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> It depends where. In France you are completely stuck when someone dies not pay. It can take over a year to finally kick someone out. But then how do you kick

> It depends where. In France you are completely stuck when someone dies not pay. It can take over a year to finally kick someone out. But then how do you kick them out? By doing something! Which was my point. Saying "nothing whatsoever to do about it" is a lie by the OP. I'm not saying all the rules are sane. But it's better to protect the weak that need roof over their heads, than the persons renting out a house they don't need. One could even argue the French law is good. If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many. Owning multiple properties and renting them out isn't a right. Having a house to live in should be.

microcolonel 9y ago
> ...than the persons renting out a house they don't need. Is a camera rental company just "renting out cameras they don't need"? Maintaining rental properties is a livelihood, a bad faith tenant is just as abusive as a bad faith landlord. People buy properties on loans to rent them out, when a tenant refuses to pay the rent, the utilities and the loan payments fall to the landlord. The obvious effect of this is that only people who can afford to lease and rent many properties out at once to spread the cost of this can become landlords. Furthermore, if this dwelling is some part of an existing home, and you can't evict them for violating the lease agreement, then you have unwanted strangers who don't care about you, forcibly staying in your own home. You don't have to be a steenking bourgeois to own a home, and you don't need to be "advantaged" to draw the short end of this straw. Some countries have a mix of laws for tenant relations, for example sublet agreements in some places are afforded little or none of the extreme tenant rights that direct let agreements are. That would likely have helped in this article's situation.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  If it destroyed someone's life to go without a camera then this would be a reasonable analogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    It destroys a landlord's life if their primary asset is turned unfairly into a liability.
    - Khol 9y ago
      So you're suggesting that because they have the ability to buy additional housing and charge people to use it, someone else should bear the risk?
      - cgmg 9y ago
        What?
    - lagadu 9y ago
      That's what's usually known as risk. They invested in an asset to provide their livelihood, that form of income has a set of risks associated with it, just like having a job carries a risk of losing it or how investing in securities carries its own risk. How much are we willing to protect the investor from risk, in this particular case, at the potential expense of a tenant's ability to have shelter? Obviously we need some form of balance but the finer details of it are wildly arguable.
    - xor1 9y ago
      All investments carry risk.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    If you want a closer analogy, we don’t require grocery stores to tolerate shoplifters; we have food stamps and soup kitchens.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Do you think immediate eviction as a remedy for late rent is comparable to fines for shoplifting? If we had adequate state-provided housing available at short notice for any household, as a social safety net, then laws about eviction could be considerably stricter without violating renter’s basic human rights. I doubt you’ll find much support for that policy change from landlords though; the competition would likely reduce prevailing rents quite a bit. Clearly tenant rights aren’t (and shouldn’t be) unlimited, but the protections for tenants currently in place were established to counter bad abuses by landlords. Various measures to preventing shoplifting (whether food or cameras) are not really comparable in my opinion.
ben174 9y ago
> Owning multiple properties and renting them out isn't a right. Having a house to live in should be. I’m not sure I’m reading this correctly. You believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in? Every person is just given a free home? Who would build all these homes in this utopia?
- maaaats 9y ago
  That's a very non-charitable way of reading my statement, I believe you are very sure you're not reading it correctly. But yes, I do "believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in". Not given freely, but having the opportunity for housing. It's even in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
  - tudelo 9y ago
    Even if it's at the cost of someone else who does not wish to single-handedly carry this burden? I have seen first hand the damage someone can cause to a home. I really think that when they are not paying for it they have even less of an emotional stake in the livability of the home post inhabitance.
    - jcadam 9y ago
      Yep, I was an accidental landlord due to the housing bubble bursting in 2008 (had to move for a job, couldn't sell the house without taking a huge loss). Hired a property manager, found a tenant, and did my best to be a good landlord. Let the tenant pay a couple of weeks late a few times without getting bent out of shape, fixed things promptly, etc. Then the time finally came to sell last year. The market had recovered, I could sell the house and actually make a profit. My reward for doing "the right thing" (not defaulting/short-selling/etc.) was ready to be reaped. Tenants moved out... got our first look at the house. It was a complete nightmare. Turns out they raised rabbits (as in, to sell) in the property and trashed the place (poop everywhere, stained walls, and egads.. the smell). Ended up taking a large loss on the property anyway - had to basically dump it in order to find a buyer and just be rid of the thing. The tenants lost their security deposit. That's it. I lost tens of thousands on the sale price (and this was a sub-$200k home), not to mention the years of maintenance, etc. I spent (well, my useless PM charged me) while they were in the house. Yea, should have just sent the bank the keys in the mail and walked away. In the end it would have been less painful.
xefer 9y ago
> is a lie I dislike this (sadly, growingly) cavalier use of the word "lie"
- maaaats 9y ago
  And I dislike people exaggerating with no basis in reality to force a point. What hurts the discussion more, me pointing it out or the statement?
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for man Eviction control makes “some form of rent control necessary: in its absence, the landlord could charge an astronomic rent instead of sending a notice of termination” [1]. Rent controls have a documented effect of suppressing new housing supply, thereby raising rents. Furthermore, “subsequent to the introduction of [German] eviction control in 1971 and 1975, the number of evictions first decreased and then, after some short time interval, returned to its normal average” (page 473). [1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/92900/1/Homburg1993Tenants.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/92900/1/Homburg1993T...
NutriSugar 9y ago
>Having a house to live in should be. I think their is a confusion of rights and duties occurring here. You have a right to own a house. What you are speaking about is others having a duty to provide you with a house. In particular, we need to be clear on exactly what the duty to provide housing is. For example, there is a significant difference between the government offering safe homeless shelters because society has a duty to provide some shelter, and legally being allowed to continue living in a rental unit that you stop paying for, because this constitutes a duty of the owner providing you with that particular house. Sex is a common idea that helps establish the difference between a right and a duty. Banning gay individuals from having sex is wrong because it violates their right to sex. But no one has to have sex with another person because there is no duty to provide sex. >If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many. There is also the possibility of regulatory capture. It prevents someone who happens to own two properties from being a competitor in providing rental services while companies that specialize in it and have many properties of the right value to be able to spread out the risk are not threatened by the laws. As someone looking to buy a house, I've considered the ability to rent it should I seek to move verses having to sell it, and it seems that tenant rights where I live (which are much weaker than French law) increase my risk of renting far more than it increases the risk of a company specializing in renting. Its weird to be in a position where I rent but feel there isn't enough protection while at the same time there is so much protection that it strongly impacts the logic of if I should buy.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Every able-bodied human has the capacity to provide their own housing, given enough land area on which to build. But in most places on Earth, the local legal regime has been constructed in such a way as to provide for a means of land ownership, where other people may be lawfully excluded from using the land, or even just being present on it. There must be a tradeoff there. Everyone requires the legal right to occupy the volume of their own body. It would be completely unethical to make it illegal for a person to exist. Any attempt to do so induces such a person to treat the legal structure as a mortal enemy. So in exchange for respecting a land property right of another, those land-owners have a duty to provide those who might otherwise develop that owned land for their own purposes with a location on which they may exist. They don't even need to actually build any houses, just to allow for any type of housing to be built without attempting to prevent it. If they fail in this duty, they have abrogated the social contract that allows land property to exist, and those with no place to stand could ethically seize the land property. The right to own land comes with a duty to supply living space to those whom you would exclude from it. Surface volume is a limited resource, and impossible to defend in large parcels without the cooperation of others. It would be advantageous for the landowners to form a cartel, such that they could retaliate against renegades that undermine the collective property right by neglecting the duty, because the natural game-theory equilibrium is for everyone to be a NIMBY until the landless people reach a breaking point and murder all the landowners, just to take a reasonable portion for themselves. If you don't build houses, you need to build strong walls. Georgists have put a lot of thought into this concept, even if I don't entirely agree with their proposed solutions to the problem.

microcolonel 9y ago

> ...than the persons renting out a house they don't need. Is a camera rental company just "renting out cameras they don't need"? Maintaining rental properties is a livelihood, a bad faith tenant is just as abusive as a bad faith landlord. People buy properties on loans to rent them out, when a tenant refuses to pay the rent, the utilities and the loan payments fall to the landlord. The obvious effect of this is that only people who can afford to lease and rent many properties out at once to spread the cost of this can become landlords. Furthermore, if this dwelling is some part of an existing home, and you can't evict them for violating the lease agreement, then you have unwanted strangers who don't care about you, forcibly staying in your own home. You don't have to be a steenking bourgeois to own a home, and you don't need to be "advantaged" to draw the short end of this straw. Some countries have a mix of laws for tenant relations, for example sublet agreements in some places are afforded little or none of the extreme tenant rights that direct let agreements are. That would likely have helped in this article's situation.

jacobolus 9y ago
If it destroyed someone's life to go without a camera then this would be a reasonable analogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing
- microcolonel 9y ago
  It destroys a landlord's life if their primary asset is turned unfairly into a liability.
  - Khol 9y ago
    So you're suggesting that because they have the ability to buy additional housing and charge people to use it, someone else should bear the risk?
    - cgmg 9y ago
      What?
  - lagadu 9y ago
    That's what's usually known as risk. They invested in an asset to provide their livelihood, that form of income has a set of risks associated with it, just like having a job carries a risk of losing it or how investing in securities carries its own risk. How much are we willing to protect the investor from risk, in this particular case, at the potential expense of a tenant's ability to have shelter? Obviously we need some form of balance but the finer details of it are wildly arguable.
  - xor1 9y ago
    All investments carry risk.
- closeparen 9y ago
  If you want a closer analogy, we don’t require grocery stores to tolerate shoplifters; we have food stamps and soup kitchens.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Do you think immediate eviction as a remedy for late rent is comparable to fines for shoplifting? If we had adequate state-provided housing available at short notice for any household, as a social safety net, then laws about eviction could be considerably stricter without violating renter’s basic human rights. I doubt you’ll find much support for that policy change from landlords though; the competition would likely reduce prevailing rents quite a bit. Clearly tenant rights aren’t (and shouldn’t be) unlimited, but the protections for tenants currently in place were established to counter bad abuses by landlords. Various measures to preventing shoplifting (whether food or cameras) are not really comparable in my opinion.

ben174 9y ago

> Owning multiple properties and renting them out isn't a right. Having a house to live in should be. I’m not sure I’m reading this correctly. You believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in? Every person is just given a free home? Who would build all these homes in this utopia?

maaaats 9y ago
That's a very non-charitable way of reading my statement, I believe you are very sure you're not reading it correctly. But yes, I do "believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in". Not given freely, but having the opportunity for housing. It's even in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- tudelo 9y ago
  Even if it's at the cost of someone else who does not wish to single-handedly carry this burden? I have seen first hand the damage someone can cause to a home. I really think that when they are not paying for it they have even less of an emotional stake in the livability of the home post inhabitance.
  - jcadam 9y ago
    Yep, I was an accidental landlord due to the housing bubble bursting in 2008 (had to move for a job, couldn't sell the house without taking a huge loss). Hired a property manager, found a tenant, and did my best to be a good landlord. Let the tenant pay a couple of weeks late a few times without getting bent out of shape, fixed things promptly, etc. Then the time finally came to sell last year. The market had recovered, I could sell the house and actually make a profit. My reward for doing "the right thing" (not defaulting/short-selling/etc.) was ready to be reaped. Tenants moved out... got our first look at the house. It was a complete nightmare. Turns out they raised rabbits (as in, to sell) in the property and trashed the place (poop everywhere, stained walls, and egads.. the smell). Ended up taking a large loss on the property anyway - had to basically dump it in order to find a buyer and just be rid of the thing. The tenants lost their security deposit. That's it. I lost tens of thousands on the sale price (and this was a sub-$200k home), not to mention the years of maintenance, etc. I spent (well, my useless PM charged me) while they were in the house. Yea, should have just sent the bank the keys in the mail and walked away. In the end it would have been less painful.

xefer 9y ago

> is a lie I dislike this (sadly, growingly) cavalier use of the word "lie"

maaaats 9y ago
And I dislike people exaggerating with no basis in reality to force a point. What hurts the discussion more, me pointing it out or the statement?

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for man Eviction control makes “some form of rent control necessary: in its absence, the landlord could charge an astronomic rent instead of sending a notice of termination” [1]. Rent controls have a documented effect of suppressing new housing supply, thereby raising rents. Furthermore, “subsequent to the introduction of [German] eviction control in 1971 and 1975, the number of evictions first decreased and then, after some short time interval, returned to its normal average” (page 473). [1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/92900/1/Homburg1993Tenants.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/92900/1/Homburg1993T...

NutriSugar 9y ago

>Having a house to live in should be. I think their is a confusion of rights and duties occurring here. You have a right to own a house. What you are speaking about is others having a duty to provide you with a house. In particular, we need to be clear on exactly what the duty to provide housing is. For example, there is a significant difference between the government offering safe homeless shelters because society has a duty to provide some shelter, and legally being allowed to continue living in a rental unit that you stop paying for, because this constitutes a duty of the owner providing you with that particular house. Sex is a common idea that helps establish the difference between a right and a duty. Banning gay individuals from having sex is wrong because it violates their right to sex. But no one has to have sex with another person because there is no duty to provide sex. >If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many. There is also the possibility of regulatory capture. It prevents someone who happens to own two properties from being a competitor in providing rental services while companies that specialize in it and have many properties of the right value to be able to spread out the risk are not threatened by the laws. As someone looking to buy a house, I've considered the ability to rent it should I seek to move verses having to sell it, and it seems that tenant rights where I live (which are much weaker than French law) increase my risk of renting far more than it increases the risk of a company specializing in renting. Its weird to be in a position where I rent but feel there isn't enough protection while at the same time there is so much protection that it strongly impacts the logic of if I should buy.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Every able-bodied human has the capacity to provide their own housing, given enough land area on which to build. But in most places on Earth, the local legal regime has been constructed in such a way as to provide for a means of land ownership, where other people may be lawfully excluded from using the land, or even just being present on it. There must be a tradeoff there. Everyone requires the legal right to occupy the volume of their own body. It would be completely unethical to make it illegal for a person to exist. Any attempt to do so induces such a person to treat the legal structure as a mortal enemy. So in exchange for respecting a land property right of another, those land-owners have a duty to provide those who might otherwise develop that owned land for their own purposes with a location on which they may exist. They don't even need to actually build any houses, just to allow for any type of housing to be built without attempting to prevent it. If they fail in this duty, they have abrogated the social contract that allows land property to exist, and those with no place to stand could ethically seize the land property. The right to own land comes with a duty to supply living space to those whom you would exclude from it. Surface volume is a limited resource, and impossible to defend in large parcels without the cooperation of others. It would be advantageous for the landowners to form a cartel, such that they could retaliate against renegades that undermine the collective property right by neglecting the duty, because the natural game-theory equilibrium is for everyone to be a NIMBY until the landless people reach a breaking point and murder all the landowners, just to take a reasonable portion for themselves. If you don't build houses, you need to build strong walls. Georgists have put a lot of thought into this concept, even if I don't entirely agree with their proposed solutions to the problem.