Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well. Build more housing!
Tentant protection laws are always a matter of degree.
Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an immediate issue, etc) should have something like a 3-7 notice period and then be referred to court and figured out without undue delay.
I'm ok with limiting the reason for the landlord ending a lease, especially where the tenant has stayed there for a long time.
IMHO rent control/rent stabilization can be useful when the cap isn't set too low, and there's reasonable ways to pass through less predictable costs. If the cap is too low, rent gets significantly behind the market rent which causes trouble for landlords but also leads to situations where renters end up stuck where they are; maybe better than being forced out but not if the property deteriorates. If the cap is too high, it doesn't provide meaningful stability or a planning horizon for tenants. If it's in the right place, it gives renters reasonable time to adjust to market changes. Again, IMHO, 3% is probably too low, 10% may be too high, somewhere in the middle is nice to have.
Tenant protections setting deposit limits and process for assessing against the deposit seem reasonable to me. Landlords are going to screw tenants out of deposits if they can, regardless of the market realities, because the relationship is over, the renter is busy with other stuff, and the landlord has the money.
Is there any morally valid reason to evict a tenant other than nonpayment of rent? For bad behavior that should be between them and the police, not you.
I'm sure there's lots, but lease says no X, tenant insits on doing X seems like a reasonable thing to evict about, but not a reasonable thing to ask the police to adjudicate.
At least as long as 'no X' is a reasonably moral thing to restrict. So no pets, no working on cars in the parking lot, no smoking, no loud noises/no more than N police noise complaints, etc. At least my moral code allows one to form a contract that restricts such thing and that when one party refuses to honor a (reasonable) contract, the other party should be able to require the breach be mended or the contract be ended, and that some breaches can't be mended.
Some things that might not be stated in a lease but would also be reasonable to evict for could include no interfering in the quiet enjoyment rights of neighbors, no storing of dangerous goods, no causing dangerous/unsafe situations.
Why is it moral to restrict random stuff in a rental contract? Would no programming be moral to you?
I don't see why that would be an immoral restriction.
I don't think it's a reasonable restriction, but unreasonableness doesn't make it immoral. At the same time, if you make an agreement not to program in a rental and then you program, shouldn't you need to stop or leave? I might have moral concerns about how one enforces a restriction against programming, it's probably intrusive
Now, if your question is no programmers and/or no overnight guests who are programmers and/or you can have six tenants in the unit, but no more than three who are unmaried programmers... Then my moral compass is pointing towards no. Restricting the practicing of a profession on premesis seems fine, descriminating against the practitioners is ick.
Pets, and car maintenance can both damage the property. Noise in the quiet time disrupts other tenants
Does programming cause property damage or impact other tenants?
Absolutely. The law with respect to behavior has almost no force within multi-tenant buildings. It is primarily subject to contract law. The police have no power there. Tenants that repeatedly violate the contractual rights of other tenants have few remedies beyond eviction.
A single asshole can destroy an entire building.
A lease is a contract that both parties have agreed to. If the tenant breaks that contract, it should be terms for eviction. If the landlord breaks that contract, the tenant should be free to break the contract and move.
If the tenant does something criminal, sure, that's up to the police.
Sure: it's morally valid to evict someone who violates any legally-enforceable provision in the lease agreement they signed.
Ah so yoyre stuck in the Kohlberg stage where follosing the law is the highest priority
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Tampering with smoke detectors
Not all bad behavior meets the threshold of police intervention.
Here's a nearly-strawman-but-definitionally-valid example: a landlord may want to remove a tenant who's being unusually hard on the place and accelerating the wear-and-tear. Could be serious enough that paying the tenant to go away would be cheaper than the cost to remediate the damage accrued over the length of the contract.
That's bad. Now everyone who lives in a home (which is everyone) is required to guess what the average amount of wear and tear is, instead of abiding by the contract.
There's common lists ... Check out Appendix 5C and 5D of this HUD publication [1]
[1] https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/hsg-06-01gapp5guid.pdf
There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc.
In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.
Yeah… these laws for private landlords to subsidize housing for other families.
If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family.
Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay
Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.
So it's better that huge corporate landlords own all the rentable housing stock?
You seem to be assuming that if we, say, just made renting illegal, everyone would a) want to own a home, and b) have the finances necessary to do so. That's not the case.
So, you would like there to be less housing, which makes housing more scarce and raises prices on everyone else?
My house fits up to 6 adults, but only 3 are living there now because I don’t want to be a landlord.
Having 3 empty rooms helps no one except corporate landlords that can navigate and scale (and collude…).
Maybe the lesson is just to not be so overleveraged.
If grandma pays 90% less taxes than me (prop13), where is the leverage?
If grandma bought the the house in 1990 and property values have risen faster than wages and inflation, where is the leverage?
If grandma is under insured, either due to the insurance company not updating coverages with inflation or no insurance bc she isn’t required to, where is the leverage?
The leverage I am talking about is being a landlord where most of your cash flow is dependent on one or a handful of tenants reliably paying rent. Maybe it would have been better to not be a single owner of a fourplex, but to go in with 20 other people on ownership of an underlying llc of that fourplex, and invest in another 19 similarly structured fourplex llc's. Same investment but de risked due to spreading it across some 80 people paying rent vs just four people. Or you can just put that money into REITs where now its what several hundred or maybe thousands of people in the tenancy pool you are investing in.
sure because a property owner is going to not rent out a property and just take the month on month hit for having an empty property. They'll either rent it or sell it.
There is a middle ground, just need to find that point.
Apparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the rental market. Landlords in cities with strong tenant protection laws will absolutely leave a unit vacant for months until they find someone with a high income ratio and credit score. This leaves poorer people stuck with no options.
In Amsterdam it led to them getting sold
Do you have evidence? There is evidence that RealPage software illegally coordinated (maybe coordinates) landlords in keeping units off the market in order to reduce demand and increase prices for everyone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-s...
Me (and others in this thread).
I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income.
At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.
How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?
Apparently not many hence the empty house.
In SF and Seattle during hiring booms, a lot of young workers move to the city with no social connections, so they start their new life in hacker houses to kickstart their friend group.
It's surprisingly common in places like SF, and near popular colleges.
Vacancy tax. No one should have the right to buy multiple, rentable homes and keep them unused in the middle of a housing crisis. It’s sociopathic.
So in the Netherlands, For many years any property left vacant and unused dor more than a year could be legally squatted.
it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock
Do you own your own house? Are you rich?
I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.
This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much.
Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.
I think you’re leaving details out of your story. If the landlord wants to make a few bucks, then they keep their good tenants (lowers vacancy rate, keeps repairs low, etc).
Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.
And yet many landlords kick out good tenants, and take the risk that a new tenant that's willing to pay 30% more turns out to be a bad one.
Not sure why you're surprised: this sort of thing has been widespread for years in cities (like SF) where demand outstrips supply.
It’s pretty simple. There’s a tech boom or similar, a bunch of rich workers move in, rents go up. Landlord spikes rent by 30% to take advantage. You can see this happening in r/sanfrancisco today, for non-rent-controlled units.
Sf is kinda a mess. Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.
The property tax situation in SF is a mess.
SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc).
Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.
> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave
They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.
Rent control drives up rent prices for everyone.
So yes, if you have rent control in a city, it would create an environment with zero affordable options.
Obviously it does not drive up the rent price of the person who is paying less rent. That's the whole point. The residents of SF have voted to prevent you from taking their apartments, so if you don't want to bid very competitively for an already empty apartment, you'll just have to take an apartment somewhere else.
> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.
This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.
Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.
> Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive past all these amazing empty homes.
Yes, if you’re not using the space efficiently, GTFO and let people have the space! Let dad have more time with his kids. Let the tech bro that created 10m jobs and have more time with his wife and kid. Let people burn less fossil fuels to get to work.
Rent-controlled/prop13 grandma needs to find another place to live for the next generation.
Someone living alone in a rent controlled unit paying below market rates is much “richer” than a family of 4 paying 5x more cramped into a 2 bedroom apartment.
Many of those grandmas would love to move to a smaller house or apartment in their neighborhood, but paradoxically cannot afford to do so. Blame the system, not the individual who has to make rational decisions for themselves within it.
Maybe you could offer a trade. Swap your home for theirs and pay them some rent for it.
AFAIK, you're not allowed to sublease a rent-controlled unit.
If they own their home, many old people made their bag and aren't interested in being landlords in retirement.
Then I suppose you'll have to pay them to move out and then pay market rent for their unit.
It sounds like you're living in a badly governed city. Have you considered voting for politicians with an abundance agenda? Or moving to a city with more intelligent housing policies such as Dallas?
NIMBYism and single-family zoning are alive and thriving in Dallas; what Dallas has is this thing called a huge-fucking-flat-prairie all around it that means Frisco, Addison, etc, have been able to add to the low-density car-centric sprawl and help keep prices down some.
(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)
One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.
> One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
Because my money should be just as good as yours? Why should you get a huge discount just because of where you were lucky to be born? I'm not asking for a better deal than you, just fair competition between equals.
> And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land.
For first 100, sure. Then they'd complain about the newcomers changing the character of the place and ban new buildings. The same thing happens everywhere, you can't route around it by starting your own new city because as soon as you've built any kind of community you have the same NIMBY problems as every other city.
> Because my money should be just as good as yours?
You have more money than me, so you deserve to take my place? That’s pure entitlement and leads to cities comprised entirely of millionaires.
This assumes the supply of housing can't increase.
What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
The accord you’re proposing is “I deserve your spot because I have more money than you, and we’ll just build more housing later to get you back in.” You can see why I’m not going to go for that as a renter and voter.
> What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
The one that we’re in the middle of talking about? Rent control.
You can do that, but now it's just "I was here first" which eventually turns in to "I'm old" (after all, young people were not there first, by virtue of not existing when rent control was enacted), which doesn't seem fair either.
To be clear, the full solution I would like is rent control plus lots of new housing construction, using whatever incentives are necessary. I do not begrudge old people "taking up space" in a city they've called their home for most of their lives; in fact, I think it adds a lot to a city's character. I'd like to think that someday I'd be able to retire in my favorite city as well.
Nothing against old people but when the city gets greyer and greyer because young people can't move in and old people stay in 3+ bedroom homes it's not great.
> I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.
If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?
I can afford to live in my city. I’m living in it right now! The nice thing is that I don’t get pushed out by arbitrary economic fluctuations completely out of my control.
If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.
That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
> If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.
> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!
Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?
Because I'm rich, and I want to live in SF dagnabbit, and how dare the (checks notes) existing residents of SF vote to block me from taking one of their apartments that I obviously deserve to live in more than they do because I'm rich?
By that logic, we should let the Ohlone tribes underbid all existing residents. They too are just rich assholes who displaced those that were rightfully there before them.
Are they there right now? Then they're covered by rent control laws.
I mean… you said it, not me.
One, we vote for it, and there's far more renters out there than owners. Sorry.
Two, there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.
Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
Ah, tyranny of the majority, the best form of government.
> there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.
But we don't. Everyone who works in the city is paying the costs, while the lucky few who moved in decades ago are the only ones who get the benefit. If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.
> Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
It's got nothing to do with profit; if there are x homes and y>x people who want to live in them, either you give them to the x highest bidders, or you unfairly screw some people over. Rent control is one form of option B (there are others).
> If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.
I'm very sympathetic to this sort of framing, but I don't think that's happening here. Or if it is, then pulling up the ladder is a pretty reasonable, rational thing to do when you're protecting against other people climbing that ladder and throwing you back down to the ground.
I moved to my city less than three years ago, not ten. I was not “lucky” to get my rent-controlled apartment: just had some foresight and was diligent in my search. My rent is high, but not as egregious as what the recent AI migrants are paying. (New upstairs neighbors are literally paying $2000/m more than we are for the same floor plan.) Thankfully, I have no fear of getting kicked out of my home due to a sudden rent spike, so I can focus on building a life.
None of this seems egregious to me. Yes, existing residents are prioritized over new residents. This feels like an obvious tradeoff if you want to maintain community and QoL. The alternative is prioritizing the rich — landlords and wealthy renters alike. I do not want to live in a city where money has the final say.
> New upstairs neighbors are literally paying $2000/m more than we are for the same floor plan.
> None of this seems egregious to me.
Enough said. I wonder if it would feel egregious if you were the one paying $2000/m more.
My upstairs neighbors have very well-paying jobs that allow them to move to the city in the midst of an AI boom. (When I moved here, I was in a similar boat.) They are not infuriated or offended by the rent they have to pay. And I've also had neighbors that payed thousands less in rent than me. (I was happy for them.) Everyone knows the rules when they move to my city; it's just not a big deal unless you're completely self-absorbed.
The alternative is that half my street gets ousted whenever a tech boom happens. What a horrible way to live.
> The alternative is that half my street gets ousted whenever a tech boom happens. What a horrible way to live.
Or maybe if the pain was more evenly distributed you'd vote to legalise more housing. Not being able to live in a street like yours is just as horrible for those of us who didn't luck into arriving there earlier, we're just out of sight, out of mind.
No, not getting to live on my street is not "just as horrible" as getting kicked to the curb with pets and/or dependents and losing your entire lifestyle and community without warning or recourse.
(But again, I am 100% for building more housing using any incentives available. This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.)
> not getting to live on my street is not "just as horrible" as getting kicked to the curb with pets and/or dependents and losing your entire lifestyle and community without warning or recourse.
Come off it, no-one's talking about kicking people out on the curb instantly. I'm all for processes and reasonable notice periods. But ultimately if you're not willing to pay what it costs to live where you do, yeah you should be pushed out for someone who will, rather than the rest of us subsidising you even as we're forced to cram into shared rooms miles away from our jobs.
> This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.
How can it be? How will residents know or care that their city doesn't have enough market-rate housing, that market-rate homes are too expensive, when they're not exposed to that market-rate price? Ever if they support building more housing in theory, they're absolutely going to object to it anywhere near them. It's not a coincidence that cities with rent control consistently build fuck all, that the few cities that have managed to actually build some homes over the past few years are in places like Texas.
Sounds like folks who don't like rent control should move to Texas, then.
Anyway, you can get mad at this policy all you want, but the bottom line is this: renters don't like getting priced out of their homes and far outnumber landowners. They will vote for rent control as the economy starts to squeeze them.
Maybe more effort should be put into thinking of ways to incentivize housing construction rather than getting fruitlessly angry at social policy.
(Also, as a rent-controlled renter, I'd love more housing to be built near me. I don't think I've ever met any renters who feel otherwise. Most of the actual NIMBYs seem to be owners, not renters. As for how would they know that more housing is needed? Um, by reading and talking to people? It's a constant topic of conversation in SF.)
Why shouldn't everyone get everything for free that can be provided for free? Forcing other people to pay a cost because you paid a cost is just sour grapes.
It can’t be provide for free, that’s the point. Mitigating risks has costs that you are ignoring. Those costs aren’t cheap and someone has to pay for them.
What's the cost? Is there some reason productive economic activity can happen only if rich people are allowed to steal SF?
Except it's not free. It's free to you but not others.
If there’s not enough supply to meet demand you have to ration by some means.
I’ve seen money, place of birth, sexual favours, lottery, length of tenure as options to ration. What do you think the best way is?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment suggested you'd be unable to afford market rent.
I can afford to live in my city because my landlord isn’t able to tack an extra $2000 to my rent due to the sudden influx of AI bros.
Pity the boonyman who was afforded no such luxury
Are AI bros infesting the boonies now
> They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone.
Yes, good! Then they will sell their bloody housing stock and people can BUY them instead
That assumes that everyone who wants housing can afford to buy it rather than rent it. It also assumes that everyone who wants housing even wants to buy it.
"Sorry bud, I know you just wanted a place to live while you went to college in this city but if you're not ready to buy a house we don't want you here"
If all the properties owned by career landlords were returned to be sold, the value (and price) of property would go down.
This idea that ubiquitous rental (which is normally at obscene prices any way) makes cities more accessible to live in is nonsense. Landlords are creating the problem that they state they are fixing
This is true, the prices do drop. In Amsterdam at least it meant low income renters getting evicted so that people with roughly 2x their income could buy their former homes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY is an interesting discussion of this.
> The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development
Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.