Rent: Legal Theft

During the pandemic, a collapsing economy and mass unemployment has left many people unable to pay their rent, provoking questions about the ethics of the current rental system. Many landlord associations have come out with provisions for landowners. However, when thinking of the tenants, they are the ones in the arrangement without any property or fallbacks. A landlord has assets to rely on or sell under difficult circumstances. When things go downhill, the tenant is left with nothing.

So what do landlords actually do? One thing they don’t do is pay for mortgage or repair bills. The tenant pays for both while their rent money is siphoned by the landlord. Additionally, apartments with utilities covered lump bill costs with the rent, making the tenant pay for those expenses anyway. Though some landlords may take responsibility for repairs, they also set arbitrary rules on the property such as no drilling or repainting the walls. While tenants have to perform wage labor to live on a property, landlords spend an average of just a measly three to 10 hours a month managing the property.

The lease between landlord and tenant is not mutually beneficial. The landlord makes equity off of the tenant’s labor. When the tenant terminates a lease, the landlord still owns the home and can find new renters. However, the stakes are much higher for the tenant. With the revoke of a lease, the tenant becomes homeless, losing a fundamental necessity. The system is overwhelmingly favorable to one side.

With this unbalanced power dynamic, the interests of one group overwhelm the other. A landlord’s goal is to extract as much money from tenants as legally possible to generate revenue. One way is by being a slumlord, in which leaseholders exploit the lower class by purchasing less valuable buildings in low-income neighborhoods for a lower mortgage. These leaseholders then raise rent out of fear that tenants will not pay and with the knowledge that low-income renters must choose between paying or going homeless. In a study examining landlord incomes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, researchers found that landlords made approximately $151 in profit each month from a single unit in a low-income neighborhood, compared to $21 in an affluent one.

The tenant’s interest, then, is to keep as much money as possible without being evicted. This goal proves difficult to accomplish when a landlord holds leverage over a renter’s head through the threat of eviction, which makes discussions between landlords and renters tricky. Landlords have more money on their side, as seen when renters in the US paid a total of $535 billion for residential rents in 2015. Additionally, Republican lobbyists criticized a bill that prevented evictions against unemployed tenants during the pandemic in New York, claiming that the inability for landlords to evict gave tenants too much power.

Though renting is a struggle for tenants, owning property is also difficult for the average person. It is more profitable for global investment firms to charge rent than to sell properties. Moreover, houses become more valuable and expensive over time as the population grows. This situation is compounded by the fact that about half of New York renters are rent-burdened and have a hard time building up equity to make these investments.

It’s important to remember that not all landlords are greedy, money-stealing monsters. There is a spectrum from a small-time landowner renting to make ends meet while being cooperative with tenants to a large institutional landlord disconnected from residents. However, the rent institution as a whole is morally wrong. Many landlords take part in an extortion system, working together to protect their interests. Small landlords work toward the interest of big corporations when they have to fight tenant protection laws to make profits.

Because renting is so ingrained in our society, it is difficult to imagine an alternative as the concept of landlords dates as far back as feudalism. However, land reform has also been found in countries like Mexico and Russia, which have fought against serfdom or land monopolies. Transforming private residential properties into housing collectives removes the landlord class and pools funds for improvements or repairs. The jobs of small landowners and groundskeepers could be transformed into laborers cleaning the property rather than just landlord duties. In the past, landlords have been eliminated. For instance, Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata fought the hacienda plantation system that took over peasant farmer life in 1910 and returned the haciendas to the peasants. Between 1910 and the 1940s, when the land reform movement regressed, Mexico fought against plantations. Even without revolutionary measures, renters can still gain some power through unions and moratoriums, such as the current moratorium on New York evictions.

It will be hard to make a new system of housing without significant reforms. Despite this difficulty, housing never should have been turned into an exploitative system.