What are some things you might do if you were a housing advocate with political power, and you wanted to minimize, if not eliminate, all tenant evictions?
Well, you might create a pro-tenant housing board that requires landlords to prove “just cause” for eviction, and then stack the board with individuals who are pre-determined to side with the tenant. (This is called a Kangaroo Court.)
You might require the landlord to pay a huge cash settlement to the tenant and also pay her relocation expenses, if she’s eventually evicted.
You might give the tenant the legal right to an attorney to appeal the decision, and then make the landlord pay the cost of that attorney.
You might prevent landlords from raising rents beyond a very small amount, making the landlord unable to keep up with inflation or cover the costs of maintenance.
You might make it illegal for the landlord to sell his property, if that entails the tenant leaving.
You might require the landlord to make expensive improvements to the property.
You might give financial subsidies to people who can’t afford to pay their rent—subsidies paid for by taxes.
You might impose hefty fines on property owners who keep their units off the rental market.
You might mandate the construction of “deeply affordable and supportive housing” without identifying how to pay for it.
You might declare housing “a human right” that would require Oakland to provide homes for everyone who wants to live here, opening the city to lawsuits.
You might develop “collaborations” with groups like The Village in Oakland, whose members are “Unhoused curbside communities,” and CURYJ, whose members are “Formerly incarcerated, Black and Latinx in the Fruitvale,” and bring them into the planning process as “community partners,” while providing no such opportunities for homeowners.
You might, in effect, make life as hard as possible for landlords.
If these things sound like what an authoritarian, fascist government like Russia might do, it’s no coincidence, because all these things, and more like them, are contained in Oakland’s new “Housing Element.” That’s an eight-year plan (2023-2031), developed by the brains that run our city, to “protect Oakland residents from displacement and prevent homelessness.” It’s a massive, 120-page document that makes explicit its goal of “target[ing] outreach and programming to Black and Latinx Oaklanders.” Now, let me make this clear: our poorest residents do need some forms of assistance. But, as with all other aspects of the welfare state, the question is, where do you draw the line? The basic difference between progressives and moderates is that the former wish to go to extremes in order to invest money in our poorest communities—money that can only come from soaking the middle class. Moderates in turn say you can’t endlessly tax people who have a little money saved up in order to permanently subsidize the poor. All that does is encourage more poor people to move to Oakland, and drive more people of means, especially homeowners, out of Oakland. (The city’s population is dropping for the first time in years, as people flee to more hospitable places.) That in turn will destroy the tax base, and then the progressives won’t be able to do anything without Federal or State assistance, which is fast drying up.
Can’t progressives see the inherent futility of their schemes? It’s a goose-and-golden egg thing. The more you rob from homeowners and others of means (and remember, many homeowners have very little money besides the paper value of their homes), the more those people will leave. Oakland will continue to deteriorate until the progressives preside over a bankrupt dystopia of poverty and crime. Progressives love making emotional talking points, but they have no end-game, no vision except one based on ideological racial and class divisions, one based on tearing down but not building up.
Steve Heimoff