Having been both a renter and a homeowner, I see this current brouhaha over tenant protections from both points of view. No tenant wants to be evicted from his residence, especially if he feels he’s done nothing wrong. At the same time, no landlord (odious term) wants to be compelled into allowing a tenant to remain whom he doesn’t want living in his property. How to square the circle has been a damnable puzzle for years.
Here in lefty Oakland and Alameda County, progressive politicians have been tilting toward tenant protections for years. Now the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, echoing something Oakland did a couple years ago, has become the first county in the U.S. to ban criminal background checks on prospective renters. This means that a landlord will not be able to find out if his prospective tenant has broken the law—any law, up to and including sexual offenses and murder—or how many times that individual has broken the law. And this, in my opinion, is going too far.
The new Alameda County ruling has to be seen as just a part of a broader progressive scheme in the East Bay to be kind to offenders. As my colleague Jack Saunders has pointed out many times, our electeds are more inclined to sympathize with lawbreakers than they are to support the majority of us who do not choose to break the law. There is, I suppose, some intellectual validity to this compassion; the progressives seem to view criminality as a misstep by suffering individuals who, through no fault of their own, have been compelled—by white supremacy, or a patriarchal culture, or poverty, or because Mommy didn’t love them enough—to run afoul of the law. By this point of view, no one has any culpability for what she has done; there are no consequences, and it is incumbent on the rest of us—including victims—to forgive culprits and give them some of our money so they can get back on the path of righteousness.
Very Christian, if you will. Forgive the sinner. The problem, though, is apparent to anyone with half a brain: without some efficient system of justice, there is no peace, and will not be, until Mankind is perfected and no human being ever again resorts to profiteering off the welfare of his fellow citizens. That this magnificent vision is not soon to be manifested, however, should also be apparent.
Which brings us back to tenant protections. Why would anyone even want to be a landlord when to do so is to have our electeds pin a bullseye on your behind? Severe rent control laws mean you can’t raise rents enough to keep up with inflation. Severe “just cause” laws mean that the burden of proof for evicting a bad tenant falls on the landlord: “just cause” is in the eyes of the beholder, and woe to the landlord who tries to get rid of, say, an arsonist or a wife beater: that landlord might find himself in a lawsuit. For instance, Oakland’s Tenant Protection Ordinance, which is heavily tilted toward tenants as its name implies, is more likely to find “harassment” of a tenant by a landlord than to rule in favor of a landlord trying to evict a bad tenant.
And now this criminal background check ban. It is just the latest handcuff on landlords. And lest a landlord—sick and tired of being pushed around by officious officials—decides to take his rental property off the market, beware: the City of Oakland has declared removing a rental unit from the rental market “a serious and complicated matter.” The landlord will have to be prepared to defend his decision before the City, and pay all sorts of fees, in a process that can drag on for months if not years. What landlord wants to go up against that?
And now, we have a District Attorney-elect, Pamela Price, who declares that as soon as she takes office in January, protecting families from “unlawful evictions” will become one of her top priorities.
In other words, times are getting a lot tougher on landlords, and they’ll have very little standing between their rights and the demands of a progressive government determined to make sure that all tenants can remain where they are, no matter what they do, regardless of whether they pay their rent. And this, in the name of “tenants rights.”
Look, homeowners had better wise up and figure out what’s going on. You’re the last remaining bastion of wealth in Oakland and Alameda County (aside from corporations), and the wealth-redistributionists have you in their gunsights. They’re going to make sure you’re weakened, and then they’re going to bury you under parcel taxes you haven’t even seen coming, and then if you try to defend yourself they’re going to call you racists and elitists and greedheads. You—the homeowners—didn’t turn out in enough force last election, and you’re now paying the [Pamela] price.
Steve Heimoff