> Do people abuse the process? Sure, some do. They get away with it at most once, because...there's a record of it all in housing court and eviction proceedings are pretty much a deathblow with any landlord doing their homework.
The problem is that for large corporate landlords this is a statistical risk that can be priced in and accounted for across hundreds of units.
For small mom-and-pop landlords renting out their basement, it's a roll of the dice on whether any given tenant will completely ruin their life and be impossible to get rid of.
Of course many people will respond to this by saying that the rights of people to have a place to live are more important than the rights of homeowners to have a bit of side income, but if the law makes it too risky to rent out a second suite, nobody will want to do it -- which makes the housing crisis even worse for renters as there will be fewer places available to rent.
It's an interesting problem I'm not sure what the solution is.
Being a small-time landlord is unreasonably risky due to tenant friendly laws and backed up courts.
Similarly, I've found renting from small-time landlords to be a worse experience. They tend to do things that a large corporation would eventually face lawsuits over - discrimination, demanding more money up front, keeping deposits, poor upkeep of units, etc.
So I'm not even sure I want to encourage small time landlording anyway.
Some things maybe really are better managed by big, lawsuit-averse, emotionless companies.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree that it's an undesirable housing option, and that it shouldn't be a priority to grow it into the future.
The problem is that in cities that have regulated apartments out of existence it's the only existing place for renters to live, so we should be mindful of things that will squeeze its availability before enough apartments can be built to take up the demand.
In expensive Brooklyn all the dense, high-rise new construction is along the water front .. 15 minutes walk from the trains. The buildings are so far from the trains, that many of them advertise private shuttle services to entice buyers/renters.
Meanwhile the subway stations that the shuttle take you to are surrounded by blocks and blocks of 3 story buildings.
Its all completely backwards, except that there was no existing constituency living on the water front to protest & block new development.
The reflex to make complex laws/tax structures more complex usually accrues benefits to the bigger players more able to parse, navigate and arbitrage those structures.
Every time US tax code gets more complicated, it usually doesn't help the bottom 50%.
That's true to an extent, and overall I agree that things should be simplified, but I think there's a special case when the "complication" is something like "if you are bigger and more able to navigate this, you must therefore pay more". Create a feedback loop where increasing resources automatically result in higher fees and fines.
> Some things maybe really are better managed by big, lawsuit-averse, emotionless companies.
Completely disagree. Every poor experience I had renting was with a big emotionless company. I have never had a poor experience with a small time landlord.
Just like landlord vet their prospective tenants, you should be vetting your prospective landlords. Someone with a few units is pretty easy to track down folks for references.
The problematic ones tended to be the ones in the "midrange" - between small time and big company. Using horrible management companies as contractors to farm out the dirty work, and generally getting away with it since they were big enough to throw their weight around - but not big enough to care about being squeaky clean to the letter of the law.
I'd rent out my basement mother in law unit, but due to tenant rights in my city there is not a single chance I will ever do so. From direct personal experience I know how difficult it is to remove a problematic tenant from a living situation no matter how much impact they may have on your life.
The outcome is that there is one less extremely affordable unit in the area for living in.
As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect.
True YIMBY policy would be zoning for six-story apartments by-right citywide, with density going up to 20 stories near rapid transit.
But even policies that sound great on paper are often sabotaged by cities with unworkable affordability requirements that prevent anything from being built.
In 2007, my house was re-zoned from R-9600 (Single family residential, 9600 SF lots minimum) to a high-density transit oriented zoning (the acronym changes every other year, but was originally PCBTPV, Planned Community Business Transit Pedestrian Village), in expectation that a light rail station will be opening within 1/4 to 1/2 mile by 2035. The new zoning requirement is six story minimum, minimum of 50 dwelling units/acre density, tax credits for elder housing and child care facilities, etc.
This is in a suburb just north of Seattle. I am currently 4 miles from the nearest light rail station, which is a 5 minute walk + a 10 minute bus ride that comes along very frequently, then a 40 minute ride to downtown Seattle, so by US suburban standards the foot/transit access is already pretty darn good. There is a small neighborhood market and a few restaurants a 5 minute walk away, and a large supermarket is really only 15 minutes walk. (but yeah, we usually drive there.)
So far, zero occupied single-family houses have been knocked down to build high density developments. There were a few dilapidated/abandoned old houses on large parcels along the freeway that were bulldozed for apartments, which was an improvement. But even if you put policies and incentives in place to encourage re-development, it can take decades for market forces to reach a tipping point where developers are actually willing to make cash offers at or above the market value on existing properties to make these changes happen.
>As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect.
This is such a weird thing to say. Why would lawmakers ever want to support a new YIMBY policy when the people that support them openly admit that it was never meant to achieve what they claimed was going to achieve?
If you listen to the histrionics that NIMBYs say, it's an example legislation that would lead to typical NIMBY histrionics, but when implemented leads to none of those claimed issues, because it doesn't get used that much.
"See, that wasn't that hard". It's baby's first upzoning.
And what if someone voted for Stein as a signal of support for voting reforms like ranked choice voting or proportionate representation necessary to actually fix these root problems?
How about if they voted in a state in which every elector was already going to vote republican anyway?
Or what if they voted to protest against Harris being chosen without a primary vote, against the basic principles of democracy? (And from a party so unwilling to pay attention to the situation on the ground that it had to wait until nearly the last moment just to be able to admit that Biden wasn't going to make it.)
I can see a lot of reasons to try sending a message that way, and as far as I know Stein didn't cost democrats the vote in any state, and certainly wouldn't have cost democrats the vote nationally even if the overall popular vote mattered (which as we all know, it doesn't); your message is extremely reductive and frankly seems like a purely emotional attack. You really aren't elevating the discussion.
This sort of rhetoric always rubbed me the wrong way, but it falls completely flat on its face now, given that there isn't a single state in the US where the margin of victory was anywhere close to being within the Green vote. The idea that a single-issue voter on something like Palestine is an implicit Trump supporter because of the issues you care the most about is just asinine. Heck, I suspect many of them are the ones most likely to be protesting. I understand that you are obviously going to view the world through your own politics, but I do feel obligated to mention that other people do, in fact, exist, even outside of elections, with all the depth that entails, and cannot realistically be understood with dualism.
Even if Trump started out saying he wants to annex Canada for those reasons, his mental state is such that by repeating it he will convince himself to support it for its own sake.
