https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2025/02/19/zappala-nb-affordable-housing-mon-view-palisades/stories/202502190024(Doug) Yes and hold tenants responsible.
The 50+ year war on landlords failed. Can't everyone see that? I've never seen a landlord go around and break his own windows or doors or anything else. I've never seen a landlord dump garbage and miss the garbage can, but I see tenants do it every week in the city. Hold the ones doing the damage accountable.
You don't help tenants by destroying landlords.
I don't know about Pittsburgh but everything a landlord can do wrong is already against the law in Minneapolis.
The problem is, everything a tenant can do wrong is blamed on the landlord as well.
Do you know of any landlord who wanted his property to go to hell?
Reasonable regulation and consistent enforcement is fine, but also, whatever happened to market enforcement? Don't do business with a supplier of poor reputation and substandard product.
Speaking of regulated free market and first world countries, how about the right to enforce a contract, aka eviction?
They closed our housing court for 2 years and then had years of delays, so how was the landlord supposed to stop a tenant from excessive damage or get the cash flow to manage the building? I experienced damages greater than what I paid for the property in one case. I survive it all because they're paid for but if this happened to me when I was starting out it would have destroyed me.
So what they seem to want is big corporate landlords with high rents who have more lawyers than the city.
The exact opposite of "affordable housing".
People buy a fixer upper to save money but you can't rent one.
Rule of thumb, when government is the problem, government is probably not the solution.
Underlying all of this is the failure of the 60-year-old so-called war on poverty. All it brought was dependency, while destroying families and building the opposite of an ownership society.
Or as they say in Minneapolis, blame the building, blame the landlord. Never look in the mirror.
