This week I’ll be attending and speaking at the Ohio Realtors Spring Legislative Conference. The title of my session is Affordable Housing: Developing Policies that Encourage Housing Without Trampling on Private Property Rights. Property rights has become the province of the right wing. It shouldn’t be. Do we have property rights or not? Of course we do. I don’t like the word “rights,” it’s an ill defined term in the vernacular usually meaning something like, “Something I’m entitled to just because.” Rights can too often be tethered to some deontological premise that puts rights outside of common experience; in other words, “God given.” But the right to property doesn’t have to be like that.

In my presentation I’ll share our experience with really bad eviction data circulated in the service of making tenant landlord law more complicated. Much of what I’ll talk about is in Losing Perspective, our response to the report that falsely argued that eviction is a “leading cause of homelessness.” It isn’t. And with only about .3 percent of rental households being evicted, it isn’t a “crisis” or “epidemic” either. Eviction is an unfortunate reality for a very small number of households some of which have violated leases or caused damage and loss to property owners.

The same crisis and epidemic language is spreading in Ohio as well and I’ll do my best to give people their some footing to fight back.  And it’s I fight we have to make across the country. With garbage data, ad hoc arguments, and power grabs by ideologues rife in the discourse, someone has to ask, “what quantitatively defines a crisis,” and “what is the endemic rate of eviction.” That last question is key because the answer for advocates is zero.

What should a private property owner do when someone isn’t paying rent, violating the lease, or engaging in conduct disruptive to other tenants? The answer from advocates is “Nothing. People have a ‘right’ to housing.” We’ll, when that “right” trumps people off setting risk to their own financial well being, they won’t rent their property any more. But perhaps that’s what advocates really want, a break down of the supply of rental housing. The goal of most socialist tenant advocates isn’t socialism at all, but chaos. When interventions like changing tenant land lord law fail, then they say capitalism doesn’t work: “We need rent control!”