> Because she stayed in the unit for six months, Hirschhorn qualified for L.A.'s recently adopted Just Cause Ordinance, which requires a landlord to have a legal reason to evict her, and if there is no legal reason, the landlord is required to pay for relocation assistance for the tenant
As long as "legal reason" includes a reasonable list of reasons I don't see a problem with such a law.
There is an inherent huge power imbalance between the landlord and the renter, where if the landlord ad-hoc decides to throw you out before you have a new place lined up, you might find yourself homeless. When people have such power over others, they often abuse that power in various ways, like asking for sexual favors, raising the rent cost exploitatively high at inopportune moments, or blackmailing the renter to keep quiet about violations, etc.
We as a society recognize that simply telling people "if you don't like the thing your landlord is asking of you in the middle of the night without warning, you are free to move out and become homeless until you find a new location" is not a humane and viable solution. Hence, we have laws for what can and can't be done.
Having traveled dozens of countries from east to west recently, I had come to an interesting observation: The countries with the most protections have the worst rental market. The countries with the least protections have a much better rental market. When there are no protection, the landlord just throw you the key. There are no papers to sign. No background check. No significant deposits (or absolutely no deposits). And no wait times. Key and go!
The worst markets were the most regulated with the most "protections". The US was exceptionally bad. There are several checks (ie: credit check), wait time, deposit, papers, onboarding process, more wait time, bank balance checks, more papers to sign. etc... for a few months rental. And you'd think all these people will make for a better maintained property. Nope.
You'll have no argument from me that protection and regulation can go too far.
But have you considered that as you were traveling across different countries, you'd be biased towards seeing the problems that affect you (finding a new place to rent) and you'd not be seeing the problems that don't affect you (existing renters being abused)?
But if the market is easy, doesn't this mean that existing renters can always bounce to some new place? It seems to me that abuse can only happen if they can't find another place. Of course, you'll always have some exceptional cases but should you break the whole market just for these?
Someone who has "traveled dozens of countries recently" is probably traveling a bit lighter than someone who's lived somewhere for several years. It seems likely you're not traveling with a couch, a bed, a nice desk, a dining room set, washer/dryer, etc. that you move with you each time. (I'd guess you're not carting a couple of young children from school system to school system, too.)
Can't just construction workers bounce to a new job if their existing job is abusing them, asking them to work under unsafe conditions, etc? It would seem abuse can only happen if they can't find another job. Regulations about how the workplace can't be a deathtrap is strangulating the market. /s
Imagine you are a lone mother taking care of her kid, you are carpooling to work, and barely making ends meet. Then your landlord starts making some demands on you and starts hinting that he might throw you out otherwise. Is it realistic to say "The mother should just move out the next day, and find a new place for herself and her child, and find a new means of transportation to her job. If that new landlord abuses his power she should just move again the next day."
Your viewpoint isn't uncommon, but the last few hundred years of modern society has repeatedly demonstrated that if people have leverage over others in terms of their access to food, medicine and shelter, then that power will be abused. If companies could they'd be paying you in scrip, we had to outlaw it, not simply tell workers to find a non-scrip workplace.
For people who aren't bouncing around the world and never living in one place for more than a few months at a time, being forced to move is a very big deal even if finding the new place to live is easy.
Lower protection leads to lower demand because low protection means high incentive for ownership. Higher demand leads to higher protection because that market implies a higher inherent power imbalance. The causal relationship you propose isn't the whole picture. Yeah, if it's difficult to find renters landlords will be happy about any that show up.
I'm no longer a Californian, but I support extremely strong tenant's rights laws. Landlords risk money. Tenants risk housing. The law should shift the balance of power here. Landlords love to say how they deserve their rents because they are taking on risk for the tenant - so they should actually take on that risk.
Moving is very expensive. You have a deposit on the new rental. You have to pay for moving your stuff over to the new place. You might have to take time off work to search for a new rental. You probably have some overlapping lease time where you are paying double on rent.
I don't understand why this was downvoted. It is a very reasonable position. For perspective, I have family members that are California landlords and have been screwed by tenants and California laws.
The problem with using the government to socially engineer society is that you even if you have good intentions one way or another, you end up playing whack-a-mole with infinite possible unintended consequences.
Its also like 300,000 dollars to get a liquor license in L.A. which is the government essentially excluding all small business from starting a bar and playing favoritism to big corporations with the stated intention of safety/regulation.
That’s exactly the case with renter protections. I’m a landlord in a large American city. I’m also a “nice guy” who makes sure that things work. We don’t evict except when other options have been exhausted.
Now for the problem: it takes many months to evict here, best case. As a result, we will never take a chance on a marginal tenant. No other decent landlord with whom I’ve spoken will either.
Unintended consequences are real, especially when owners are deprived of their property rights. You might think I’m conservative, but for the most part I’m a flaming liberal. ;-)
I find it hard to believe that completely unregulated markets don't have the same "whack-a-mole with infinite possible unintended consequences", just a different set of consequences.
If only we could have a petition and vote directly on this kind of thing, and not close voting until we confirm that X% of the (legal) population has voted. It's 2023, and I'm honestly baffled we haven't done something along these lines by now.
Perhaps future generations will look back on this period and see us as barbaric because of it.
It might be surprising that many countries have such renters protections, as it attempts to equalise the power disparity between landlord and renters, and makes it harder to be a 'scum lord.'
If you ignore the Airbnb element — then on the surface this appears to be an issue of a landlord letting a property which was not fit for occupation. It is the landlords obligation, not the renters, to determine whether their property is fit for purpose. If they failed to do so, then the renter is protected from punitive actions (such as being evicted) for wanting these fixes made when they are discovered.
I don't disagree with your basic premise, but in this case, the tenant appears to be refusing access to rectify the problems.
And if the residence isn't fit for occupancy, then nobody should be living there, rent or no rent. While apparently legal, the dissonance required to argue "I won't pay rent because the home isn't fit for purpose" while living long-term in that same house makes my eye twitch.
> While apparently legal, the dissonance required to argue "I won't pay rent because the home isn't fit for purpose" while living long-term in that same house makes my eye twitch.
Depends a bit on whether it was "not fit for purpose" knowingly before living there, or part-way through. A landlord shouldn't be able to get around rental protections by intentionally neglecting the property, nor should they be able to hide serious problems and go "welp, move out" when discovered.
It's a crappy sticky plaster on the social problems caused by de-taxing land and granting one class of people the right to extract rents from a other through legal title.
Just like rent control.
If your sympathies side with those on the side of the parasitic rent extraction machine depleting the productive capacity of the real economy (the side of the economy where people work rather than charge for access to assets), you won't be a champion of either of these things and will argue that they are well meaning but inadvertently bad for the victims of the parasites.
Realistically some parasites can't be killed without killing the host - they entrench themselves that deeply. When Cuba decided to overhaul land rights, for example, the US invaded.
Wow. Is that a law most Californians support?