What do you think about Tenant Unions?

[Nathan Gesner]

Here's an article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/t...

With rent rates increasing dramatically, a housing shortage around the country, and new generations that feel entitled, I suspect we'll see more of these. 

I find it interesting that the go on "rent strikes" and stop paying rent. How is that successful? In my state, a tenant can only withhold rent if the Landlord fails to maintain the rental. Even then, the tenant has to follow strict guidelines. If my tenants just stopped paying rent because they disagree with the market rates, I would evict them. Unless you're investing in a liberal area like NY or LA or Portland, I just don't see how this would be effective.

[Sean McKee]

I'm all for tenants having reasonable protections against bad landlords. However a lot of the tenant unions have a very different interpretation of "reasonable" than most property owners. Because of this I don't think there will be much middle ground in the fight over housing.

In my opinion tenant unions often have misplaced objectives. Most of their efforts don't actually focus on the actual problem of a lack of affordable housing. Rather, many of their objectives are aimed at creating restrictive and punitive laws on current property owners. The sad thing is many of these new laws make it much harder for smaller landlords to do business. They are less inclined to give second chances. Since smaller landlords provide a lot of the affordable housing units, this makes even harder for the tenants the laws seek to protect to find housing.