There’s a very similar ongoing problem with sober living homes. You’ll read exposés that, within 2 paragraphs of each other, castigate one home or provider for “kicking recovering addicts to the curb with no notice or legal eviction!” and another for “allowing an environment where residents still drink and do drugs, pulling others into relapse!”
….Well, polemic and slant aside, what other options are there? It’s a home for adults, not an inpatient hospital. You can’t stop people at the door and subject them to a search. So if a resident relapses (within or without the home), you can either (a) preserve the sober environment by kicking them out and sending them back to detox immediately (thereby catching flak for not going through a full court eviction), or (b) go through a full court eviction, leaving the relapsed resident in close proximity to the other recovering residents (thereby catching flak for “allowing” a non-sober environment).
There is no magic “do a full court eviction but also keep the home 100% drug and alcohol free” process. What are providers supposed to do, spank them? Yell at them? If an adult decides to drink in his living room, how do you actually stop them other than kicking them out of the home?
I think this contradiction is at the heart of modern debates here. We need to change the culture around this stuff such that sending an addict back to rehab is seen as the humane thing to do for both the addict and the fellow residents.
Indeed, the importance of balance, always! This may be another of those cases where it's not so much an either / or on good cause than a question of how a good cause law is drafted. Clearly small landlords should not be subject to the same standard as multifamily ones. Clearly all landlords should be able to evict (easily) abusive and disruptive tenants. And programs that provide assistance with rent are a better option than good cause when it comes to missed rent payments. At the same time, we've seen cases of tenants being evicted from multifamily housing for organizing tenant associations or otherwise persisting in advocating for fixing code violations. The threat of such evictions can discourage others from organizing. Tenant associations or any type of union may be a plus or minus overall; the right to organize is a point of fairness. Retaliatory evictions do, however, seem wrong and a good candidate for a somewhat narrower good cause protection that many tenant rights groups want. Personally, I like the term “just cause” better than “good cause”, but that’s just me. I’ve been a tenant and an owner.
Thanks for the comments! The rise of tenant associations strikes me as yet another symptom of the housing shortage. Scarcity conditions remove the market incentive for landlords to be customer-service oriented and set up the landlord-tenant relationship to be antagonistic. I think you see less retaliation and less desire to organize where/when landlords must compete to retain tenants.
The obvious question becomes "If we make evictions easier for SRO-type units, what happens to the people who get evicted". Maybe the answer is "they go back to sleeping under an overpass and are no worse off than they are in the status quo", but that's tough to sell politically.
It's a tough sell—if framed that way. The status quo is 770k people sleeping on the streets; if this or other ideas could take many of them off the streets, even if it meant that some would end up back there, that would be a net positive.
Love this!
Thanks, Will!
would love your thoughts on some of my stuff. follow me back, I could DM you?
There’s a very similar ongoing problem with sober living homes. You’ll read exposés that, within 2 paragraphs of each other, castigate one home or provider for “kicking recovering addicts to the curb with no notice or legal eviction!” and another for “allowing an environment where residents still drink and do drugs, pulling others into relapse!”
….Well, polemic and slant aside, what other options are there? It’s a home for adults, not an inpatient hospital. You can’t stop people at the door and subject them to a search. So if a resident relapses (within or without the home), you can either (a) preserve the sober environment by kicking them out and sending them back to detox immediately (thereby catching flak for not going through a full court eviction), or (b) go through a full court eviction, leaving the relapsed resident in close proximity to the other recovering residents (thereby catching flak for “allowing” a non-sober environment).
There is no magic “do a full court eviction but also keep the home 100% drug and alcohol free” process. What are providers supposed to do, spank them? Yell at them? If an adult decides to drink in his living room, how do you actually stop them other than kicking them out of the home?
I think this contradiction is at the heart of modern debates here. We need to change the culture around this stuff such that sending an addict back to rehab is seen as the humane thing to do for both the addict and the fellow residents.
Indeed, the importance of balance, always! This may be another of those cases where it's not so much an either / or on good cause than a question of how a good cause law is drafted. Clearly small landlords should not be subject to the same standard as multifamily ones. Clearly all landlords should be able to evict (easily) abusive and disruptive tenants. And programs that provide assistance with rent are a better option than good cause when it comes to missed rent payments. At the same time, we've seen cases of tenants being evicted from multifamily housing for organizing tenant associations or otherwise persisting in advocating for fixing code violations. The threat of such evictions can discourage others from organizing. Tenant associations or any type of union may be a plus or minus overall; the right to organize is a point of fairness. Retaliatory evictions do, however, seem wrong and a good candidate for a somewhat narrower good cause protection that many tenant rights groups want. Personally, I like the term “just cause” better than “good cause”, but that’s just me. I’ve been a tenant and an owner.
Thanks for the comments! The rise of tenant associations strikes me as yet another symptom of the housing shortage. Scarcity conditions remove the market incentive for landlords to be customer-service oriented and set up the landlord-tenant relationship to be antagonistic. I think you see less retaliation and less desire to organize where/when landlords must compete to retain tenants.
The obvious question becomes "If we make evictions easier for SRO-type units, what happens to the people who get evicted". Maybe the answer is "they go back to sleeping under an overpass and are no worse off than they are in the status quo", but that's tough to sell politically.
It's a tough sell—if framed that way. The status quo is 770k people sleeping on the streets; if this or other ideas could take many of them off the streets, even if it meant that some would end up back there, that would be a net positive.