In a post I made last year, I argued for the reform of Homeowners Associations (HOA’s) as an important component of the urbanist project. My core argument was that given (a) the expectation of homeownership among many Americans, (b) the fact that most forms of dense urban housing require the collective governance of shared assets,1 and (c) the abysmal reputation HOAs have for over-regulating residents’ daily lives, limiting the powers such organizations hold is crucial for making urban living more satisfactory for the average American.
Of course, these arrangements are only one side of the urban housing coin. An increasingly urban society will likely also result in more people living in rental apartments, townhouses, and cottages. Even though renting gets a bad rap, this need not be a negative development. There are many advantages to renting. You can move whenever your lease is up, allowing you to more easily take advantage of opportunities as they come up or move on to greener pastures when they fall through. Financially speaking, it’s easier to diversify your investments2 when you rent, since having a mortgage requires most folks to center their portfolio around a single property and the vicissitudes of the local housing market. While these may not be concerns for all, and homeownership still makes sense for a lot of people, all I can say is, when my coworkers discuss the cost of home maintenance, I’m quite happy that I don’t bear those expenses.3
The problem with all this? Renting can really suck. It’s a lottery whether you get a landlord who is responsive to maintenance issues, pet bans constrain individual freedom of choice, lack of outdoor space limits available recreational activities, and amenities promised in marketing materials but not mentioned in the lease can be taken away at any moment.4
These encroachments, while not as serious as affordability or more serious tenants’ rights issues,5 still impede quality of life and personal autonomy. Critically, these drawbacks are not inherent to renting but stem from the rent-seeking and bare minimum mentality most landlords have. Addressing these issues would go a long way towards improving the comfort and contentment of urban life.
Such a program can be pursued either through direct regulation or by creating tools that tenants can leverage against their landlord. For the former, most cities already maintain standard codes enforcing baseline health, safety, and civil rights protections. The main thing I would add to these tenant codes would be to make pets widely allowable,6 as that is a common impediment to individual freedom of choice. Additionally, passing laws that require amenities advertised to be encoded in the lease itself, and requiring penalties for failing to provide those services be written into contracts, would go a long way to building more consistency in the tenant experience and give landlords an incentive to be more timely with repairs and maintenance.
Of course, these sorts of regulations can only go so far towards improving living standards. Prescriptive regulations are cumbersome to write and enforce, and can have many negative consequences on affordability, business operations, and the design of new builds. The bottom rung of renters would inevitably face price increases if cities simply required each apartment have a gym or a laundromat. My preference, instead, is to use soft powers of local government to pressure landlords to improve amenity offerings or to build partnerships that elevate quality of life and the built environment.
Cities could establish Ombudsmen offices or legal clinics that are empowered to aid tenants in contractual and civil matters (instead of just focusing on code and civil rights enforcement7) or issue rewards for those who turn negligent landlords into the city. Policies in support of tenant unions, such as formally recognizing a right to organize, adopting anti-retaliation laws, offering grants and legal aid to organizers, and requiring publicly financed construction to establish unions, would give everyday renters the powers necessary to negotiate for better amenities, timelier repairs, and more say in the regulations that define everyday life. Finally, municipalities can engage directly with large apartment complexes to negotiate improved tenant amenities. Maybe the city puts together a buying group to purchase gym equipment at a discount, or uses city horticultural staff to construct community gardens or outdoor recreational space at cost on apartment parcels. I don’t love the idea of using city resources to improve landlord property (and any service extended to improve such amenities SHOULD NOT be offered at a loss for the city). But improving the daily life of residents is fundamentally worth doing, and if that means using civic resources to enhance private services and amenities, I think that can be a worthy accommodation in some circumstances. It at least should be on the table.
There are many possible pathways available to enterprising cities looking to tackle the indignities baked into renting. Mayors could negotiate with large landlords on behalf of their citizenry or use city media channels to call out bad actors and support tenant struggles. These sorts of actions may seem to fall outside a Mayor’s purview, but if we’re learning anything from Mamdani’s phenomenal achievements in NYC, voters are frothing at the mouth for leaders who put convention aside and actually fight for citizens in every available avenue. Municipal grocery stores, suing delivery apps for lost wages on behalf of workers, pet inclusive shelters, and cutting time-consuming bureaucracy for transit and childcare permitting are all examples of Mamdani breaking with mayoral norms by putting people above process. If Mamdani’s style of governance spreads, and I’m praying it does, a program to improve the dignity of renting is a worthwhile plank.
Beyond simply being good politics, such a program has great public relations implications for pro-social political factions. For progressives, a reputation for effective governance can help our long-term electoral prospects, earning us a much needed ‘get sh*t done’ moniker. And for urbanists, such a program helps to hedge against “you will live in the pod, you will eat bugs” style accusations, as it centers our platform’s agenda for improving the experience of city life and expanding the autonomy of residents to live the lives they desire.
I know that, in a world with spiking housing costs and widespread insufficiencies in infrastructure, focusing civic attention towards apartment amenities seems trivial. But these small infringements on our daily quality of life — from having someone else dictate whether you can have a dog or arbitrarily close your gym to save a few bucks — flout the dignity and liberty of tenants. It’s plainly degrading. Renting should not mean that your day-to-day life should be wantonly limited by the whims, laziness, or greed of a landlord. They already hold enormous sway over one’s financial, geographic, and even psychological security. When a gym is closed, it affects how we maintain our health. When we’re denied a pet, it affects whether you can have the family you desire when you desire it. When they shut down the laundry room, they force abrupt changes to your daily routine. These impinge on our ability to conduct our lives how we want it. Cities can and should use their powers to help renters fight for better services and more freedom to define how they live.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to
Hard truths about (some) U.S. farmers: Essential viewing for those wishing to understand American agriculture.
The Cardholder Is Always Right: Did you know it costs restaurants $15 to dispute chargeback requests from credit cards? For this and other reasons, I never realized just how terrible payment platforms can be for small businesses. Especially when they buy up your reservation platform.
Building foundations and walls, laundry rooms, utility infrastructure.
If you’re lucky enough to be able to invest.
And before anyone says that significant repairs are priced into renting, while that’s true in the abstract I personally will not face a $20,000 one time expense for any single failure faced in my unit. Those costs are spread across the complex, providing a kind of insurance where each unit functionally pays a little bit of these costs every year instead of one or two individuals facing a significant expense at random times. Of course, rent spikes represent a real risk, but it’s a tradeoff that depends on your individual situation, not an intrinsic drawback.
In my current apartment, our laundry room was offline for 6 months, half the equipment in the gym is broken, and there’s the remains of a tennis court abandoned a decade ago.
Habitability regulations, privacy protections, bans on discrimination, etc.
And requiring landlords to only be allowed to charge a one-time pet deposit, monthly pet fees is just rent seeking.
To make this possible, provisions regulating leases would have to be placed in planning codes to provide cities the standing necessary to actually issue fines. I’m no procedural expert, but I’m sure there’s a pathway here.