Communists Press for Florida Rent Control

It’s happening everywhere. Communists in New York pushing to make all evictions for any reason illegal. They try to paint tenants as the victims.

This woman in Winter Haven, Florida had her rent increased by 58 percent, from $1545 to $2450. During the pandemic, the woman wasn’t paying rent, and the landlord collected nearly $6,000 in federal COVID stimulus money to make up for the year or so that she wasn’t paying rent. One of the stipulations on getting the COVID funds is that the landlord has to accept it as full payment for all back rent. So this landlord got screwed out of approximately $12,000 in rent that had to be written off. That six grand was less than a third of what he was owed. So he did what any business would do- he raised prices to make up for it. That apparently makes him the bad guy.

That woman’s case, like others, is being used to paint business owners as the evil, greedy ones for daring that their customers pay for the products and services that they receive. We are talking about a 40 year old woman who is living with her retarded 20 year old daughter and 9 year old son, while also taking care of her daughter’s toddler child. She is trying to raise three kids on nothing but government handouts. I wouldn’t have rented to her broke ass in the first place.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the local commies can’t afford rent, so they show up to protest at the landlord’s house, demanding that the landlords sell the apartment building they live in to a local non-profit at a loss. He bought the building for $6.5 million, and the tenants are using this intimidation tactic in an attempt to force him to sell the building for only $3.6 million.

All of this leads us to Tampa. A local communist newspaper called “Creative Loafing” is calling for rent control in the Tampa Bay area. The measure failed in Tampa, but across the bay in Saint Petersburg, the council has actually voted to declare a “housing emergency” and has begun walking down the road of rent control. So what does it take to make that happen under Florida law?

Landlords in Florida can’t raise rent during the term of the lease. My tenants sign a lease for a year, and the rent is laid out in the lease. That is the amount they pay for that year. When the lease is up, we can negotiate for another year, but that deal is separate from the year before.

To restrict the new lease, Florida statute 125.0103 is pretty explicit. There are a number of steps that have to be followed. First, the city has to declare a housing emergency.

Such governing body makes and recites in such measure its findings establishing the existence in fact of a housing emergency so grave as to constitute a serious menace to the general public and that such controls are necessary and proper to eliminate such grave housing emergency.

Saint Petersburg has already done that. Step two is that they have to put it on the ballot and get a majority of voters to approve it:

Such measure is approved by the voters in such municipality, county, or other entity of local government.

After all of that, the rent control is only in effect for one year. Following that, the entire process has to be repeated. Even then, the rent control doesn’t apply to seasonal rentals or to “luxury rentals.” A luxury rental is defined as a rental that would have cost more than $250 in 1977. According to the US inflation calculator, that would today be a rent of $1,159.

The only people who will come out ahead on this will be real estate attorneys.

Communists hate landlords. They want free shit. They are going to destroy the right to private property.