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rental property owners. Tenants don’t have to pay rent and can’t be evicted! This is called the Eviction Moratorium. I know small rental property owners who are owed more than $150,000. Never mind the fact that for many of these owners, this is their retirement income! Moreover, after the emergency is over, tenants have a year to pay owners before they can be evicted! While there are government programs like the state’s Housing is Key program to pay the back rent, these programs are slow to pay and inefficient.
Many tenants are wisely “gaming the system” by not paying their rent and using this period of opportunity as a savings account builder. For others, it’s a new car purchase, or event clothes and vacations at the rental property owner’s expense! Since there is no requirement placed on tenants to prove financial hardship caused by COVID, you are looking at tenants gaining a windfall of, $18,000 per year on a $1,500 per month apartment! As you might imagine many “moms and pops” are facing foreclosure or having to sell to guess who? Wall Street! This is simply unfair, should be illegal, and it constitutes a taking by the government, but nobody seemingly gives a damn about small, “mom and pop” rental property owners.
THE NEED TO ENFORCE LAWS
In Los Angeles, the city attorney recently announced proudly that he was charging a rental property owner for the gang activity in his building! Not clear why the police simply didn’t arrest the criminals there? Moreover, if the owner sought the eviction of the alleged gang members the city would provide legal services to the gang members at no charge!
We need to enforce laws related to camping on the streets, beneath bridges, and in alleys and along the freeways. Aside from being unsightly, it’s unsanitary and has become a source of disease and rodent infestation. We might just have to move the homeless to sites with or without their consent. People sleeping or camping on the street should not be a right. We must decide is housing a right? If it is, then what exactly does one have a right to? Unlike food (food stamps) and health care, (Medicaid), the federal government does not consider housing an entitlement. Only one in four eligible, low-income individuals receives any sort of assistance according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, November 15, 2017. The Section 8 waiting list is years!
THE NEED TO LOOK AT MULTIPLE APPROACHES
We need to look at multiple possible solutions to the issue of affordable housing. The government is clearly
inept at building housing, affordable or otherwise. Over the last 40 years we have allowed Wall Street to wage war on private housing investment for their own benefit. Many of the tax advantages at the federal level have been wiped out. At the state level, here in California CEQA and other regulations bring unintended consequences and have made housing more expensive and difficult to develop. Locally, zoning restrictions and difficulties getting entitlements coupled with rent control make private investment in housing far less attractive.
Wall Street began buying houses through distress sales to flip for profit. Now they have been buying houses to rent. In the process they are driving up the price of the houses and apartments and pricing prospective, private buyers out of the market. One company owns over 100,000 properties that it rents, with no intention of selling. They even advertise on television they will pay cash for houses in any condition. Wall Street has taken the view they don’t care which party is in the White House, and they’ll still count the money. Going back to the Reagan era, all the treasury secretaries came from Wall Street. We must break this stranglehold!
There are six phases of most government projects. They are: (1) Enthusiasm – In the beginning everyone thinks this is a great idea. (2) Disillusionment - Once it becomes clear, it was a bad idea and people question why it was done. (3) Panic - Once the true costs come in, then chaos sets in. (4) Search for the Guilty – There is always a belief that someone must be guilty of something. (5) Punishment of the Innocent - Usually the people who are punished had nothing to do with the project in the first place. And, (6) Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants - Finally, the people who had nothing to do with the project or its solution receive all the glory for the solution.
In order to resolve the issues of homelessness and housing crisis, we have to break this cycle.
The author, Roderick Wright, is a former member of the California State Senate and Assembly. He has developed affordable housing with the Inner-City Housing Corporation. He worked in the Planning Department of the City of Los Angeles. He also worked at the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). Mr. Wright has been a rental property owner for over 40 years and is also a member of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles and the Coalition of Small Rental Property Owners.
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