Ethical Renting

Last year I went to a San Jose town hall meeting because the city council was having a public comment hearing about a motion they were about to vote on – whether or not to enact a rent control policy. It was an extremely polarizing experience. On one side, there was essentially renters who were being priced out of places they had lived for years, sometimes decades. On the other, was landlords opposed to the rent control measures. The reasons for supporting or opposing the rent control measure was equally polarizing. Renters were having to make decisions between rent or food, having to move out, being evicted for not being able to afford the rent hike, or being one expensive bill away from falling behind on their payments. The landlord’s reasons essentially boiled down to wanting more money than they already had. One man had the gall to say to a room mostly full of people who were working minimum wage jobs, that he wanted to fund his “nice retirement”.
On the face of it, these two arguments are the same; two groups of people both want more money. However, there is a world of difference between wanting enough money to get by, vs wanting extra money, specifically at the expense of other people’s ability to survive. Rarely do people in the housing market talk about the ethics of their business, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they need to. Like price gouging, the ethics of making a profit from people desperate to not be homeless are dubious at best. In addition, these antics are destabilizing to communities by either increasing the transiency of who is living there, or completely replacing the community with another one that can afford it. Stabilizing and lowering prices would help strengthen cities and probably make it easier to find housing as well. Separating excessive profit from housing would also put a lot of housing back on the market. In San Francisco, about 9% of housing units are vacant (https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2018-08/housingsolutions2018/cities-sic-taxman-on-vacant-ghost-homes). This is partially due to about half of all new developments in the city being sold to wealthy out-of-city second home buyers who rarely if ever stay there (https://sfist.com/2014/09/30/almost_half_of_newly_built_condos_i/). By decreasing the wildly high profits that can be made off of people, it could potentially shift the market away from renting and allow less wealthy people to get a foot in the door of home ownership. This would also have the added benefit of protecting communities in danger of being gentrified or pushed out.