Tag Archives: #Housing

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The Democrats say we need more affordable housing, but look what has happened when they were in charge of it As Ned Stark would say, "Winter is coming."

The First Street Journal reported, on December 5th, just how well the Democrats, whose current cause de jour is “affordable housing,” have done when they’ve actually been in charge of housing. We noted a story and an Editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer[1]Sadly, both stories are now behind a “subscribers Only” paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll just have to take my word for it. showing how a liberally-oriented “affordable housing” landlord ignored conditions in a dilapidate apartment, and the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, noting in the Editorial that:

(Essie) Campbell filed several complaints, but no city inspectors entered her home or issued violations for the appalling conditions inside.

Well, though no one has died due to it, it’s happening again!

The Embassy Apartments, 2100 Walnut Street. Photo via Google Maps.

Some tenants in a Walnut Street apartment building say they haven’t had heat this winter

Some tenants of the 15-story Embassy Apartments say the temperatures in their units were lower than legally allowable.

by Nate File | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 5:56 AM EST

For some people, being carried in the arms of firefighters is a kind of fantasy.

But for 83-year-old Deborah Diamond, it was misery. On Friday evening, she and the other residents of Embassy Apartments at 2100 Walnut St. were told by their building’s management to evacuate because the city deemed it unsafe after a daylong power outage had disabled the fire alarm system. Firefighters strapped Diamond, who is on hospice care, to a chair and carried her down nine flights of stairs.

“This building is in tremendous disrepair,” she said of the 15-story property built in 1900.

This building isn’t some dump in North Philly, but is located between Rittenhouse and Logan Squares. In my Google Streetscape search, I noticed two very nice nearby townhouses, one with an historic preservation plaque on it, with “Harris/Walz” signs in the windows. 🙂

Even before the outage, some residents said their apartments had not received heat this winter, or weak heating at best. Two residents said they measured temperatures inside their apartments that were far below legal temperatures.

There’s more at the link. The newspaper’s story does not say that there had been previous complaints to L&I which were ignored, but here we have a 15-story apartment building, in a city which has been run by the Democrats since the latter days of Harry Truman’s presidency, just a couple of weeks shy of 73 years ago, and there are stories like this.

More will crop up as the depths of winter hit the City of Brotherly Love, and we hear of fires caused by electric space heaters, and toxic fumes from desperate people using kerosene heaters; this happens every winter.

According to a 2021 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, roughly 30% of the city’s rental units lack a rental license entirely, and only 7% of the city’s rental units are inspected during a given year. This presents a troubling lack of clarity on how many households are renting units that fail to meet basic habitation standards.

There’s no surprise in this. Philly is both one of our oldest cities, so the existing housing stock is relatively old, and our nation’s poorest big city. But that also tells us that the Democrats and their policies for “affordable housing” are just words, not matched by deeds.

References

References
↑1 Sadly, both stories are now behind a “subscribers Only” paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
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Today’s left see landlords as Snidely Whiplash, tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks

In November on 2017, the voters of the City of Brotherly Love voted in a self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutor,” a criminal defense attorney, Larry Krasner, whose campaign website proudly proclaims that:

During his first term, he has supported victims, he has exonerated the innocent, and he has held police accountable. He has reduced future years of incarceration and supervision while helping to drop the jail population. He has focused on the most serious crimes in Philadelphia while working with leaders to address the root causes of violence.

Translation: Mr Krasner hates the police and loves the criminal class. He wants to keep criminals out of jail, and reduce probation times.

His policies include ending criminal charges against those caught with marijuana possession, ending cash bail for those accused of some misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, reducing supervision for parolees, and seeking more lenient sentences for certain crimes. During his time in office, he has advocated for greater police accountability and pursued police misconduct.

Mr Krasner made no secret of his plans when he first ran for office, and the good citizens of Philadelphia elected him to become District Attorney. Clearly, the majority of Philadelphians are perfectly comfortable with hating the police and coddling criminals.

The draconian, economy-destroying reaction to the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a misspelling; panic is exactly how the response should be characterized — included mass job losses, and many communities put eviction moratoria in place, so those who could not — or would not — pay their rent wouldn’t be thrown out of the apartments in which they lived.

Well, evictions have resumed, and the left are unhappy. It’s very difficult to proclaim that people should be able to simply live without paying rent to property owners, so now the left are using the tactic of complaining about how evictions are handled.

‘I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy’: Housing advocates say eviction process in Philly must change

During a two-hour hearing, tenants and attorneys described a system that’s violent and traumatic.

By Aaron Moselle | Wednesday, June 21, 2023 | 5:19 PM EDT

The knock on the door startled Mark Person.

The person waiting outside shocked him.

It was a deputy landlord-tenant officer. And he was there to evict Person from his Roxborough apartment.

“He looked at his watch and said I had 10 minutes, and that he had others to serve and that I had to hurry up and be out. There was no notice of courtesy — just him standing with his hand atop his pistol like a cowboy Western,” said Person.

As has been journalistic practice in recent times, the article begins with a sort of human-interest hook. The original from WHYY, Philadelphia’s National Public Radio station is not behind a paywall.

As we have previously noted, a deputy landlord-tenant officer had an eviction go bad, and a woman, over $8,000 behind in her rent, being kicked out was shot in the head.

Naturally, it didn’t take long before the Usual Suspects were up in arms, as the furthest left Democratic mayoral candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty — who, thank the Lord, lost in the primary — to politicize it. She tweeted:

While details are still coming to light, I’m appalled by today’s shooting at Girard Court Apartments and my heart is with the impacted families.

I’ve raised alarm bells for years about our city’s terrible eviction practices and worked to reform them.

So, what did we have? The family were more than $8,000 in arrears on their rent, which was apparently forgiven by the owner, in lieu of an agreement that they’d move out by the end of 2022. But the family wanted to stay, and petitioned the court to extend, for an unspecified period of time, a petition which was denied. If the eviction was being carried out on March 29th, the tenants had stayed three months beyond their agreed evacuation date.

In a subscribers-only article, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that City Councilcritters:

Jamie Gauthier and Kendra Brooks called for hearings in April after a deputy landlord-tenant officer shot a woman in the head during an attempted eviction lockout in North Philadelphia. Police said a struggle ensued between 35-year-old tenant Angel Davis and the privately contracted officer, who has still not been identified. The deputy discharged a weapon and struck Davis, who was hospitalized in critical condition.

The shooting sparked a protest and shined a light on a shadowy corner of the city’s legal system — one that housing advocates said is long overdue for sweeping reforms. Calls ranged from increased notice before lockouts occur to ramping up social service outreach to higher training standards and transparency.

The liberal councilcritters don’t like the system, don’t like it at all!

Instead of relying on sworn law enforcement personnel, Philadelphia’s courts allow a private for-profit attorney known as the landlord-tenant officer to carry out eviction orders in exchange for the right to collect millions in fees from landlords. The landlord-tenant officer in turn deputizes independent contractors hired to serve final notices and enforce lockouts.

Gauthier, a Democrat who represents West Philadelphia, described it as a profit-driven arrangement that lacked the oversight standards of other government agencies.

“There is no public bidding process, no standard for how to execute evictions, no mandatory training or law enforcement certification for deputies, and no accountability and oversight,” Gauthier said.

There is an unspoken undercurrent in all of this, that the left would like for all evictions to be handled by the sheriff. Some evictions in Philly still are, but the private system is less expensive for property owners, and thus more frequently used. If the City Council can increase the costs for the landlord-tenant officers, the higher costs could bring the landlord-tenant office to become just as expensive as having the sheriff handle things.

Lawmakers gathered reform ideas from housing attorneys and people who have been evicted. Brooks’ office said the Landlord-Tenant Office was created under state law but the city is exploring whether it has power to enact certain reforms — like requiring a detailed contract between the court system and the office. There currently isn’t one in place.

“(H)ousing attorneys and people who have been evicted,” huh? “(H)ousing advocates,” as quoted above, huh? In other words, people on one side of the issue.

And thus we come back to Larry Krasner, the prosecutor elected on a promise not to prosecute so much. Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal is pretty lousy in her job, but at least she hasn’t promised to refuse to do evictions. The obvious question becomes: if the City Council can eliminate the Landlord-Tenant Office, and push all evictions onto the Sheriff’s Department, would the city not see a Democratic candidate for sheriff make a campaign promise not to enforce any eviction orders? That, after all, would make “housing advocates” and their fellow travelers very, very happy, as it would for the people who see landlords as being Snidely Whiplash, tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks.

The left have been slowly — and some would argue not-so-slowly — turning the City of Brotherly Love into a crime-and-drug-addiction filled [insert vulgar term for feces here] hole, and if the left can somehow deprive honest people of their property by refusing to enforce evictions, that would be the final straw.
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2222 Wallace Street

We noted, on April 5th, a rowhome for sale at 4931 Hoopes Street, in West Philadelphia. The purpose was simple: to demonstrate how bad the neighborhood in which a 13-year-old was shot happened to be. We included four pictures of this disaster listing, for documentation, because photos disappear from zillow.com once a home is sold.

The house is completely unlivable, save as a squatter could make his home there. More importantly, while a house flipper might be interested in the property, he’d quickly forget the notion, because he could never recoup the money that he’d have to spend on the place to get it up to snuff because the property values in the rest of that dilapidated neighborhood are so low. Even if a flipper could buy the place for $1.00, there’s a possibility that he couldn’t make money fixing it up and selling it.

According to the zillow listing, property taxes on this place are $875 a year. If someone fixed it up and resold it, it would be reassessed, and the taxes increase.

2222 Wallace Street; the unit for sale is on the left. Photo from listing on zillow.com. Click to enlarge.

Now, why did I bring this up? There was a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighting another row home for sale, in Fairmont, at 2222 Wallace Street . . . . for $875,000.

There is already a pending offer on this home.

The photos make it look well done, and it’s a beautiful home, though I will confess that were I to have redone this home, I would not have selected the styles that the remodeler chose. Nothing personal; it’s simply not my style.

Taxes? According to the zillow.com listing,[1]I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, … Continue reading property taxes on this unit were $10,881 in 2021. That works out to $906.75 a month, which is higher than any mortgage payment I’ve ever had to make on any of the houses I’ve owned. Yet, as we previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer are aghast that how safe people are in the city depends upon their skin color. While I have no idea what race the family who put in the pending offer on the Wallace Street house are, generally speaking most black and Hispanic Philadelphians can only dream of owning a home in that neighborhood.

I was wryly amused that the Inquirer ran this story, given how the Editorial Board were lamenting that the city is very racially segregated, and that an $875,000 listing is not exactly one which will draw many black or Hispanic prospective buyers. Still, article author Paul Jablow has such stories about once a week.

References

References
↑1 I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, and here is the listing on that site.
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A probably meaningless victory for property rights

It was August 12, 2014, when my wife and I toured the property that we decided to buy for our retirement home. Great location, a livable, if nevertheless fixer-upper house, and a fantastic price. However, we were not quite ready to retire, so, rather than leave the house sitting vacant, we rented it out.

In January of 2017, we gave our renters notice that we would be taking possession of the property on July 1, 2017. That gave them six months to find someplace else to live, and enabled their children to finish out the school year to finish out the school year.

But just imagine: what if I had retired in 2020 instead of 2017. With the eviction moratoria imposed by various levels of government, if our renters had simply decided to cease paying rent in April, and not to leave the property by the end of June, we could still be stuck in Pennsylvania, still waiting to take possession of our own property.

The Washington Post has a long, feature story on what has happened to rental property owners due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the covid economy of 2021, the federal government has created an ongoing grace period for renters until at least July, banning all evictions in an effort to hold back a historic housing crisis that is already underway. More than 8 million rental properties across the country are behind on payments by an average of $5,600, according to census data. Nearly half of those rental properties are owned not by banks or big corporations but instead by what the government classifies as “small landlords” — people who manage their own rentals and depend on them for basic income, and who are now trapped between tenants who can’t pay and their own mounting bills for insurance, mortgages and property tax. According to government estimates, a third of small landlords are at risk of bankruptcy or foreclosure as the pandemic continues into its second year.

There were bills we had to pay on our rented-out property: property taxes, some repairs, and, just a couple of months before the renters were to leave, to have the septic tank pumped out. The HVAC system needed to be serviced. Fortunately, this was before the virus struck, and we were still receiving our rent payments.

The Post story details the problems through which other landlords have had to go, but so many people see landlords as all being wealthy, all being Snidely Whiplash about to tie Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks.

Now a federal judge has thrown out the nationwide eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control:

Federal judge vacates CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium

Court rules agency lacks legal authority to impose it

By Kyle Swenson, Staff Writer | May 5, 2021 | 3:11 PM EDT

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overstepped its legal authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium, a ruling that could affect millions of struggling Americans.

In a 20-page order, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich vacated the CDC order, first put in place during the coronavirus pandemic under the Trump administration and now set to expire June 30.

“It is the role of the political branches, and not the courts, to assess the merits of policy measures designed to combat the spread of disease, even during a global pandemic,” the order states. “The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not.”

The Biden administration has indicated it will appeal the decision. The ruling does not affect state or local eviction moratoriums. In Washington, D.C., for example, the city government’s ban on all evictions remains in place.

Translation: the ruling is very limited in scope. But here was the line that really got to me:

After Wednesday’s decision, tenants’ rights advocates called for the Biden administration not only to defend the policy but to step up legal protections that will keep people in their homes.

No, no, no, no, no! The eviction moratoria have not kept “people in their homes,” but kept people on other people’s homes!

In the wild and unthinking reaction to the virus, governments across the country, federal, state and local, have devastated our economy and turned individual American citizens into both slaves and agents of the government. The landlord who cannot collect his rent, yet not evict the squatters who are living in his property, has been transformed into an unpaid government housing agency, and has had his property effectively seized by the government for the private benefit of others. What was his is no longer his. The Fourteenth Amendment states that the government may not seize anyone’s property without due process of law, but unless due process of law includes government edicts, that constitutional provision has simply been waved away.