It is the first of September and it is raining. Two landlords are emailing me, each with a list of escalating demands: my prior landlord, reminding me to hire professional cleaners, to empty the city trash cans, to leave no evidence of my life here; the new landlord, reminding me that my lease doesn’t start until 3 p.m. and of the mandatory fee for installing a window AC unit and a list of my rights that I’ll never be able to access.
It was not my intention to move. I liked my apartment and my neighborhood, and my three roommates and I could have afforded a modest rent increase. Except the landlords demanded we renew the lease in February, seven months early. My roommates are advancing in their careers, going to grad school, finding partners, and we weren’t sure where we’d be in seven months.
When we told the property manager we’d need to replace two of the roommates, he said there would be a $500 fee for each. When we said that this was at best silly and at worst illegal, he stopped negotiating. He scheduled three or four showings a week for months, with people coming in and out of our apartment at all hours, turning the lights on and off, leaving doors open, prying into our space. At the end, the property manager leased the apartment to a tenant at a rent barely higher than what we were paying.
My former landlords, Michael Park and Patricia Lee, probably don’t even know this happened. I never met them. If I had to guess, they live in Tewksbury with a bunch of iPad kids in a big house with a boat rotting in the yard. The property manager also probably lost money by not playing fair with us. But he knew he could do whatever he wanted. The point is to humiliate people like me.
After writing this, I’ll move into an apartment that’s still in Somerville but worse all around. It’s on the first floor on a major road, has fewer bathrooms and is far from the places I like to be. The bonus is everything I own getting wet when it rains.
Through my writing, I’ve received feedback from homeowners that they in fact did work for what they have, and “scraped” and “saved” to get where they are. That’s wonderful. A bunch of my friends work full time and are still on food stamps. We pay a great portion of our income to live in crowded, decaying apartments with landlords. We pay even more with our dignity.
People get confused about the argument for rent control. Sure, it’s a bad economic policy. When we get it, it will make the machine run less efficiently. In its extreme forms, the policy is nihilism – a bet that it is impossible to fix things the “right” way.
We can elect bright-eyed socialist grad students, buttoned-up clever boys with econ degrees and a sales pitch, pragmatic neoliberals who waffle in Facebook Reels, but none will promise to make the rent come down, because they know it’s not possible. We are never building the consensus needed to fix this problem. We will either get rent control, or we wait for president Barron Trump to cut the legs out from under the economy once and for all.
So yes, we need it. Not because it will work, but because it won’t. Economists predict it will crash property values. That’s not my problem. The housing appreciation of the past 30 years? Renters like me have paid for all of it. We need to ask what happens if the future isn’t abundant? What if interest rates stay high, utilities get more expensive and the rent keeps going up?
The notion of fairness is fraught when it comes to renting. Is it fair for me to have to move neighborhoods every year or two, throw away a bunch of my stuff, rent a 20-foot truck in the rain and beg the landlord to take care of his own home? It sucks, but it is rational. Is it fair to cap profits on rentals? Probably not. Is it fair that some people were born when houses could be bought for a firm handshake and a bag of hockey pucks? Not really, but that’s no one’s fault.
I don’t hate landlords, nor do I think the government should intervene to make my life fairer. My concern is that the past 100 years of policy have favored property owners even when these policies have been shortsighted or economically harmful. When a policy favors renters, we are expected to be calm, rational and principled – rejecting them when the economics don’t work to make sure things are “fair” for the most protected class of people in the country. I am starting to believe that either both should get relief, or nobody should.
Nicholas Marchuk is a local author and engineer. His work is available at major retailers and on his website, nicholasmarchuk.com. Comments and questions can be directed to his contact form and may be responded to in this publication.
