City studies plan to increase fines against landlords for criminal tenant behavior

Posted on July 17, 2007 in Crime & Law Enforcement by DM

Update: I stand corrected on the “evictions can take months” statement I made below. Someone gave me a little more info about the tools available to landlords for evicting problem tenants, and turns out it can happen in as little as a week.

The Register mentions this afternoon that the City of Des Moines is considering a plan to increase fines against landlords who don’t do enough to remove criminal tenants from their properties. This is another prime example of misplacing responsibility on those who can do nothing to control it.

It is not the landlord’s responsibility to control a tenant’s behavior. It’s the tenant’s responsibility.

Does the city really expect landlords themselves to forcibly remove people who are drug dealers, criminals, or even just aggressive noisemakers who may be prone to confrontation? Of course not. The police department has a long-standing problem with this tactic, which is called vigilanteism - it’s discouraged.

Landlords must, in fact, follow defined legal procedures for eviction, which can take - quite literally - months as the tenant appeals or flat out refuses to move.

This means a landlord could be racking up fines when they are in fact trying to rectify the problem. This hardly seems fair. The city does not need stiffer fines for landlords, which will only drive up the cost of rent for tenants. (Know a landlord who’s going to absorb a thousand-dollar fine? Nope, me either.)

The city needs instead to make a fully staffed police department a top priority so it can get its officers to the scene in a timely manner, make arrests, and file charges that stick to these bad neighbors.

Then the city needs to impose stiffer penalties on people who make our neighborhoods a living hell. Steve Martin once proclaimed, “Death penalty for parking violations!” And while that is certainly far-fetched, the notion of actually going to jail for dealing drugs or otherwise ignoring the rights of your neighbors is reasonable and puts the blame and the punishment where it belongs: on the perpetrators.

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