Yes, Evicting Your Tenants Is Bad Actually
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
We are in the middle of a god damn pandemic, and some landlords want us not to criticize them for denying their tenants housing. “Not all landlords are rolling in money,” writes Jacqueline A in a Medium article explaining why she is evicting her tenants. “Some are just normal individuals trying to make ends meet. In the same way, we have good and bad tenants; we also have good and bad landlords. In the same way, tenants don’t want to be homeless; landlords don’t want to be in debt due to their tenants.”
Before we proceed, it should be noted that being unhoused is not equal to being in debt. The former is far worse. However, it does speak to the priorities of not only Jacqueline A but many landlords out there. They want to prevent people from demonizing their right to deny an individual in their care housing while simultaneously critiquing anything that prevents them from getting their money.
These criticisms have existed for centuries, but the recently axed eviction moratorium had many landlords up in arms over a temporary loss of profits. (Note that the moratorium excluded many scenarios and did not prevent landlords from getting their money eventually, but a lot were frustrated by a gap in rents anyway). “The eviction moratorium is killing small landlords, not the pandemic.” Dean Hunter, CEO of the Small Multifamily Owners Association, told NBC back in June of 2021. The argument being that landlords would have to sell their property if they did not receive financial aid, or implicitly left unsaid, could return to the previous era of evicting their tenants.
Now that that eviction moratorium has been removed on the national level, we are seeing that cold reality play out in real-time. Hundreds of thousands risk losing their homes by the end of the year. These landlords wanted sympathy from us for “having” to evict tenants from their homes so that they can preserve their economic entitlements (i.e., rents), but they were not nearly as concerned with all the negative repercussions that that decision entails (i.e., financial hardships, homelessness, and even death for their tenants).
They asked us to prioritize their monetary losses over our empathy for their tenants — a group that is overall more disadvantaged economically — and we should question the ethicality of this tactic and what it says of us as a people overall.
When we have this conversation, it's very easy to get bogged down in the specifics of the investment and the philosophical nature of owning property (and we will get to that), but before we even jump into those turbulent waters, we should first talk about what’s at stake. When we discuss housing, we are inherently talking about the right for people to live a good life or even to live at all. The decision to deny someone housing makes their lives materially more difficult, and that action could harm them physically, not simply financially.
Housing is expensive in the United States. There are a lot of factors that are too much to cover in-depth here: the purchasing of a good home outright requires over 100K in all states, a high number for most working Americans who make a median wage of $19.33 an hour; millions of renters also spend over 50% of their income on rent, making saving difficult; there is also a dwindling supply of low-cost rentals and homes to buy. And of course, these problems fall along existing lines of inequity, with browner Americans far more likely to rent than own. All of these factors taken together mean that when someone is denied housing in an inequitable market such as ours, especially a lower-income person, they will struggle to find an alternative.
It’s difficult to find national data on the eviction-to-homelessness pipeline because we don’t have good figures on the total number of unhoused people in the US period, let alone all the contributing factors. However, we know from many studies that a link between eviction and being unhoused is credible. For example, Scholars Robert Collinson and Davin Reed combed through over a decade of housing court cases and other administrative programs in New York City, and they found that evictions increase the “probability of [lower income households] applying to homeless shelter[s] by 14 percentage points.” In the words of one anti-homelessness advocate on their experience with this phenomenon:
“Seven, eight years ago here in this neighborhood, my family and I were evicted. This memory comes back to me, it's like a moment of rejection…we weren't worthy to be in the place that we live at…My mom was a hardworking person and she worked multiple jobs. This was during my Senior year. I didn’t know what we were going to do next and neither did my siblings…We decide to just head into a shelter.”
There is a clear link between evicting someone and homelessness — a statement that should sound obvious when uttered aloud — and that's not the only issue. Losing your home comes with it a bevy of health problems. Unhoused people have a shorter life span — 17.5 years shorter than the general population, according to one estimate. They suffer from treatable problems such as wound and skin infections, malnutrition, and substance abuse, as well as mental health problems — all of which would be easier to deal with with a roof over their heads.
Landlords love to share anecdotes of tenant horror stories where people refuse to cooperate, dragging proceedings in courts for years, as a justification for why they must evict. The web is filled with listicles of these stories, usually taken from only the landlord's perspective. These stories aim for the viewer to gawk at all the problems landlords allegedly have to deal with. “…landlords have a tough job,” writes Jasmin Suknanan in BuzzFeed. “But their jobs become *extra* tough when dealing with people and situations who just make the experience a living hell.” These “problem cases,” however, are a statistical minority. We are in the middle of a pandemic that has wrecked the earning potential of millions of Americans, and the number of Americans who are behind on rent sits somewhere at 12% nationally.
Given the repercussions we just talked about — the poverty and death that follow from an eviction — is preventing one or two people from skipping out on rent truly worth risking the physical and mental health of millions of people? And should someone's personality really dictate whether or not they have a right to housing?
Any empathetic person should answer no.
If you are complaining about a poor return when your actions hurt and possibly even kill people, you might understand for a moment why it's hard for others to take your concerns over a bad investment seriously. Because that’s what housing is for most people who rent out property — an investment, a way to accumulate wealth over time.
According to a 2018 Rental Housing Finance Survey, nearly 45% of all rental units are owned by for-profit businesses, which own a disproportionate amount of properties with 25 or more rental units. It's true that individual investors own the remaining units (55%), but this doesn’t make the majority of these investors poor. Owners make up a small number of Americans, and they tend to have a larger income than the average citizen.
Now, if some of these individuals are over-leveraged (i.e., have taken on too much debt) and make a bad investment, they could stand to lose a great deal, as the standard of living they have mapped out for themselves disappears. When comparing this loss to the loss of tenants, however, who are far more likely to face starvation and death, you can see how people think these complaints come off as heartless.
Despite what people like Jacqueline A may have us believe, debt is not the same thing as being unhoused. One group of people losses the future they thought they were entitled to but still most likely has a roof over their heads, while the other loses everything.
To the commenters already typing away links and articles about landlords losing wealth because of bad tenants, losing your economic future is indeed unfair, but that’s how our capitalist system works. You are not entitled to a return on investment, any more than a restaurant owner would be entitled to a profit if patrons stopped going to their restaurant or an investor is to a certain stock price if the stock plummets. Our system is unfair, and if you are unable to make money, you are only allowed access to a patchwork of safety net programs to survive.
We should want to change this dreadful state of affairs. It seems strange to me, however, that many landlords demand sympathy for them over a loss of profits but will disregard the lives of tenants, who are almost always in a materially worse off situation. It speaks to an utter lack of empathy. They want all of the upsides of capitalism for themselves, with none of the downsides, while expecting others to weather both.
Why should housing be different from any other investment? It seems strange that property owners feel like they deserve special treatment over other investors when sudden economic downturns are part of the risk they take on when entering this sector of the economy. There is always the risk that tenants will default on their rents — that’s part of the reason rents are so high in the first place.
Rather than realize that our housing system is unfair for all (and maybe should be radically changed), many landlords will often complain that the law is interfering with their ability to turn a profit. “Preventing all evictions, for any reason (as some local ordinances effectively do),” opines Tony Francois in The Hill in May of 2020 of the now axed eviction moratorium. “While doing nothing to shield property owners, is a dangerous over-reaction to the scope of the problems posed by the current emergency.” Francois goes on to explain that the moratorium may not even be necessary and that if implemented, it will ruin many small-time property owners. He’s, in essence, complaining that the law is unfair because it will impact the earning potential of landlords.
Yet again, this is a willful misrepresentation of how capitalism works. The law has always affected how wealth is made or lost. In fact, gaps in the law are how most entrepreneurial people make their money in the modern era. Gaps in contracting law allowed companies like Uber to break into the taxi business. They reclassified drivers as independent contractors rather than employees to avoid paying out healthcare and overtime entitlements. Gaps in how cryptocurrencies are classified have allowed speculative investing to skyrocket. Going back even further, Robber Barons such as Rockefeller could amass so much wealth because there was no regulatory framework to challenge them.
Large returns on investment almost always come from the exploitation of inequity, and landlords are no different. Housing is not like other products and services where someone can skip one month if they can’t afford it. It’s an essential service that, as we have already covered, materially impacts someone's physical and psychological health. Someone will pay for this service if they can, which is why many devote such a significant portion of their income to even suboptimal housing.
For many, there is no alternative, but the streets.
People would not rent if they had any opportunity to own property, and it’s this necessity that landlords are profiting off of. Take a moment to consider what renting even is. You get the temporary ability to live somewhere, and in exchange, you pay off a landlord’s mortgage and give them equity. Your wealth stagnates or even decreases in this arrangement, while their wealth increases over time. This is all to pay for a service that you must have if you wish to live at all.
It’s inherently exploitative, and as with any exploitative investment, the risk underpinning these high rewards is that the political order will change at any moment. Many people, for example, currently use Airbnb to rent out (or sublease) their spaces, often circumventing local tax and safety regulations on vacation rentals and apartments. In an attempt to get some of that potential tax revenue, governments all over the country are now cracking down, passing laws that make it less profitable for people to rent out their residences with booking platforms like Airbnb. It was (and to a certain extent still is) that gap that made the platform desirable in the first place.
The law is always shifting people’s access to vital services such as housing, leading to high returns and sudden downsides. One of the reasons there is a gap in affordable housing right now is because the federal government has not prioritized it. There have been consistent cuts over the last three decades, going all the way back to Nixon. Public housing is pretty much only built now to replace existing units. Rental vouchers are the preferred method of choice in the current era. Even these have long waitlists as only about a fourth of people who qualify receive them (landlords also often discriminate against voucher holders).
If our government were to increase its funding toward affordable housing, housing would not be nearly as profitable of an investment for landlords as it is today because they benefit from this discrepancy. As scholars Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers write in a paper published in the American Journal of Sociology:
“In poor neighborhoods…landlords are betting on today. These landlords see much higher monthly profit margins per housing unit. This short-term investment strategy does not rely on future equity, a risky proposition in distressed communities, but on the simple fact that in poor neighborhoods mortgage and property tax payments are significantly lower than in nonpoor neighborhoods but rents are not.”
Our current policy regime prioritizes homeownership while not reducing costs for renters. This creates a climate where those who have the resources to purchase property can do so and then charge renters, especially poorer ones, a premium for that service.
While the money is running high, it may seem to landlords like these entitlements to high rents will go on forever, but that’s not the case. There is nothing inherent about your return on investment, in the same way, that there is nothing inherent about people having to set aside a portion of their wealth in rents. These are temporary arrangements built on policies that could change at any moment. The expectation that landlords should not weather any risk (or losses) goes against how our capitalist system operates.
It is troublesome that many landlords would rather stubbornly hold onto their perceived entitlement to rents rather than work towards building a world where neither party has to worry about housing on an ongoing basis. It seems to be more about the preservation of power than about the economy. We should question why we prioritize someone’s right to exploit others over providing everyone equitable housing.
Again, all of this is unfair. It's unfair that housing is so hard for most people to obtain and keep. It's also unfair that exploiting other people is the easiest way to build a safe future for yourself. It creates a situation where to get ahead; you have to take advantage of others — a win-lose scenario.
We should be working towards a world where housing is not a zero-sum game. How we get there is another article (or book series) in its own right. If you are interested in solutions that work towards that future, check out the Urban Institute, the Coalition for the Homeless, and the Housing Partnership Network as places to start. You might also want to research nonprofits and grassroots campaigns in your area working on this problem on a local level.
When it comes to housing, we can create a win-win solution, but to be frank, it will mean shifting our empathy towards the plight of the exploited rather than the lost wealth of the exploiters. Landlords will have to let go, either willing or through force, the idea that they are entitled to profits built on the backs of others' misfortune.
I am not asking to rewrite the economic order overnight, but when it comes to this debate, we need landlords to stop taking up the conversation with housing. Stop writing op-eds and articles bemoaning your loss of profits, and focus on the structural inequities within this system. Uplift and donate to voices trying to reform housing for the better (not simply your bottom line) and spend political power on their preferred solutions.
Also, if you are a landlord, see what you can do with your tenants to make your relationship with them more equitable. One solution worth looking into is rent-to-own contracts. These vary depending on the specifics of the contract. Generally, though, they create an arrangement where the renter sets aside money every month to purchase the property and has first rights to purchase it when it's sold. This opens up a path for homeownership and provides you, the landlord, with an offer to purchase the property, rather than having to pay fees to a realtor to find one.
In exchange for taking small steps like the ones above, all of us will be working towards a world where we don’t have to worry about exploitation, to have a roof over our heads—a world where housing is a right rather than an asset enjoyed by the few.