The prejudice against rental
Throughout my professional career, I’ve dealt with a curious prejudice – against rental housing generally, and against affordable rental in particular.
In country after country, situation after situation, I’ve found that when people think of housing, they instinctively equate it with homeownership, and when making distinctions, ownership is seen as good, rental as bad. A great set of examples, of stupefying bluntness, comes from a 1922 booklet by M. W. Folsom, “The Facts about Home Owning“, from A Home of Your Own.
“Brown rents,” runs the caption. “Haven’t you seen him scratch matches on the wallpaper?”
What makes this image compact is its twin prejudices:
Just listen to the portentous introduction as it wheels out all the prejudices:
What makes prejudice so difficult to combat is that it is never voiced, so we who believe in rental have to voice them to challenge them. They include:
1. Renters are ‘those people’. As I’ve posted before, it’s human nature – especially for the successful – to equate worldly success or failure with moral character. It’s also useful vaccination against guilt – I don’t need to help the poor, runs the thinking, because their poverty is their own fault.
2. For good people, rental is an inferior tenure. Every politician I’ve ever met, more or less everywhere, values homeownership as a public and societal good. Only a handful of politicians I’ve met anywhere value quality affordable rental as a public good.
Everybody wants homeownership, but that’s just shorthand. What everybody really wants is quality housing, security of tenure, and controllable occupancy costs. Once those benefits of homeownership are in hand, if people are called upon to trade (say) appreciation for lower occupancy payments, many will plump for the lower rent.
3. Rental depresses property values. Even as we allow that those who own homes are strongly inclined to invest in them (for home ownership does change behavior), I know of no evidence that the NIMBYites‘ fears are justified.
Quality affordable housing is good for localities; it does not depress property values – at least not in any statistically valid way – and to the extent it reduces commute times or increases workforce housing availability, sustainable affordable housing is good for communities, but to hear the locals talk, you wouldn’t think so.
4. Rental means slums. This one contains a germ of syllogistic logic. Because slums are economically rational, and because urban land is always valuable, nearly all urban slums are rental.
Even if all slums are rental, not all rentals are slums.
In terms of physical configuration and financial instruments, home ownership in the
5. All landlords are bad landlords. Like the preceding prejudice, this one too has a grain of truth. Landlord is not an elective office, not a popularity contest. Slums have winners, including slumlords – and in 1922, that is what most landlords were, with the exception of a handful of socially-minded reformers like Jane Addams of Hull House and England’s Quaker charities.
Thus, just as the twentieth century saw the invention of quality affordable housing, its final quarter – basically, from 1975 through 2000 – saw the birth and emergence of genuine mission entrepreneurial entities (MEEs), for-profit and non-profit, as professional affordable landlords.
If all those prejudices are false, what is true about rental?
[A related post will appear tomorrow.]
Write a comment