Tag: rent

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crime and punishment property rights

It’s a Crime

property rights, rental

Somebody forces his way into your home and insists on hanging around. You can’t eject him yourself, but you manage to contact the police. The police arrive. You prove you’re the owner. The police arrest the intruder and you resume full use of your property.

Patti Peeples and Dawn Tiura want intruders to be treated this same way — as criminals to be thwarted immediately — if owners are away when intruders intrude.

The pair co-own a Jacksonville, Florida, house that they rent out. After the last tenant moved out, two squatters moved in. They were discovered by a handyman.

To evict the squatters, Peeples and Tiura had to go to court to start justice’s slow wheels turning. It took more than a month.

The squatters told police that they’d been conned by a rental scam. But they had recently told the same story to explain their occupancy of another home in the neighborhood. 

Also, they threw a brick and feces at the owners’ car as the owners were driving past the house. 

And after the squatters were finally evicted, the owners discovered massive damage: missing appliances, holes punched in walls.

So, not innocent. Much less sanitary.

“Squatters are nothing more than criminals who are breaking and entering into a house,” Peeples says. “They should not be handled in civil court. They should be treated within the criminal court system.”

There’s certainly no reason to let them linger and wreak revenge for having suffered the inconvenience of being caught.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

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Fifth Amendment rights national politics & policies subsidy

The Moratorium on Survival

Bill of Rights, property, law

If only Lincoln Eccles were a property owner in Franklin County, Ohio, instead of Kings County, New York. He’d have more of a chance.

Franklin County is defying the latest national moratorium on evictions. Early in August, caving to pressure from socialist Democrats, President Biden directed the CDC to outlaw the evicting of tenants for another 60 days.

A Franklin County court has announced that the county will not obey the ukase. The county cites a recent court of appeals ruling that disputes the authority of the CDC to impose the nationwide moratorium.

In June, the Supreme Court had narrowly refused to lift a previous moratorium in evictions, even though at least one justice in the majority acknowledged that the CDC had exceeded its authority. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s exact words: “Yes, this is unconstitutional, but . . . well, okay.” (Fine, not his exact words.)

Property owners have bills too. (Not to mention rights.) The less money they get from a property, the less money they have to maintain it, let alone earn profit.

Lincoln Eccles owns a 14-unit building in Crown Heights. Several tenants owe him rent. One owes $40,000. Which has put Eccles behind on utility bills and property taxes. The boiler must be fixed before winter. 

But Kings County is not defying the CDC.

“At this point they’re just abusing us,” Eccles says. “And it’s some version of slavery to me, forcing people to work and produce a product for free, and there’s no compensation.”

Were one to consult the Constitution, one might find a prohibition about public taking of private property “without just compensation,” but governments throughout the union haven’t been consulting that relevant document much lately.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets local leaders moral hazard nannyism porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Small Target, Big Subsidy

Denver, incentive, California, development, rent, graft, corruption

Something has gone wrong when, to get a tenant to move into an empty space in your prime-location building, you need a $4 million subsidy.

And when I say “prime location,” I’m not engaging in Trumpian over-statement. The downtown Denver, Colorado, property location sees over 35,000 pedestrians per day . . . and that’s with the primo slot empty.

But to get that slot filled, the owners have negotiated with the city government to nab a $2 million “incentive” to fix the place up for Target, which is thinking of leasing the location to put up a smaller-than-usual “flexible-format” store. Oh, and another $2 million for “operational” costs, which seems to be some kind of a loan to be paid back from taxes to be collected — and shared by the city for 20 years with the owners.

In other words, it’s the darnedest business deal you’ll ever see (and never get): up-front money not from a bank or investors, but from Denver’s city government “BIF” — Business Investment Fund — which is obviously part of a convoluted scheme fed by taxes and devised by . . . people I wouldn’t trust with my money.

Structuring deals like this is how modern cronies — er, cities — operate, I know. Am I alone in judging it corrupt on the surface and corrupting in the details?

If prime commercial property has gone unused for about a decade — as this three-storied mall space has — I’d think that maybe the owners have set the rents too high or the city has been a bit too greedy with taxes.

Or both.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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