David Berry (1795-1889) was a Scottish-born horse and cattle breeder, landowner and benefactor in colonial Australia.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Being threatened with eviction from your home because you’ve lost job, as has happened to so many people in the COVID crisis, can obviously be traumatic. But the denunciations of landlords as a class can be very unfair, and the eviction suspensions that some politicians promise are dangerously simplistic.
Many landlords are small-business people, for whom the loss of rent can be devastating, enough to drive many of them out of business. When that happens, the effect may be to decrease the available housing and drive up rental prices.
And while the image of landlords, at least to many people, may be negative, most are honest people trying to balance making a profit and being responsive to their tenants.
Being a landlord can be pretty unpleasant. Some tenants are irresponsible or worse, blithely damaging property, delaying their rent payments even if they have the income to pay, having loud parties and otherwise being a pain in the neck.
After my wife and I moved out of our old (built 1835) two-family house in a then rather marginal part of Providence to work abroad, we rented out the place for a few years. In that time, we saw a pretty wide range of tenant behavior, from highly responsible custodians to deeply irresponsible and selfish ones, including somebody who sawed through an antique door to create a cat entrance. We eventually moved back to the house, taking all of it over, but then, after a couple of years, moved a dozen blocks away to a single-family house because there was too much drug-related crime in the neighborhood at the time. (It’s much better now.)
Anyway, in the current public-health and economic anxiety, let’s not demonize whole economic classes, though I might make an exception when it comes to private-equity billionaires….
