The Problem With ‘Just-Cause’ Eviction A Dangerous Idea That Will Hurt Renters and Landlords
Radical changes in New York’s housing regulations seem to pop up with little warning these days, almost as quickly as William Levitt once built new homes on Long Island. But rather than boost the supply of homes, today’s changes strangle the housing market and work against the interests of the same tenants in whose name they are enacted.
Last year saw rent regulations that extended price controls — with their well-known effect of stifling new supply — statewide, even potentially to upstate communities struggling more with abandoned homes than rent hikes. The same law limited rent increases meant to allow landlords to recover investments for capital improvements, sentencing New Yorkers to a wave of disinvestment and “shabbification.”
This year, claiming to be interpreting the law (though it’s highly disputable whether the statute required it), the state surprised us all with a ban on broker’s fees — which, if it overcomes a current court injunction, is likely to lead to owners folding that cost into the rent, or further letting buildings go downhill.
Watch out, because Albany may be about to throw another destructive rent regulation bomb our way. State Sen. Julia Salazar is pushing an attractive-sounding “just cause eviction” law. The idea that anyone might be evicted for almost any reason is upsetting, and limiting the reasons to “failure to pay rent, the violation of committing or permitting a nuisance, or permitting the premises to be used for an illegal purpose” sounds reasonable — until one looks at the details.
The Salazar bill would, first, prohibit evictions based on “unconscionable” rent increases, defined as more than 150% of the Consumer Price Index, which rose just 2.3% from 2018 to 2019. There is simply no getting around the fact that this would usher in a rigid regime of statewide rent control.
Its implicit assumption is that all tenants are in poverty and would prefer to live in poor conditions rather than pay a higher rent. And, of course, that owners, absent regulation, would always raise rents with impunity — rather than doing their best to hang on to good tenants.
In addition to limiting evictions, the law would grant tenants the right to renew a lease, and that owners could not simply decide renewals for reasons of their own. The assumption here: that all owners are arbitrary and capricious, rather than hoping to avoid the mess of Housing Court when dealing with a problem tenant.
The truly fatal flaw in the proposed law is its blindness to the fact that the eviction of some tenants improves the quality of life of many others — who may have been victimized by their noise, overcrowding or criminal activity.
That is the same flaw that marred Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book “Evicted.” The often-brilliant book concludes that evictions are a problem based on housing costs — and not, sometimes, the behavior of the many problem tenants he portrays as victims.
It’s worth noting that the state’s largest landlord to the poor, the New York City Housing Authority, requires tenants to sign a lease which makes clear that they can be evicted, and not only for nonpayment of rent. “Dangerous persons” can even face “permanent exclusion.” A lease may not be renewed if the original tenants are no longer living in the unit, or if tenants own or rent an apartment elsewhere.
While landlords primarily provide shelter, they also serve as gatekeepers that help establish and preserve norms of good community behavior. Surely they make mistakes. But by screening tenants on such criteria as credit scores (another progressive bugaboo), they also encourage households to do their best to pay their bills and live within their means.
The Salazar bill would hurt many of the people it purports to want to help. Let’s hope that, like last year’s rent regulation bill, Gov. Cuomo doesn’t let it sneak into law in the dead of the Albany night.
This piece originally appeared in the New York Daily News
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Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he directs the Tocqueville Project, and author of the new book, Who Killed Civil Society?
This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News