Responses to "a letter to a heartless landlord"
Monday Oct 13 1997
<CGower@mailer.scu.edu>
You know, it is people like you that give us "Good" Landlords a bad name.
I have renters in a property I own in San Francisco, and they are paying
dirt cheap rent, given the current rental market and I have not raised their
rent in the last year and a half and am not attempting to evict them either.
I am a responsive landlord who is there to take care of problems and am fair
to my tenants (if they are fair with me), even when one of them has bounced
over five checks on me in the last two years and failed to maintain the yard
as is agreed upon in our lease.
To categorize all tenants as "good" and all Landlords as "Bad" is going to
do nothing to improve tenant/landlord relationships in San Francisco.
Quite frankly it makes you sound ignorant and bigoted.
Do you consider all blacks, latinos and chinese to be a certain way too?
Sincerely,
Craig
editor's note: I had to respond to this...
Craig -
I'm glad you made the point that Not All Landlords are Bad. In fact,
my last landlord was a gem and treated me like a friend for 8 years.
But please don't compare my point of view regarding eviction to the
entirely separate issue of racism. To go on public record here,
I am in NO WAY a racist or ethnically bigoted toward any black person,
latino person, chinese person, or any person of any race, creed, color
or religious conviction.
We are all PEOPLE, and we all deserve to be treated with respect.
It's when assaults on basic human dignity go unchecked that we as a society suffer.
I am truly sorry that you have been "victimized" by irresponsible tenants.
You sound like a caring and conscientious person. If there were more landlords
like yourself, perhaps this eviction addiction madness would never have occurred.
Respectfully,
Kevin Barnard
email kevin@whisperdesign.com
home www.whisperdesign.com