Tenants don’t have the same rights with respect to their landlord as employees do with their employer. So unfortunately I can’t see this ending well for the tenants who participate.
while understandable, i think this position is ultimately self-defeating–the rights that employees have against their employers pretty much all exist because they were won through political struggle originally (usually at great social or economic expense to early workers). the same can probably be said of tenant rights, and that therefore the only reason they aren’t as good as employee rights is because there’s not really a broad tenant activist movement yet. and that would of course have to be built through actions like this, even if they might in a specific case end poorly for tenants
I think the biggest issue here is the corporations purchasing these homes in bulk. Had these been owned as, say, someone’s second home, they would naturally care more for the property as the property would be a lot more personal to the owner. Individual owners with only one or two properties for rent also have significantly less power in controlling the market as they would be forced to compete with each other. Corporations owning sizable percentages of the homes in an area can essentially set their own prices, especially since they can afford to buy properties well above market rate from individual owners looking to sell.
As someone who knows people who are small landlords in the area, it has become a very toxic place for both renters and individual landlords. At least one of the people I know is at the point of packing up and leaving the state because of how bad it is to own and rent there. While giving renters these additional rights is a step in the right direction against corporate landlords, I think it would honestly be better to find a way to disincentivize people/companies from owning so many properties in the first place so that more individual ownership can happen. Imagine if people in the city actually owned their homes.
I wonder how many examples of corporations making life miserable for normal people need to be made public before enough people realize we are in deep shit to start protesting.
Crony capitalism decays everything it touches for the sole purpose of shunting the lion’s share of our nation’s wealth into the pockets of the already obscenely rich.
