I, Landlord

I am a Landlord. I own a small 500-square-foot condo in the New Orleans French Quarter which I rent out to a full time tenant.

We bought the condo right after Hurricane Katrina. It’s hard, I think, for people who weren’t there to appreciate how close we came to losing New Orleans that year. High profile Politicians wondered, aloud and publicly, if the city ought not to be rebuilt. There was a growing feeling in the country that we ought to let Mother Nature finally reclaim the city, as she had been trying to do for three hundred years. Why keep fighting it? they wondered. It’s expensive and it’s dangerous and it’s probably even racist.

“Just let her go”, they said…

But we loved the city too much to let it die. Certainly, America has many beating hearts, but it’s just as certain that New Orleans is one of its loudest. Tennessee Williams said “America has only three cities: New York, San Fransisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” Few who have ever visited the City would disagree.

My family history in Louisiana goes back 300 years… my Mother’s family has been in New Orleans proper for more than a century. So, we decided to fight for the City in whatever way we could. But in those days, after the storm blew itself out over lower Michigan, the fight often felt like a losing one. And as the chorus of those “let the city die” voices grew louder, many of the people who left town in the wake of the storm decided not to come back. We almost lost our beloved Saints to San Antonio. And there were days when it seemed like every house or condo unit in town was on the market at the same time. The realtor signs hung from the underside of the French Quarter’s famous iron balconies, one after the other, like rows of gravestones.

That was when an idea occured to us… what if we buy real estate? What if we become a part of the tax base? What if we show people that not everyone is leaving… that some of us have decided to stick and fight?

What if we take a risk?

And so we did.

Most years we make a little money off the place. When we take the monthly rent and subtract the mortgage payment, the HOA, the insurance and property taxes, we typically make a yearly profit of between $3,000 and $4,000. Call it $300 a month, on average. We’re not getting rich off this place, but we get to be a permanent part of the city we love, and it’s mostly paying for itself… mostly. Some years there are unexpected expenses, like the slip-and-fall issue that cost $5,000 from each owner to repair a year ago. That one ate up our profit and we wound up taking a loss on the property that year.

And then came COVID.

The Mayor of New Orleans very quickly shut down the bars, restaurants and live music venues that are the lifeblood of this city that is so dependent on Tourism, and our renter lost her job. She had been a reliable tenant and we did not want to lose her so we negotiated a COVID rent reduction, with no expectation that we would ever make up the loss (we never did). She told us that even with the reduction, she would have to dip into her savings to continue to make the rent. I felt badly about that, but I did not feel any guilt. I had argued loudly and consistently against the lockdowns. I had looked at the data and thought that sheltering the most vulnerable while the rest of us went on about our lives made more sense than destroying millions of lives and small businesses. I thought she should have been allowed to continue to work.

But I lost that argument, and the lockdowns came anyway. I never discussed politics with my tenant but if I ever had, I might have pointed out that if different politicians had been running the city when COVID hit, her job might not have gone away and her savings might never have had to be touched.

But you can’t argue with reality, so we all did the best we could under difficult circumstances. Everyone took a financial hit, even us Landlords. And believe me, the bank never called me to say “hey guy, I know things are tough right now, so don’t worry about the mortgage bill this month.” And certainly the City never offered to give me a break on my Property taxes.

But I’m not complaining. That’s the reality, we signed a contract, we took a risk, and I never expected, nor asked for special treatment.

So why am I telling you all this? Well you may have noticed that some of our celebrity members of Congress, most of whom are better at Social Media than they are at legislating for America, have been publicly demonizing Landlords lately. And they’ve had an easy time of it because decades of popular entertainment, and intentionally biased media messaging, have convinced too many Americans that to be a Landlord is to be objectively evil. A necessary evil, perhaps, but evil all the same. In THE GODFATHER: PART 2 the local landlord is such an odious fellow that Vito Corleone’s not-so-subtle threat of mob violence if he doesn’t lower the rent on Vito’s friend actually feels like justice.

How awful do you have to be for the audience to root for the amoral mobster who is threatening to torture and murder you if you don’t do what he wants?

I think it’s that image, of the slumlord who is happy to let women and children burn to death in substandard housing units as long as he gets the full insurance payment after the fact, or of Scrooge McDuck swan diving into a pool full of gold coins while Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim freeze to death in the wretched hovel Scrooge rents to them, that fuels the stupidity and craven opportunism we see flowing out of the mouths of lawmakers like AOC and Cori Bush. It would be easy to laugh off that stupidity if not for the fact that stupid policies, like year-long CDC-ordered eviction moratoriums, often flow right alongside it.

And all of us have been renters at one time in our lives, not all of us have been Landlords. We all know what it’s like to have to write that check every month, but few of us know what it’s like to have to make the mortgage payment and pay the taxes and the insurance and deal with an ever-shifting set of codes and regulations and still somehow find a way to quickly get things fixed when they break at 3 o’clock in the morning. So it’s easier for most of us to identify with the people who face the prospect of eviction and to direct our disgust at the Landlord who must be the one responsible for that injustice. After all, we Landlords are so awful that the scale of justice tilts away from us even when there’s a Mob Boss who would murder his own Brother on the other side, right?

So I guess that’s why I wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. So you could see that we’re not all monsters. I think most Landlords are like me… they have one or two properties that they rent out to make a little extra cash on the side. Very few of us are big corporate landlords with hundreds of units, and while there are certainly plenty of jerks out there, as is true of every single business on planet Earth, almost none of us are Scrooge McDuck.

In my case, we got into property rental as a way to do something to help save the city we love. In the process we found a way to provide a place for a New Orleans local to live and thrive, and she pays us for that service with a monthly rent payment. It’s a simple business transaction that is repeated millions of times in cities and towns all over America on the first of every month. There’s nothing coercive or evil about it. And no one is being forced into anything.

Maybe you’ll think about that the next time AOC or Cori Bush suggests that charging rent is somehow fundamentally amoral and that Landlords like me deserve as much scorn and abuse as society can deliver.