Property Owners are at the center of a bitter fight with Lawmakers to hold on to property rights. It’s both a targeted and ignorant path to blame our housing costs (crisis) on landlords & housing providers. Our lawmakers, including both elected and appointed have yielded the stage to a minority of tenants who’ve organized and recruited Unions, Media & Progressive Politicians into targeting the property owner as the primary reason for the crisis, when the blame rests solely on the Government. Then the Government, aided by an exaggerated pandemic doubles down and in the last 4 years & passed over 100 housing related measures, ordinances, orders, moratoriums, & propositions that often overlay, enhance or contradict existing laws leaving property owners and their representatives literally intoxicated with overregulation.
Our paralyzed elected, nearly all of them, are drowning in a reservoir of ignorance. In addition to lacking the most basic understanding of owning and operating Real Estate Investments they artfully stood by their poster child, the Covid Con-Job and for nearly 4 years, put housing providers into straight-jackets with a rent freeze, just cause evictions, eviction moratoriums and all were enabled by a willing judiciary that sided with tenants even under the most egregious tenant defaults.
Then in 2024 we get the Governments permission to assess a 4% increase after 4 years, with some independent cities allowing up to 10%.
Now, stay with me……. Property owners today are faced with mandatory regulations for seismic retrofitting, balcony, deck and walkway inspections and compliance under Senate Bill 721. Then we have ADA, fire and life safety compliance and insurance company requirements to upgrade electrical and further safety enhancements for railings, lighting and handicap accessibility. These are all in addition to the normal and regular repairs, maintenance and replacements that occur during ownership.
Those are just the backdrop of what property owners are faced with, but in the last 36 months we got, 30% to 50% increases in utility costs (water, power, light & taxes) a 50% to 200% increase in trash/rubbish removal & mandatory recycling, a 30% to 50% increase in Fire, Casualty Insurance with a growing list of exclusions & limitations. Then we have a 25% to 50% increase in the basic cost of maintenance, labor & materials. Then of course the cost of evictions has gone up 4X from pre-pandemic to today. But the Government gave us 4%……OUT OF TOUCH
The amount of rent loss to property owners plus the extortion tactics played out by the courts & tenant-rights attorneys in the past 3 to 4 years is both incalculable and incomprehensible.
When I tell you we are in a period of De-Constructing property rights, and many of our rights afforded in the Constitution, this is what it means:
“It literally means to break something down into parts in order to better understand its meaning. The Deconstructionist examines not only what the text says but also what it doesn’t say to conclude that no text has one meaning and if one can break down language enough, they will discover that it can mean anything they want it to mean.”
The Godfather of Deconstructionism is a French Philosopher and a former professor at UC Irvine, named Jacques Derrida. In today’s world it encourages people to question the inherency of their beliefs and ultimately abandon them.
This is exactly what the shadow architects of our government are doing today. There’s no real prospect that our modern government will be radically overhauled, but there is good reason for all of us to believe we are all pawns in this massive Deconstruction project and our “Rights” are being redefined. This includes our property rights, social and cultural rights, economic and religious rights and our civil rights. So, pay close attention to the slow or not so slow drip of regulations on our lives. They have a plan and while we’re all in it, the benefits are flowing away from us not to us.
In Closing, this is a quote from Hillsdale College “Unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats are ruling the American Citizen without their consent. They reject the separation of powers and replace the rule of law with faceless regulatory agencies”.
By Tony Maniscalchi | May 2024