Anti-Landlord Political Climate

There’s a lot of politics going on. And to add to it, we’ve been watching episodes of Designated Survivor and Veep.

This week I attended a board meeting for a group that is working to secure funding for revitalization efforts in my city. A resident made a comment about how problems on her block are caused by landlords not doing adequate screening, and the conversation went in a strange direction.

Suddenly the cause of the neighborhood blight was bad landlords and a police officer suggested we enable neighboring residents to bring landlords of drug houses to court. What? How did we get there?!?

I certainly agree that many landlords could do a much better job of screening. But this topic was concerning, because we do pretty thorough screening, and we have still ended up renting to drug users and maybe even drug dealers. We have not accepted anyone with prior drug convictions. How else do you screen out drug use without being discriminatory?  What would these folks consider to be worthy of fines to landlords?

If the group I was with this week gets their way, there may be even less affordable housing in the future, as the ethical landlords decide it’s not worth the hassle of catering to the low income niche.