property anyway - had to basically dump it in order to find a buyer and just be rid of the thing.

The tenants lost their security deposit. That's it. I lost tens of thousands on the sale price (and this was a sub-$200k home), not to mention the years of maintenance, etc. I spent (well, my useless PM charged me) while they were in the house.

Yea, should have just sent the bank the keys in the mail and walked away. In the end it would have been less painful.

Our property manager (standing in for the owner) inspected our rental every 3 months for the first year, then every 6 months after that. If we'd've trashed the place, they can start the eviction process straight away. Do you not have the right to inspections?

Yes, but I was out of state and unable to manage the property directly, hence why I hired a PM. The PM ostensibly conducted regular inspections :/

In France : no.

Going from "Having a house to live in should be a right" to "having the opportunity for housing should be a right" is a very non-charitable way of arguing.

I would phrase it more as "a human has the right to access any resources necessary to continue existing".

That includes having a place to be, and the means to acquire food, water, and medical treatment. At minimum, this would be in the form of subsistence farming, including medicinal crops. One person has the exclusive right to enough land surface area to meet all their own needs, the exact number depending on the local environmental factors.

When it is more advantageous to society at large to exclude would-be subsistence farmers from access to vital resources, it creates a duty for them to replace the products that the person would otherwise create from them. With economic specialization, this should be trivial. A thousand subsistence farms may be replaced by one industrial farm that can feed tens of thousands. It stands to reason that the industrial farmer should feed those prevented by law from farming for themselves, because if that person does not, the thousand will burn the law and take the land by force to feed themselves, and people elsewhere may starve. In the interest of preserving the benefit of economic specialization, which allows billions more of us to exist than the planet would otherwise support, those who benefit from owning property should share enough of that benefit with those who do not that they are not forced to rebel against property itself in order to survive.

The more specialized society becomes, the more critical it is that transfer of "unearned" benefits take place. Those benefits are the price that the winners must pay to the losers, for continuing to play by the rules of the game instead of cheating at it, or flipping over the game table and stomping on all the pieces.

You believe in responsibility, but the tenants (OP's hypothetical ones) have failed the responsibility that got them into their housing. At that point, to allow the tenants to stay is giving them the home freely.

It's funny you mention this, because it is an actual right in France. People have a right to housing. That's why the government provides (or should provide more) shelter to homeless people.

Do you believe that people do not have the right to have a shelter where to live, but only those who are rich enough to afford it ?

Who would provide such right?

The state

Who has such a right?

Education for everyone? And (basic) universal health care? What kind of utopial nonsense is that!

Is there anything we should have to pay for?

Yes. Do I really have to explain how most things in life are not black and white issues?

> is a lie

I dislike this (sadly, growingly) cavalier use of the word "lie"

And I dislike people exaggerating with no basis in reality to force a point. What hurts the discussion more, me pointing it out or the statement?

You can do something but in many cases it can be a very long and tiring battle. There are a few people who thrive on rental fraud. They understand how the system works and repeatedly take advantage of landlords to obtain free rent.

An example of this: A malicious tenant can just stop paying rent, the landlord will then start the eviction process. But the tenant already anticipated this and filled for bankruptcy without the landlord knowing. That then makes it so you can no longer evict the tenant and they receive protections. This buys them even more time to live for free and the landlord is powerless.

I think it is important to have tenant protections and landlord protections. I am sure there are many tenants who have a legitimate reason they cannot pay rent and should be given leniency with the expectation that they are trying to get back to normal. But when landlords come across tenants who purposely work the system in order to obtain free rent there should be a course of action the landlord can take to ensure these people cannot continue doing so. Based on my experience, and in my area, there are no real penalties for rental fraudsters, like are described in this article. This guy has been running the same scam for years against multiple people, why can this not be stopped?

In San Francisco, it is illegal to for a master tenant to rent a room for more than the subtenant’s proportionate share of the space. You can charge more, but hell will descend upon you once the subtenant figures it out.

How does that even work? By floor area?

That's not how pricing works!

It prevents you from arbitraging rent control, which is great, or master leases in rent controlled buildings would never turn over at all.

Great. Price controls to fix the unintended consequences of price controls.

In the UK renters only have rights if the landlord doesn't live there. If they are a "lodger" they basically have fuck all rights and can be kicked out immediately.

Same in Canada.

You can certainly do something, but you will lose a lot of money doing it. Where I live in Illinois it can take months. If someone isn't paying that whole time, that's a real hardship.

I still rent out my old place because I took a bath in the financial crisis and I needed to move. I can't just "price it in" as I can only charge what the market will bear, which just barely covers my mortgage.