Rent control, protected tenancies and the question of fairness
Carol Lloyd got more than a few letters after her column last week on protected tenants. This week she expands the topic a bit with feedback from some of her readers.
After speaking to nearly a dozen of my letter-writing critics, I discovered that most didn’t fulfill my darkest stereotyped ideas of them: They weren’t rich, Republican or unsympathetic to the plight of the poor. Aside from one reader who owned over a hundred units in Reno, all were small-property owners, who lived in or had lived in a flat in their small building. Most were in their 50s and 60s and had been Bay Area residents for a long time.“Even when you adopt a child, your responsibility ends when the child is 18,” argued landlady Ruth Wheeler. “The city is saying that by renting a unit, we have possibly ‘adopted’ this person for life, no matter how long that life is, and for better or for worse.”
One former landlady, who asked to remain nameless, framed it more personally. “I’m an old lady, and so yes, I agree that old ladies should be protected. But who is going to protect me from my protected tenant?”
These landlords bring up good arguments against rent control… More than one person blames rent control for San Francisco’s outrageous housing prices…
