Another story out of Seattle, but it applies to a lot of other places, and the direction of the national rental market, IMO. This is one of the reasons I recently sold the last of my rental properties. While the county where my rentals are is not a bad place to be a landlord or renter, the state is passing enough legislation that it makes it tougher and tougher to be an individual landlord.
I think that's bad (as the story alludes to) for both individual landlords and for good renters. Being an individual landlord, I needed to be picky regarding my tenants, because unlike a ginormous property management company, one bad tenant could kill my income for the whole year. By being picky, I also always charged under market rent, kept things in good condition, and in over 30 years of landlording, had around 90% good and happy tenants.
If the government tells an individual landlord they have to take some "government mandated" tenant, the landlord loses and the neighborhood loses, and other tenants lose, because if you have to account for "undesirable" tenants, that means raising the rent to cover expenses (or in hopes of weeding out undesirables, which has the unintended consequence of weeding out desirable lower income tenants). Or else selling, and when it becomes a losing proposition to be a mom and pop landlord trying to make a few bucks to cover retirement, then the big corporations will come in, and again rents will go up, and renters will have to deal with a faceless entity. "Lowest common denominator" tenants will also knock down property values for owned residences in the area, and pretty soon you'll have "the section 8 lifestyle" wherever there are rental properties.
It's just interesting that the liberal philosophy in this regard pretty much is a boon to criminals, people who can't get their *expletive deleted*it together, and big corporations that will come in to handle that demographic. The losers are the lower to middle income decent renters and the "family" landlords that rent to them, and what has for decades generally been a mutually beneficial partnership.
As a total tangent, while the author makes good points, I doubt I would rent to him. If stuff breaks, I fix it. If YOU break stuff (apparently through negligence) you're paying for it or looking for a new place to live. The author is the kind of renter that drives rents up.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/05/21/smug-seattle-to-mom-and-pop-landlords-criminals-are-welcome-your-rights-not-so-much.html