William Watson: Of course we have a rental crisis. Who would want to be a landlord?
You must pay the rent! I can’t pay the rent! You pay the rent! I pay the rent!
The internet tells me this classic confrontation between a greedy landlord and a penniless young damsel dates back at least to an 1867 play called “Under the Gaslight.” (Gaslight, indeed!) We boomers had it embedded in our consciousness by the cartoon series “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” which several subsequent generations have probably seen in re-runs.
In this culture, “greedy landlord” is redundant. It’s a given that landlords are avaricious and exploitative. We’ve all seen news stories and public affairs show segments on how they habitually jack up the rent in cockroach-infested hellholes where their victims invariably are single moms. When not doing that, they’re engineering “reno-victions” — evicting tenants on the pretext that they’re doing repairs but really just wanting to replace them with people willing to pay higher rents.
If anyone has ever seen a news report, especially on CBC, in which the landlord’s side of the story is told fairly, and the difficulty of dealing with deadbeat or destructive tenants is given appropriate weight, please let me know. I watch a lot of news and I’ve never seen it — no doubt because reporters are more likely to be tenants than landlords.
This same news media is now all aflutter about the housing crisis, especially in rental housing, especially among students — a problem the federal government is thinking about solving by capping the number of international students our universities and colleges can admit — presumably because foreign students can’t vote. It will be fun to see how such a policy is administered. Will there be a cap-and-trade system in which schools are allotted a quota on the basis of their
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