I have entered the final stretch of writing my book. Final doesn’t mean short but there’s finally an end in sight. Writing a book is done in such small (compared to the whole) increments that it’s hard not to feel like it will never be completed. Now, however, I’m sure it will be completed.
In the meantime, what should we talk about? What interesting subjects have not been covered yet? Suggestions welcome and encouraged.
Clarissa's Blog 
No one is talking about how “tenant protections” have ruined the low income housing market and fueled homelessness. States with LL/T Acts that “best protect” tenants from rapacious landlords have far higher homelessness and higher rents. Every tenant “right” costs landlords money to comply. Unless we follow the Soviet model, this forces rents higher. I’ve had published several op-eds on this if folks are interested.
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I have doubts about this.
We moved from a state with pretty good tenants’ rights to a state with basically none.
We are at the bottom of the rental market, in terms of what we can afford. No difference in what we paid for rent, crossing the state line, and in both cases we struggled to find *anything* in our affordability range, and in both cases were dealing basically with slumlords.
Biggest difference: how much the landlord thinks he can soak us for when we move out, and how difficult it is to fight that. In the previous state, we got our deposit (which they attempted to keep, illegally) back with a strongly-worded certified letter and an offer to let a judge decide it in small claims court. In the new state, after a recent move, not only did they keep our deposit illegally, they also collected rent for a month we did not live there, and are attempting to collect an additional month’s rent after that, plus some bogus fees piled on top of our deposit, to the tune of $2k. We are not the sort of tenants who allow vermin infestations and punch holes in the wall, btw. Looking at reviews online for this management company, this is their standard operating procedure with all tenants.
We sent the usual strongly-worded letter, we will now wait and see if they drop it and just keep the money they’ve already squeezed out of us, or decide to ruin our credit, too. We could take them to small claims, but local law dictates that whoever wins that pays court costs, so we run the risk of owing *even more* money if we lose… and we made the mistake of trusting them to be actual human beings and relied on verbal agreements instead of getting everything in writing and documenting like OCD freaks. We are over a barrel.
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I’m sorry for your experience. But anecdotes are not data. The 3 West Coast States (I’ve practiced landlord/tenant law in Oregon since 1970; worked for both Legal Aid and as counsel for our county housing authority; represented owners and property managers who controlled a majority of our local rental market; represented the leading non-profit housing providers, etc.) have by far the tightest housing markets and the most pro-tenant laws in the country. By contrast (a perfect example is the Fargo, ND/Moorhead, Mn housing market) states with the least regulation, such as North Dakota have higher home values and lower rents than states such as Minnesota (only the Red river separates Fargo and Moorhead, but rents are 20% less—many more Dakotans are willing to act as landlords because their liability and time burden are so much less than their progressive neighbors to the east— and home values higher.
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“higher home values and lower rents … many more Dakotans are willing to act as landlords”…
That seems like a very mixed bag to me.
I would very much like to see a situation with *lower* home values, where fewer people are willing to act as landlords, which would result in more people being able to afford to buy their own house and not rent at all.
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…also, “I am sorry for your experience” reads exactly like “your call is important to us” and other customer-service-script phrases that mean exactly the opposite.
I don’t know you and I am choosing to attribute honest good will to you on that. But it’s a conscious act of will.
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I was a landlord (owner occupied two family home) and watched my state enact law after law protecting tenants, and allow tenants not to pay rent for extended period of time during COVID – but owners still had to come up with their mortgage taxes etc.
I was getting worried about getting a bad tenant after many years of decent tenants. I wanted out and now I am out and couldn’t be happier not to worry about that anymore.
I think small holders – people with 1-3 units – are very different than these large corporate rental house companies. But I think some small landlords probably do unethical things.
more regulation, IME = shrinking number of units available to rent on the market
amanda
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this was not a low income rental situation by the way. It was market rate.
Amanda
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Since 1973, Oregon law has presumed that its residents are so deluded and stupid, they can’t be trusted to choose for themselves, what trade-offs they are willing to make, in order to find an affordable rental.
The Oregon Residential Landlord Tenant Act (ORTLA) enacted that year (along with statewide land use planning, which, by mandating that new rental housing be built within urban growth boundaries, also has driven up its cost) expressly forbids tenants from “waiving or forgoing any rights granted” to “protect” them from landlords, who otherwise, following Marxist ideology, might “exploit” them. Oregon Revised Statutes Section 90.245(1)(a). These “rights” include minimum habitability standards requiring rental units must, always, be free from “rodents or vermin”, not ever leak, have “clean and sanitary buildings and grounds that are not “unsafe in any part,” and much, much more. ORTLA has more than one chundred pages of tenant “protections” — and a single section devoted to tenant responsibilities.
If ORTLA mandated that every rental in the state must have granite countertops and an Olympic swimming pool, even the legislature might realize that imposing these requirements would price housing out of the reach of its poorer citizens. Why, 50 years ago, our legislature thought it alone knew, better than each Oregonian, in every conceivable situation, what a prospective tenant was willing to endure to find an affordable rental, can only be answered: “It didn’t.”
ORTLA, whose passage I supported as a legal aid attorney testifying before the legislative committee considering it, was copied, almost word for word from the Model Landlord-Tenant Act, drafted by the Boston based National Housing Law Center. This Legal Aid think tank, whose worldview clearly envisioned only urban slums, apparently was unaware that no rural home in Oregon, without an excellent mouser, can ever be “vermin free at all times.”
Each ORTLA mandate increases the property owner’s expenses, which then must be repaid with higher rents. Thus, at the margin, each increase in tenant “rights”, “wrongs” those low-income renters now priced out of the market. Often, after it is no longer profitable to rent at an affordable rate, “mom and pop” landlords sell out to owner-occupants, thereby reducing the stock of rental housing, or to large corporate purchasers with the savvy (in the view of tenant advocates, to better “oppress” tenants by raising rents to market rates) and economies of scale to make the numbers “work.”
Oregon has been profoundly unsuccessful in seeking to solve its self-created problem by pouring tax dollars into “affordable”, taxpayer subsidized housing, banning single family zoning in cities, and wasting hundreds of millions watching the non-profit “housing-industrial” complex flail pathetically.
It is not coincidental that before 1973, with very few exceptions, the only “unhoused” one saw in Oregon were “hoboes.”
Why are Oregonians free to choose to eat junk food, even using food stamps, buy and drive junk cars, which are “unsafe at any speed,” but are forbidden by law to decide that they’d rather live with a roof over their heads (even if it’s in a mouse infested, leaky single-wide), than live in a tent on West Burnside?
If I want to grow marijuana commercially, renting a small rural plot with an “unhabitable” shack for shelter, ORS 90.110(9) says that I am smart enough to make my own choices, since my rental is “primarily for agricultural purposes,” and not subject to any of the requirements of ORTLA, including “habitability” thresholds. But, if I want to rent the identical property for my own use, and grow for personal consumption, I am forbidden from doing so, since I am now, in the eyes of our State, an instant idiot, who lacks the intelligence to decide what’s “best” for me.
Given the number of the unhoused who are BIPOC, the ORTLA presumption that tenants are incompetent to make their own housing choices, is, if not “systemically” racist, an embarrassing expression of outdated paternalism.
Rents are significantly lower in Fargo, N.D., than Moorhead, Mn., twin cities (like Portland and Vancouver or Eugene and Springfield) separated only by bridges across the Red River of the North and in the same SMSA. The primary reason is that Minnesota has introduced far more friction into the system by also enacting landlord-tenant laws mirroring Oregon’s, whereas North Dakota has allowed the market to more freely set rents.
Oregon could return to pre-1973 rental housing abundance by simply making voluntary any landlord’s participation in ORTLA.
Property owners who “opt out” will immediately save the 10% of rental income they now have to pay professional property managers, because ORTLA is so complex, only a professional can navigate its myriad requirements. For example, ORS 90.425, which makes the IRS Code look like child’s play, has twenty-seven separate sections, covering 6 full pages in the Oregon Revised Statutes, requiring landlords to care for abandoned property that their tenants cared for so little that they left it behind.
As someone who has practiced landlord-tenant law in Oregon since 1970, I would estimate rents are perhaps 20% higher, because of ORTLA’s complexity and mandates, than if it were repealed. If the revised statute requires that landlords who choose to opt out, make it abundantly clear to prospective tenants, that the “protections” of ORTLA do not apply, and the tenant then chooses cheaper rent, foregoing the “help” of Big Brother, why shouldn’t they be free to do so? In return for an affordable rent, they could then negotiate their own habitability and other protections, like any other party to a private contract.
Tenants who feel they “need” ORTLA’s current protections can choose to rent from a landlord who doesn’t opt out, just like today. What do we have to lose, by again allowing the free market to allocate at least a portion of our scarce rental housing resources, as it so successfully did from 1859 to 1973?
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All those things.
And yet.
Housing would be cheaper to buy, if nobody thought it looked like a good investment for their portfolio. Owning rental houses needs to go back to being a modest sideline for active retirees.
When I talk about the more-robust tenant protections in our previous state, I’m not talking about anything like y’all have in the PNW.
We’re talking about a single, really basic law: if a landlord wants to keep my security deposit, he has to provide me an itemized receipt for the expenses incurred by me, the tenant, within a specified timeframe, for which my deposit is being retained. I think it was 30 days. 60 at the outside.
At my last rental, no itemized receipt was provided, ever, and the law further stipulated that if I, the tenant, took him to small claims court and won, he’d owe me double the amount of the deposit.
My current state doesn’t even have that.
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I agree with the point about the absolute dishonesty and nastiness of the security deposit withholding. It’s not a deposit at all. It’s a surcharge for the right to rent.
Also, people go into rental ownership because there’s no other way to protect their savings. Inflation eats everything. The stock market game is unbelievably rigged. People want to put money aside for old age or a rainy day but there’s literally no vehicle to do that outside of real estate. This is one of the reasons why “free markets” are a lie. The stock market is completely rigged to benefit the behemoths at the expense of little fish.
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Yeah, the real solution to the problem would be for the FED (or whoever is in charge of the money supply: the FED has been doing a crap job and needs to be fired) to aim for ) 0% inflation. That would solve it all in one go: savings would be safe from invisible predation by the government, and everybody wouldn’t have to scramble for a “safe” investment vehicle to dump their cash assets into. Yes, there would be temporary deflation as cash fled the marketplace to hide out in savings. It’d be good for everybody *except* the investor class and the government, who build their whole financial castle around debt, and stealth-defaulting on debt via inflation, at everybody else’s expense. So of course… probably can’t happen short of a revolution. Nobody wants to let go of power, connections, or access to the money spigot, voluntarily.
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Not just a surcharge: it doubles the cost of moving out, when landlords just keep your deposit by default. That’s twice now that I have spent 4-5 days, while very ill (this time I had a fractured rib, from the bronchitis, which I acquired from the mold or whatever in that house), minutely cleaning everything so I could hopefully get the deposit back… only to have to fight for it anyway as it was withheld for bogus reasons.
As a tenant, the lesson I’m learning from this is: landlord is keeping my deposit anyway, so there is no reason AT ALL to sacrifice a minute of time or effort to leave the place clean. Or, frankly, even in good condition maintenance-wise. Why should we? That’s what the security deposit was supposed to ensure, but they’re going to keep it no matter what, so… why bother?
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ORS 90.300, has 18 sections, some of which have subsections, laying out in excruciating detail, the landlord’s obligations to return, (or properly account in writing for any set-offs), the tenant’s security deposit within 30 days of the tenancy’s termination. A not uncommon tenant scam is to claim they “accidentally” left invaluable family pictures when they moved out. Since these momentos are non-existent, the landlord can never discover and safe-keep them. The “sloppy” tenant then extorts damages upon threat of litigation, because the landlord breached their duty to safe-keep and return what the tenant “abandoned”.
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Nothing like that here. Anything we leave behind is forfeit, will be set out on the curb.
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