Inspired

I ran a across the link to this on Patrick Killelea's website. I thought it was an inspired solution to the foreclosure problem. What was more interesting though was the author's comment that "[p]erhaps to the surprise of much of the industry, abuse of the PTFA [the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act] has been limited to one-off events, eviction attorneys told me as recently as last week." The real estate industry, which includes eviction attorneys certainly, always claims that tenants shouldn't have the most basic rights because granting tenants these rights might, somehow, enable tenants to engage in nefarious acts in our rental units. That there is no evidence for this is irrelevant--in the propoganda of the "industry" tenants would take any opportunity to run wild in the streets.

Indeed one of Jerry Brown's initiatives as Mayor of Oakland was to "clear out" rental units being used as drug emporiums. Brown became very quiet on the subject when it turned out that most of the drug selling was being done by homeowners, not tenants.