This link is about a class down in L.A. for landlords. It teaches them methods of self-defense against violent renters who attack them, which apparently is a “thing” lately. Cat Brooks retweeted it with the comment, “Some stuff you just have to retweet with no comment cause there’s legit nothing to say….”.
Look, I’m not a landlord, never have been a landlord, and never will be a landlord. I’ve seen and heard too many stories about wacko renters who make life impossible for their landlords. When I bought my Adams Point condo back in 1987, the renter who was living in it refused to move. She had no excuse, she just stopped paying her rent for about six months. There was nothing the then-owner could do about it because the City of Oakland sided with the renter. Eventually, it cost the owner tens of thousands of dollars to pay off the renter—and it almost wrecked the deal itself. That’s when I decided that being a landlord wasn’t for me.
I can’t help but have empathy for landlords. Most of them are not the evil, greedy pigs the woke media and progressives portray them to be. They’re simply ordinary people trying to augment their incomes. And yet the pro-tenant bias of our big cities makes it possible for tenants to refuse to pay their rent, secure in the knowledge that it will be months and months, if not years, before the landlord will ever be able to evict them.
That’s not right and it’s not fair. It is, however, straight out of the Carroll Fife playbook. You remember when she and her Moms 4 Housing friends squatted in that house and claimed it belonged to them? That was theft, clear and simple. In a normal city, such illegal behavior wouldn’t have been tolerated. The police would have been summoned, and Fife and the other squatters would have been hauled off to jail and charged with felonies.
But Oakland isn’t a normal city, and this is what Fife counted on. In the end, the city treated Fife as though she were a hero. Funds were raised, the house was bought and given to Fife’s group as a sort of reparation—and Fife used the notoriety to elevate herself to the City Council. This sense of entitlement fuels everything Fife and her cohorts do today. “You owe us,” they say, in effect, “for 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow.” And part of the toll they expect to extract from a capitalist system that oppresses them is free rent. After all, if “housing is a human right,” as they claim, then it should be free—no matter who happens to own the house. Meanwhile, landlords such as Jinyu Wu are at the brink of bankruptcy because of Alameda County’s COVID rent moratorium, which allows people who have never had COVID to refuse to pay their rent because of COVID! It’s all part of the woke’s war on landlords.
It’s easy, I suppose, if you’re a renter, and you don’t think too hard about these things, to side with the anti-rent squad. But a little common sense will tell you that, at some point, if you do away with our system of homeownership and renting, then what will happen is the existing housing stock will fall into an irreversible state of decrepitude. After all, someone who’s too poor to pay rent can hardly afford to maintain their house or apartment. But that, too, is out of the Carroll Fife-Cat Brooks playbook: Make Oakland so poor, so undesirable, so unlivable that the middle classes will flee. The price of everything, including rent, will fall, in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. Once Oakland turns into Appalachia, apartments will be affordable. But who will want to live here except the destitute? What businesses will want to locate here? Who would want to visit a restaurant or shop in Oakland?
Let me tell you what the anti-rent crowd really wants: government-controlled housing, as in socialist and communist societies. We used to have that; they were called “the projects,” and they were really nasty. Now, the progressives are calling it “social housing.” Sounds fancy, but it’s just lipstick on the same old pig.
THAO RECALL UPDATE:
California state law states: “Recall proceedings may not be commenced against an officer of a city…if (a) The officer has not held office during the current term for more than 90 days.” Since Thao hasn’t been in office for 90 days, recall proceedings by law cannot commence before April. Some 30,000 signatures will be required at that time to get the measure on the ballot. But the recall movement is very much alive, despite this temporary hiatus. More to come.
Steve Heimoff