Does the city really want to lower rents?

Irent out the small house I used to live in. Boulder requires a rental inspection once every three years. And, as humans do, I once let it slip. I was graciously reminded of my oversight via a $300 municipal fine.

In order to renew my rental license, which the city charges $70 to file, I needed to hire one of the city’s certified inspectors. He charged me $100, and since he was going to be there anyway, he gave me a deal on the city’s required energy efficiency inspection, delightfully called “Smart Regs,” as if all regulations weren’t smart, for only $100 more.

I took off work to be there as the inspector spent about five minutes to check boxes on a few pieces of paper. Fortunately, nothing required repair. So, only $570 later absolutely NOTHING was different with my rental property. My home was no safer or more energy efficient, yet the city made money and the inspector made money.

But, my tenants got a rent increase to cover the costs of this regulatory shell game, just like the rent increases they get every time the property taxes go up. Still, we’re to believe city governments are serious about making housing more affordable.

Take the city and county of Denver for example. The City Council is looking to ban what has been deceptively labeled “income discrimination.” That’s the ugly term being used to describe the fact that some landlords are disinclined to rent to people through Section 8 vouchers, the federal housing assistance program for low-income people.

“Income discrimination” is of course designed to sound mean and bigoted for political effect. Landlords can’t discriminate based on race, religion, disability and sexual orientation but can on most everything else, including how a prospective tenant gets the money to pay rent. If you don’t want to live in the apartment next to a drug dealer, child pornographer, or executive director of the Aryan Nation, you might want your landlord to have the ability to ask applicants where they get their rent money.

There are many good reasons a landlord wants tenants with Section 8 vouchers. It opens your property to a new pool of potential renters and the government will help you advertise to them. And your rent checks coming from the feds are less likely to bounce.

But it’s not bigotry that makes some landlords reluctant to accept Section 8 vouchers. It’s the cost in money, time, and paperwork. Beyond the initial formfilling aggravations, your property will be inspected yearly, which is a costly hassle even if you pass every time. Section 8 vouchers can’t be used for security deposits, so if Denver forces landlords to accept such tenants, will the city pay the security deposit?

Section 8 money doesn’t come in until AFTER you’ve rented your property, and since the system works at the speed of government, it’s not unusual for landlords not to get paid for months. If a landlord doesn’t have the excess cash to handle that time without payment, they could go bankrupt.

And Section 8 is limited to what the feds decide is “fair market value” for your metro area. In a hot market like Denver, that maximum may end up acting like rent control.

The City Council might want to think about how their alwayswell-meaning actions will make housing costs even higher. As I have learned from first-hand experience, landlords don’t pay the costs of extra regulatory burdens, our renters do.

Council might be wiser to focus on the underlying reason for the lack of housing. Supply and demand aren’t difficult concepts to comprehend. If we want lower costs of housing the city should instead be removing regulations and barriers to building new homes and apartments and focus on better roadways so folks can live where rent is cheaper and still get to work.

And there is this little matter of freedom of association. Progressives seem a little scattered on the concept. While they get it when it comes to LGBT issues, they forget the right to freely associate with people you want also means the freedom not to associate with those you don’t. Bullying people into a relationship against their will, like with an insurance company for a health care policy they don’t want, or a landlord with a tenant they don’t want, seems the opposite of liberal.

Jon Caldara, a Denver Post columnist, is president of the Independence Institute, a libertarian-conservative think tank in Denver.