Say What?

“Renters’ rights” has become a rallying cry among a growing class of people who have appointed themselves advocates for the renter community. It is worth noticing what that means. Many of these advocates neither own the properties in question nor rent them. They do not maintain the units, pay the mortgages, make the repair decisions, or bear the consequences when those decisions turn out to be wrong. They are observers, giving political voice to their interpretation of a relationship between two parties who are actually making the decisions.

So let’s start at the level where the rental market works reasonably well for, say, 90 percent of landlords and tenants.

There is no such thing as “the rental property” or “the renter.” There are properties in varying conditions, in different locations, with different amenities and different levels of maintenance. There are tenants with different incomes, preferences, standards, and expectations. And there are landlords ranging from meticulous owner-occupants to large property managers. Some are excellent. Some are indifferent. Some are terrible.

That is precisely what we should expect in a voluntary market.

A landlord offers a particular product at a particular price. A tenant decides whether that product is worth the price. If it isn’t, the tenant can leave. Maybe they move next door. Maybe they move across town. Maybe they find a better unit for the same rent.

That ability to leave is not a trivial feature of the arrangement. It is one of the mechanisms through which the market disciplines both sides.

Landlords, meanwhile, have an obvious reason to keep good tenants. They have an equally obvious reason to maintain the property. Maintenance preserves the capital they own. A neglected property loses value. Poor maintenance drives away good tenants. Deferred repairs become more expensive repairs. Eventually, the owner pays for the neglect through lower rents, higher turnover, larger repair bills, or a lower sale price.

This is ownership.

Yet you would rarely know it from much of the renter-rights conversation. The landlord is routinely cast as a wealthy, absentee, quasi-parasitic figure who owns an inexhaustible supply of appreciating property and needs to be forced to spend money on it. What gets left out is the rather important fact that buying, financing, maintaining, and eventually selling property can produce losses. The owner takes the capital risk. The tenant does not.

Now we have a new proposal for inserting renters into the ownership relationship: the “Right to Repair.”

Thankfully, this week the St. Paul City Council denied the request for Right to Repair to appear on the ballots this fall:

Citing a critical last-minute memo from the city attorney’s office, the St. Paul City Council voted Wednesday to block a proposed “Right to Repair” tenants’ rights ordinance from proceeding to the November ballot. Organizers, who spent Thursday morning meeting with attorneys, said they are reviewing their legal options.

The ballot question, proposed by the Safe Homes St. Paul campaign, would have asked voters to approve a new city ordinance that would allow residential tenants to devote up to $500, or half their rent, whichever is greater, toward completing their own home repairs.

The problem is not that repairs are unimportant. Of course they are.

The problem is who gets to decide what constitutes a repair, what the repair should be, who should perform it, and who should pay for it.

There are legitimate circumstances in which one property owner’s decisions affect others. A sewer system is a good example. It functions because everyone connected to it is constrained from dumping solvents or other toxins into the system. Some aspects of property necessarily involve obligations to other property owners.

But imagine extending this logic.

Suppose my neighbor has an ugly driveway full of weeds and cracked pavement. I believe it is an eyesore. I also believe it is hurting my home’s resale value. Why shouldn’t I invoke my “right to repair,” have the driveway fixed, and send my neighbor the bill?

Obviously, that wouldn’t be neighborly.

Yet the principle becomes considerably less absurd only because we have decided that the person who owns the property should generally retain the authority to decide what happens to it.

Some parts of housing are shared. Many are not.

And that distinction matters.

Tenant-rights advocates may sincerely believe they are improving the housing stock through political organizing. But there is a fundamental mistake in confusing an interest in a property with an ownership interest in that property.

A tenant has an interest in having a decent place to live. That does not give the tenant an ownership claim over the decisions involved in maintaining someone else’s capital.

If the tenant is dissatisfied with the property, the market already provides an answer.

If the tenant cannot afford to leave, then there is a legitimate policy question about whether that person should receive assistance. Subsidize the person who needs help. Don’t confiscate the decision-making authority of the person who owns the property.

That distinction is crucial.

The alternative is essentially this: I don’t have enough money to move, so I should have the power to make you spend money on your property according to my judgment.

That is not a renters’ right. It is a transfer of ownership authority without a transfer of ownership responsibility.

And that is where the “Right to Repair” becomes something more than a maintenance policy. It becomes a power struggle over who gets to control property.

The socialist instinct is often to separate ownership from control—to leave the title with one person while progressively transferring the decisions to everyone else. But this creates a problem that is often ignored: if you separate responsibility from authority, you weaken the incentive to preserve the asset.

The owner pays for the roof. The owner pays for the furnace. The owner absorbs the loss when the property deteriorates. The owner ultimately bears the consequences of bad capital decisions.

So why should someone who bears none of those costs have the authority to make those decisions?

Ownership is not simply a right to collect rent. It is a bundle of risks, responsibilities, costs, and decision-making authority.

Take away the authority while leaving the responsibility, and you haven’t made the system more just. You have simply made ownership less meaningful.

And when ownership becomes less meaningful, don’t be surprised when people become less interested in owning, maintaining, and improving the property in the first place.