Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Slum Landlords


This makes me laugh. Today on my way to work I have to listen to our idiot mayor— this is somewhat redundant as all city council types fall under this generalization— proclaiming that he is going to crack down on slum landlords through bylaw enforcements.

Okay, go ahead force all landlords to repair basement foundations, replace window treatments, re-do their wall insulations, roofing repairs…. Etc. Well this all sounds well and good until he passes the costs onto the tenants. So now the $350 rent check has to be raised $525 to pay for all of the repairs and now the rental tenants can no longer afford to live there. We can make all homes palaces but those costs are always passed onto the dweller. People do not get into business to lose money.

Low cost rental housing is a niche market used by people who do not have a lot financial options and these are the people directly hurt by Mandel’s imposition. To reduce low rental housing options only hurts those who are dependant on that market.

Everyone loves to belittle “slum” landlords as if this is a lucrative market where fat cats landlords live the high life through their ability to bully and cheat tenants. This is a lie propagated by Hollywood in the 80’s (their attempt to discredit Regan). Slum landlords are businessmen that deal with extremely small profit margins. Do you not think these people if they had the capital would love to deal with high end, expensive properties? Do you think that they prefer dealing with drug dealers, pimps and other unstable clients that make up a large percentage of their clientele? No, like all other people on this messy planet they are doing their best to utilize the resources available to them to make a living, so while painting “slum” landlords as scapegoats may be beneficial politically but it is virtually useless as a strategy to upgrade housing.

You want to fix up housing. Get rid of capital gains taxes. People would trip over their feet trying to get into the house refurbishing business. But without economic incentive houses will continue to be run down to the point they are only profitable in the low rental situations.