Landlords have the right to change their mind when it comes time for lease renewal. You're arguing that landlords should be forced to always rent their property to the same tenant once they begin. That's how ownership, not rental, works. Rentals are for a limited time by definition.
I know people (in fact, every branch of my family, along with many of my friends) who have rented their entire lives, because they can't own - they've never been able to amass enough capital or convince someone else to lend them it. Should they be uprooted every year (or more often) because someone wants to make a bit more money?
Rentals are whatever the combination of the contract and the local law say they are, by definition.
> Should they be uprooted every year (or more often) because someone wants to make a bit more money?
No, they shouldn't be, but that's not really the issue. The issue is: should landlords be legally allowed to uproot them?
My answer is a decisive yes. For whatever the reason, they should be able to not renew a contract once it expires.
I don't see why laws should be in place to restrict how much someone makes. Nobody has to have that particular apartment, or live in that particular place, etc. There's always options.
> No, they shouldn't be, but that's not really the issue.
Yes, it really is. Which does the most harm - uprooting people and families every year, forcing them to deal with the stress of moving and finding new life patterns which match wherever they live now, or disallowing landlords from making a bit more money?
I guess you mean "disallowing landlords to make more money."
Again I think that's a red herring. There are plenty of reasons an owner might want to remove a tenant outside of profit. But again, it's not the issue--this is really straight to the heart of property rights.
Someone owns a property, and by and large, should be able to do what they want with that property.
Living on someone else's property is part of the risk of renting. Similar to working for someone else--would you also argue an employer should have to keep paying a worker who is underperforming (or any of a litany of legitimate reasons), because if they didn't that worker might have to deal with the stress of moving & finding new life patterns?
Property rights only exist because of the law, otherwise, in general, property amounts to "what you can personally protect from people using force". It makes sense that alternate property models from "full ownership" can be implemented without the world crumbling.
As I say in another comment, when you rent out a house to a tenant, you already lose certain property rights, at least while the tenant is living there. You can't write a contract which allows you to keep them, by law. You usually even have certain duties to the tenant, as much as landlords like to shirk these. This is the same in many developed countries, and the world's yet to fall apart for it.
In many countries it's quite difficult for an employer to fire a worker, and if they do, they have to provide some financial support to help them, as you say, move and find new life patterns. I do not live in one of those countries, so I cannot vouch for the advantages and disadvantages of this system, but it's hardly unthinkable.
My answer is a decisive yes. For whatever the reason, they should be able to not renew a contract once it expires.
And therein lies some of the disconnect: my answer is a decisive no. I think there are some reasons for which a landlord should be able to kick out a tenant, but I do not believe that any reason will suffice.
And that's why we have (imperfect) laws such as the Ellis Act, and a raft of other things that protect tenants from capricious, rent-seeking landlords.
>Should they be uprooted every year (or more often) because someone wants to make a bit more money?
If they are living on someone else's property, and that person wishes to sell the property, and the lease and any other contractual or statutory guarantees have lapsed, then yes? This is really not a new thing. You can't do away with property ownership as a concept just because San Francisco is ridiculous.
Property ownership is an abstract concept enforced by law in the first place. There are theoretical economic models which do away with it to varying extents, or implement alternative ownership models. Why is it so mind-boggling to modify how it works in one specific instance?
Actually, almost everywhere, when you have a tenant, you lose some ownership rights already, by law. For example, except in an emergency, you generally can't enter the building without prior notice.
The issue is not that acquiring a tenant restricts some rights that the owner would otherwise have; this is a compromise that the landlord knowingly makes when he rents. That control is relinquished for a pre-agreed, limited period of time, after which control will be returned to the owner, is the essence of renting. The issue is that some people seem to believe that once they are on someone's property, that person loses the future ability to determine how that property is used; i.e., it's not that they have to wait until the current contract expires, but rather that you seem to be arguing that the landlord should never be able to remove a tenant from his property if the tenant does not consent, even at points when the lease on the property has lapsed. That's a permanent deprivation of the core of ownership -- the ability to determine and direct the utilization or exploitation of the property, even if you have to fill existing contractual obligations first, like an active lease.
> The issue is that some people seem to believe that once they are on someone's property, that person loses the future ability to determine how that property is used...
Here's the thing, though. It's not as if existing rent control regulation catches landlords by surprise. If a prospective landlord is so unprepared as to be unaware of the rent control status of a property that he's planning on purchasing, then he's likely to do very poorly with pretty much all of the tasks that being a landlord requires of him.
In short, the fact that landlords rent out rent-controlled units is proof positive that they understand and accept the restraints imposed on them by rent control regulations. The fact that rent controlled apartments continue to be rented in SF (rather than withdrawn from the market for five years and converted into condos, as the law allows) is proof that rent control is not draining the lifeblood out of landlords.
The insane rents in SF are not due to rent control (how could they be?), but due to the pathological lack of new residential construction.
Rent control doesn't grant tenants a permanent interest in the property, even if some rent control regulations make it annoying and/or arduous to remove tenants. The person I replied to suggested that landlords should be required to let their tenants stay in their property eternally if the tenant so chose, i.e., that tenants should have permanent control of the property.
You absolutely can alter the concept of property ownership; to think otherwise is a failure of imagination, historical perspective, or both. (For instance: who owned the land under the buildings at 8th and Market three million years ago? What would an early Christian think of our complex system of interest-bearing loans? Have you ever read any sci-fi novels depicting societies in which property rights took fundamentally different forms? Should landlords be allowed to kill or enslave tenants if that would increase their profits? What if the government knocks on your door and claims eminent domain? And so on.)
Whether you should do so is another question, one to which I don't have the answer.
I think your view of property ownership is a bit out of touch with reality. It's pretty rare that having a deed to a piece of land lets you do whatever you want with it. Or even close to whatever you want.
On the other hand, the owner of this building would have benefitted from the intended effect of rent control on the price of the property when they bought it. There's no doubt that a rent controlled apartment building would fetch less at sale time than a non-rent-controlled equivalent.
Sure, landlords "have the right to change their mind", but only within the legal/regulatory framework in which they've chosen to invest.
But hey, "Uber, but for residential rentals". There's clearly _some_ people who'd benefit from doing end-runs around the rules by which everybody _else_ plays...
(Just think for a minute about how surge pricing for apartment rentals in SF would look... All the "locals" moving out to Oakland or Pleasanton while WWDC or Google IO is on, and moving back in again during Burningman...)
I think there's actually even more to the comparison you've made than you've said: the reason Uber is generally ok, even though it does make an end-run around some transportation regulation, is that the existence of Uber doesn't take anything away from anyone. Taxis still exist, people can ride in them. If existing taxi drivers are losing business, there are avenues they can take to recover that business (often imperfectly). Making an end-run around housing laws almost unilaterally benefits an already-privileged group (land owners), at the expense of others.
If you're going to trot out an absolutist term like "by definition", I'd like to inform you that "limited time" is by no means a condition for being defined as "rent": http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rent
I know that sounds a bit pedantic and splitting hairs, but if you're going to base your argument on re-defining what words mean... that's a bit of a problem.
"A bit" is an understatement. You're overtly, obnoxiously pedantic when you reference a single dictionary and ignore common usage, particularly in this thread. Yes, I know, that sounds harsh, but "doing your homework" is a necessary precondition for being a pedant.
In common use, it's always in conjunction with a temporary agreement. You don't "rent (a home) forever." GP didn't make up some new usage to further his argument.
Touché, though I don't agree with you on the "common usage" bit. People do in fact "rent (a home) forever", and from what I've gathered it's not that uncommon, at least for cases where "forever" is a person's adult life span.
Even considering the temporary case, what does "temporary" mean? 1 year? 2? 5? 10? Where's the cut-off where you've rented for "too long" and it's ok to be kicked out of your home? Even if you can pick a number for that yourself, I hope you can agree that others might have different numbers, and that the selection of such a number is somewhat arbitrary.
I think the fact that all of this is a problem proves the point that people do expect to be able to rent a home for some value of "forever" (or even some value of "temporary") that is larger than a landlord's profit motive would allow.
Look, if I want to rent a power saw from a hardware store that offers rentals, me keeping that saw for a long time isn't a problem, assuming I'm continuing to make payments[1]. If the hardware store finds there are more people wanting saws, and they're running out, they'll just buy more; there's a ready supply. The same thing doesn't work for housing because land is a limited public resource. In SF's case it's even more limited due to the arbitrary new-construction planning process and disappointing level of NIMBYism in the city that means we can never keep up with demand, Mayor Lee's housing initiatives notwithstanding. This is why real property law doesn't give absolute power to the owner of that property. There are rules. You can't discriminate based on protected classes, for one. Rent control is another rule. The Ellis act is yet another. These rules aren't perfect, but they do tend to protect people who would otherwise be at the short end of a very unpleasant landlord-tenant power dynamic.
[1] It might be stupid for me to do so, financially, since I'd fairly quickly pay more than the cost of a new saw, but let's assume that, like housing in SF, the cost of a new saw is several hundred times the cost to rent it. This also serves to point out that owning a house is financially impossible for many people, while renting -- up until recently -- was much more doable.
>I think the fact that all of this is a problem proves the point that people do expect to be able to rent a home for some value of "forever" (or even some value of "temporary") that is larger than a landlord's profit motive would allow.
The only value that should be expected is the duration of the lease. Yes, it's true that many landlords are satisfied with their rental arrangements and want to continue renting (I have personally done several lease renewals with the same landlord, and I have relatives that lived in the same rental for 20+ years), but a tenant should never take that renewal for granted. Leases are usually in 12 month increments, and at each renewal point, the relationship is re-evaluated by both parties and one or the other moves on or alters the terms of the rental contract if he/she is dissatisfied. Is it really that hard to figure out how this works?
I'm a tenant now and I will hold no ill will to the landlords if they do not wish to renew our lease. I do not feel entitled to their property beyond the contractual and legal stipulations outlined in our lease and in the state's landlord-tenant law, nor do I feel that it's my right to force them to rent to me in perpetuity.
I'm more surprised that some adults believe renting a home grants them a perpetual interest in it than anything. That's literally the difference between renting and owning. If you have a permanent interest in the land, you are at least part-owner. When people want to keep things forever, they buy them.
I think that's a matter of status quo and what's considered standard/common. In SF there's usually no new lease agreement after the initial 12 month (or whatever) lease is up. Most revert to month-to-month after that. There's certainly nothing stopping a landlord or tenant asking for a new agreement that covers more time, but in my experience it's not that common in SF.
You could interpret that either way, I guess, as reinforcement of what you're saying, or as against. People should get the fact that it's always month-to-month after the initial period, and just deal with the uncertainty surrounding that.
But the expectation is that the initial lease functions more for the landlord than the tenant (protects the landlord from a flaky tenant who is going to move out after a few months, causing the landlord to have to bear the cost of re-cleaning and re-listing the property after a very short time). SF's laws are very tenant-friendly, so it's hard to get rid of a tenant even on a month-to-month agreement. That certainly breeds an environment that makes people think that "forever unless I want to leave" is normal.
I'm more surprised that some adults believe renting a home grants them a perpetual interest in it than anything. That's literally the difference between renting and owning. If you have a permanent interest in the land, you are at least part-owner. When people want to keep things forever, they buy them.
That reasoning holds tons of merit, I think. A problem, though, is that the cost to buy in SF is out of reach for most tenants. When a 20% down-payment pushes $150k for some of the "cheaper" houses, buying becomes difficult for the majority of people. It can even be a stretch for the high-flying, well-paid tech worker who has actually been able to put money away for several years.
Sorry, and I know you're probably predisposed to disbelieve me since I started off with a crappy tone, but I'm honestly not trying to be a pedant here.
I truly believe that most people (at least who live in SF; I can't speak for other cities) would not consider a rental "temporary" to the degree that you seem to be thinking. Whether or not they should is another matter, but I think the state of rentals here -- especially among rent-controlled units -- serves only to reinforce the belief that a rental can (and "should") be as permanent as the renter wants it to be. And it's a feedback loop: people believe this because of renter protections, which causes them to believe and fight for (and often get) even stronger renter protections, which allows their rental status to become even more "permanent", and so on.
Again, not saying it's right (or wrong), but I can easily see how the sentiment in SF is that renting need not be a permanent thing.
In a rent controlled area, they don't have that right, by definition. Rent controlled rentals aren't for a limited time, with various exceptions, by definition.
Yes, they do have that right. They can use the building themselves, rent it to someone more trusted (family/friends), or sell it. They don't have to rent it out in the first place, so the building never has to come under rent control.
Yes, you technically can rent it for a limited time of zero, meaning they do have the right to rent it for a limited time, in some weird mathematical field theory of rental treating that as the additive identity element or something.
It's those exceptions that you glossed over in your initial comment that cause your assertion to be incorrect.
Landlords have a variety of legal options to terminate a rent-controlled lease. Those options are almost always less palatable than continuing the lease. This is by design, and -in areas with obscene housing supply issues- good for society. Housing security is far more important for societal well-being than the fullness of a landlord's wallet.
