The problem is that for large corporate landlords this is a statistical risk that can be priced in and accounted for across hundreds of units.
For small mom-and-pop landlords renting out their basement, it's a roll of the dice on whether any given tenant will completely ruin their life and be impossible to get rid of.
Of course many people will respond to this by saying that the rights of people to have a place to live are more important than the rights of homeowners to have a bit of side income, but if the law makes it too risky to rent out a second suite, nobody will want to do it -- which makes the housing crisis even worse for renters as there will be fewer places available to rent.
Being a small-time landlord is unreasonably risky due to tenant friendly laws and backed up courts.
Similarly, I've found renting from small-time landlords to be a worse experience. They tend to do things that a large corporation would eventually face lawsuits over - discrimination, demanding more money up front, keeping deposits, poor upkeep of units, etc.
So I'm not even sure I want to encourage small time landlording anyway.
Some things maybe really are better managed by big, lawsuit-averse, emotionless companies.
The problem is that in cities that have regulated apartments out of existence it's the only existing place for renters to live, so we should be mindful of things that will squeeze its availability before enough apartments can be built to take up the demand.
In expensive Brooklyn all the dense, high-rise new construction is along the water front .. 15 minutes walk from the trains. The buildings are so far from the trains, that many of them advertise private shuttle services to entice buyers/renters.
Meanwhile the subway stations that the shuttle take you to are surrounded by blocks and blocks of 3 story buildings.
Its all completely backwards, except that there was no existing constituency living on the water front to protest & block new development.
Completely disagree. Every poor experience I had renting was with a big emotionless company. I have never had a poor experience with a small time landlord.
Just like landlord vet their prospective tenants, you should be vetting your prospective landlords. Someone with a few units is pretty easy to track down folks for references.
The problematic ones tended to be the ones in the "midrange" - between small time and big company. Using horrible management companies as contractors to farm out the dirty work, and generally getting away with it since they were big enough to throw their weight around - but not big enough to care about being squeaky clean to the letter of the law.
I'd rent out my basement mother in law unit, but due to tenant rights in my city there is not a single chance I will ever do so. From direct personal experience I know how difficult it is to remove a problematic tenant from a living situation no matter how much impact they may have on your life.
The outcome is that there is one less extremely affordable unit in the area for living in.
The solution is to make the rules different for small landlords.
How do you quantify small - number of units or dollar value? What is small - 1 unit? 2? 5?.
What stops a larger landlord setting up 1000 LLCs each managing 3 unit?
As soon as you get into "different laws apply to different people" you run into problems.
But when you don't do that, you run into different problems, which is what we have run into already.
Every time US tax code gets more complicated, it usually doesn't help the bottom 50%.
Actually funded court system?
Having to wait months to evict a tenant for legitimate reasons is a huge issue if it's affecting >50% of your rental units.
What this means is that you can rent somewhere, not pay, it will take a minimum of 6 months to get rid of them since they can request RAFT and you must wait until the application is processed before the trial can proceed. After they're successfully evicted, after 4 years of no evictions, they can have it sealed, regardless if the judgement is paid or not.
Repeat. Free rent.
The risk of legal costs are basically passed along in the cost of rent. And bigger corporate landlords are naturally going to have a bigger advantage because they can pool their risks.
The point isn't that there are bad landlords. It's that you are creating a treadmill. The more you add tenant protections, the more costs you add to housing. And the more incentives you give landlords to screen tenants and otherwise behave badly.
The most common tactic for tenants is to break something safety related (window, door, stairs, etc) and then refuse to pay rent until it is fixed. The landlord can try to evict but the Housing Court will stop the eviction as soon as they find out the property is not "safe and habitable" (see https://www.mass.gov/info-details/tenant-rights). This can be repeated by the tenant with the bonus that the landlord now gets more fake safety violations racked up against them.
One simple thing could go a long way to fix this but was voted down by the legislature - re-establish a mandatory rent escrow system that the tenant must pay the rent to until the safety issue is fixed. It used to happen automatically but now Housing Court judges must approve it (https://masslandlords.net/policy/rent-escrow/) and they rarely do.
The sad thing is that due to these policies most of the rental property in my little town has been converted to AirBnBs/Vrbos and the stock that is left was gone up in price as supply has constricted.
Like anything, until you've been a landlord you don't know the hassle and stress they go through. I was a commercial landlord for a while and I got out - never again.
Where is your evidence of this "big problem"?
No state allows what you describe. This being some sort of widespread problem is a myth that's been running around for decades after Pacific Heights which was part of Hollywood cashing in on white fright in the late 80's early 90's.
For example, in super-liberal Massachusetts: if you are one day late with your rent, the landlord can start eviction proceedings. The tenant is given time to find legal assistance and respond - shockingly, you can't just slap an eviction notice on the door and bounce someone onto the street. You have to prove to a judge that your tenant isn't doing what they should be doing, or is doing things they shouldn't be. Shockingly, your tenant has a right to defend themselves. Do people abuse the process? Sure, some do. They get away with it at most once, because...there's a record of it all in housing court and eviction proceedings are pretty much a deathblow with any landlord doing their homework.
> the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.*
...which is why landlords screen tenants for employment/income and renting history, search for records under their name in housing court, and google them to see if they have any arrests in the news, etc. Come on.
> Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters)
Bad landlord far outweight bad tenants in this housing market. Whereas one tenant might make one landlord's life difficult, one bad landlord can make hundreds if not thousands of people's lives miserable and dangerous. Daniel Ohebshalom is a great example:
https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/017-24/nyc-s-infamous-wors...
That press release is the culmination of something like a decade of housing rights advocates trying to get the city to do something about him. And what did he do? Soon as he go out of jail, he started harassing his tenants:
https://nypost.com/2024/05/01/us-news/nycs-worst-landlord-in...
This isn't some anecdote.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-worst-landlord-list...That list is a "hundred" of the top violators and it's likely the list of landlords with more than a dozen violations is probably more like "thousand" range or higher.
In my city, landlords are infamous for charging all sorts of illegal fees and also stealing people's security deposits under the guise of made-up cleaning and repair expenses; the courts have repeatedly ruled normal cleaning and simple repair (like fixing picture hangar hooks) is not valid reason for using someone's security deposit - it's part of the cost of doing business.
You can take them to housing court - and maybe eventually get your money back - but in the meantime you're definitely not getting your lease renewed so you're left needing to find a new place...without a reference, which pretty much tanks your chances of finding another apartment because the market is so tight.