Housing is a Human Right

If housing is a fundamental right to humans. Should Landlords be part of the solution in solving the homeless problem?

This is a question raised by landlords across America. The landlords claim that they need monthly rents just as the people need housing. It has been a question of

what is in the most need. Initially housing was created to help all people across the board. They had rentals, homeownership, and subsidized housing. Forty years ago, you would not see this scale of unhoused individuals that we see today. The disruption that we see in the housing market today is because at some point housing went from a right to equal and adequate living to a commodity.

Large investment companies own hundreds of thousands of homes. They are praying for the misfortune of homeowners hoping that they will go into foreclosure. Once they go into foreclosure the investment companies purchase their properties. Once they purchase the property, they understand that these people need to be housed, so they turn the properties into rental units and place some on the stock market. These large investment companies that own hundreds of thousands of properties will leave some of their properties vacant to manipulate the system, so that, rents will go up and the billionaire investors will get a good return on their investment.

This is a treacherous cycle on how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This process is called Gentrification. Kicking the blue-collar workers out of the neighborhood to make room for more affluent families that can afford higher rents. Although big investments firms have turned this monopoly game into a survival of the fittest event. Public Policy has proven himself to be the god of it all. In 2020 when COVID-19 hit the Government showed us who really owned the property when they introduced the Renters and Eviction Moratorium. Landlords right to evict tenants were restricted if the tenants were financially impacted by

COVID-19. This has been a nightmare for many landlords because they claim that some tenants were taking advantage of the situation. One landlord claimed that they had a tenant that was regularly late, then that tenant stopped paying all together. There were several claiming that landlords were losing their properties.

To level out the playing field we need to make a seismic shift in the way we visualize real estate. We need to see it as a place that we create memories to share throughout generations. Not as a commodity or the means to make a quick dollar. So, if we own property, it is for people to make a home not to rent out weekly and leave vacant periodically like an Airbnb while someone is sleeping on the street. The answer is: “if you have vacant property while someone is sleeping on the street, then yes you are responsible for helping with our unhoused population.”

Author: Nina S. Young