For landlords, there’s no such thing as a no-risk tenant. This writer lives in a 60 unit building and considers the superintendent a friend. The super has plenty of eye-rolling stories from 30 years of vetting and choosing perfectly normal (in appearances and introductory behaviour anyway) prospective tenants. Then getting it wrong by renting to them.
Like the beer drinkers with impeccable references who liked to cap every evening by urinating off their balcony, turning an evening stroll in the garden into a hazardous waste dump. After that eye-roll, the super has a long list of others.
No surprise that landlords try their best to be cautious in their choices, and are not inclined to experiment any more than necessary. That’s particularly true when a prospective tenant has bad ‘paper trail,’ with evidence of insolvency, eviction, homelessness, probation or incarceration. Health (including mental health) issues may be less evident, but equally on the list of things to watch for.
So let’s equip a poor soul with all of the above and walk that candidate into an interview with a landlord. Could that prospective tenant be offered a rental risk free? Of course not!
But wait a moment. That may not actually be true. Some states in the US are working at making renting risk free for landlords who are willing to accept people who are difficult-to-house. There are two sound reasons for doing so. With rental accommodation both scarce and expensive these days, any state concerned with providing affordable shelter for all its citizens needs to build it and own it (decidedly out of fashion) or subsidize private landlords to do so. That’s reason one.
Reason two is that most who have fallen on hard times are not fundamentally evil, though some may behave that way. Just as most folk don’t urinate off their balconies. But some behave that way.
Here is a story from Pennsylvania where governments and agencies are experimenting with providing incentives to give difficult-to-accommodate renters a chance. Read more in The Philadelphia Enquirer: People who are homeless or on probation struggle to secure housing. An ex-Comcast manager turned landlord is helping.
