You hear this all the time from progressives. If it’s true, then the State has a moral and legal obligation to make sure that all who want housing get it. This means, in effect, that the State may use all its considerable power to do whatever it deems necessary to give housing to everyone.
They accomplish this at the City and County level through a variety of coercive means. Rent control is one: the property owner can only raise rents by so much each year, in accordance with a formula the City Council or Board of Supervisors devises. Or eviction prohibitions: these same agencies provide tenants with vast powers to resist being evicted for, let’s say, non-payment of rent. Even if the landlord manages to succeed in evicting a deadbeat tenant (a process that can take years), that landlord often has to pay thousands of dollars to the tenant, in penalties and moving fees. Then too, tenants who complain about substandard conditions—mold, peeling paint, broken elevators—are entitled to their day in court, and the landlord is usually compelled to spend large quantities of money to repair the conditions; but he is not allowed to raise the rent to pay for those repairs.
Let’s say a landlord is fed up with being the victim of these one-sided laws and decides to remove his property from the rental market. But he can’t even do that; cities or counties will tell him he’s not permitted to idle a property for longer than a certain period of time. If the landlord protests all these inhibitions on his freedom to manage his own property as he sees fit, he runs up against the opposition of dozens of “tenants rights” organizations, including the A.C.L.U. and Carroll Fife’s “Moms 4 Housing.”
I hardly need to point out that, if housing is a human right, then so are other essentials for life: food, clothing, healthcare, leisure and so on. If you apply the same standards of the left to those other essentials, then society owes everyone a wardrobe, three square meals a day, complete medical care, and time off to recreate and play. Is it in fact the case that society owes everyone these things? The answer is, No. So, I would argue, we have to conclude that housing is not a human right. We have to understand that the degree to which people have things is directly related to their ability to pay for them. But to the left, this statement is anathema.
To interpret all this activity as anti-landlord is the correct way of seeing it. Do tenants have more rights than property owners? This fundamental question has always burned its way through our legal system. At the nation’s founding, of course, property owners had near-authoritarian rights. Only they could vote—and only if they were men. Gradually we changed our Constitution to be fairer and more equitable. But somewhere along the line (at least in certain places like Oakland and San Francisco), we went too far, because the “Housing is a human right” contingent seized control and decided that anything that obstructs the right of people to own their own home is illegal.
The big issue now in Oakland concerns whether or not the City Council will end the eviction moratorium that was imposed because of COVID. The pandemic, obviously, is over. Yet the eviction moratorium remains, and for a good reason: the woke left that created it has no desire to end it. Hundreds or thousands of tenants in Oakland (we don’t have exact statistics) remain in their apartments because of the eviction moratorium. Landlords in some cases haven’t received rent for many months if not years, and they’re still subject to all the conditions I described above. The City Council is going to have to vote soon whether or not to end the eviction moratorium; personally they don’t want to because “housing is a human right.” But legally, and in the court of public opinion, they’re under a huge amount of pressure to end the moratorium. We’re going to see how much the Council knuckles under to the far-left renter-grievance complex, which is so tightly aligned with the defund-the-police and shut-down-the-jails complex. If you have the time next Tuesday, April 11, please join me, Seneca Scott and many others at 11 a.m. at City Hall to demand an end to this unlawful eviction moratorium. Here’s the message from Seneca:
“We are reaching out in the hopes that you will join us for a rally at City Hall on Tuesday, 4/11 at 11am. We are organizing neighbors and local businesses to demand an end to the theft from small property owners and the brutal lawlessness local businesses are forced to endure.”
Steve Heimoff