HOW TO BE A GOOD PERSON : IN A LANDLORD'S EYES

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

At some point in our lives, we all wonder whether we are "good people." We live with others. We know how "good people" act. We have an intuitive sense about what makes a person "good." We even hear things about what makes a person "good:" They are friendly, kind, forbearing, compassionate, ethical, honest, caring, loving, trustworthy, gracious, forgiving and generous. "Good people" do not hurt you. They do what they say; and they apologize if they do not. They consider you at the same time they consider themselves. Aristotle and many other philosophers have written tomes about what it takes to be "good." It is an age-old question.

Of course, not everyone can agree on what is "good." You can't know you are a good person until you know what is good in the first place. What is good in one person's eyes may be bad in another. It is easy to lay down absolute standards for goodness. Yet like all ethical dilemmas, only we can say whether we subjectively feel that we have done right. Nonetheless, we can generally all agree that being "good" involves living without intent to injure other people. In that sense, being a "good person" essentially depends on positive motivation. And that positive motivation shines through in good actions toward others. Good people think selflessly; they refuse to hurt others to advance their interests. Bad people do the opposite; they are willing to hurt others to help themselves.

Being a good person is an individual lifestyle. It does not depend on how much money you make or what you do for a living. While it is possible to identify "objective" factors that hint whether a person is "good," true goodness comes from the heart, not from action alone. Enron fraud artists probably donated some money to charity the same year they robbed millions; that donation did not make them good people. No, being good is internal; and good shines through in external action. It is hard to verify. But everyone knows it when they see it.

It is refreshing to know a truly good person because they are rare. In our world, it is hard to be selfless and honorable. There are so many impulsions to discard goodness toward others in order to advance yourself. By the same token, it is hard to be patient. No one wants to wait or understand others' problems. Nor do they want to waste their time on others without reward. After all, people need to fend for themselves. They only have a limited time to get the job done. If they waste their time being nice to others, they might injure their own fortunes. And no one likes to do that. Put simply, we expect most people not to be good; our society frustrates goodness. That is why it is a welcome relief to meet a good person.

There is no formula to being a good person. Yet people throw the term around far more than they should. In many cases, they say someone is "good" solely because they act in a way that enriches them. That misunderstands what it means to be good. A truly good person acts with malice toward no one. The fact that a person acts the way another person wants them to does not make him good. To the contrary, expecting a person to act in a way that is beneficial to you undermines their value as an individual. It "instrumentalizes" them; it makes them pawns in a game you want to win. Just because someone pays you according to a contract does not make them "good." Merely fulfilling an external legal obligation is no shortcut to goodness. A good person holds to his word because it is his word, not because the law threatens him to do so.

Yet many people think that observing external obligations makes you "good." It is easy to make this mistake. After all, complying with the law seems like a "good" thing to do. But the law is indifferent to intention. And intention is the only thing that determines whether a person is good. In that sense, it is possible to seem good by fulfilling every imaginable legal standard. Yet it is also possible to have only bad intentions while complying with the law. You can be a total scoundrel yet do nothing illegal. If a person did not know you, they might say: "Well, he is law-abiding. So he must be a good person." To that extent, fulfilling external obligations can disguise ethical flaws.

I encountered an example to illustrate this easily confused distinction in the New York Post a few days ago. I read an article about some poor web designer who got run over in a Brooklyn street. See N.Y. Post, Horror hit-run in B'klyn, April 19, 2010 at p. 9. The article quoted his landlord. She spoke about his character: "He works. He comes home. He's a very good person (emphasis added)."

What did the landlord know about this guy? How did she know he was a "very good person?" She based her assessment on the fact that he works and comes home. What does that have to do with ethical goodness or pure intention? Nothing. If anything, it reveals that the landlord thinks the web designer was a "good person" solely because he went to his job, came home every night and ostensibly paid the rent. He might have been an utter scoundrel who doublecrossed his friends and broke women's hearts. Yet as far as the landlord was concerned, he was a "good person" because he adhered to his contractual obligations to pay rent. He also was a "good person" because he quietly went to his job and caused no disturbances.

I suppose this is what it takes to be a "good person" in a landlord's eyes. Landlord apply a "formula" for goodness: Have good credit; make an income; cause no trouble; pay your rent; keep your mouth shut; pay next month's rent; pay a late fee after the first. Your intentions do not matter. And "being a good person" means acting exactly the way the landlord wants. In this case, the landlord happened to like the way her tenant behaved because he did what enriched her. She morally approved him because his behavior coincided with her interests. His own ethical qualities did not influence her appraisal. It was "all about her." And that determined whether he was "good."

This gravely misunderstands what it means to be a "good person." A person is not "good" simply because he acts in a way that enriches another. Nor is he "good" simply because he adheres to contractual obligations under law. Rather, goodness is more subtle than that. There is no checklist. Action is not enough. It takes real reflection to see whether someone is good. Getting a rent check in the mail every month does not suffice to prove goodness.

Criminals and scallywags can mail rent checks, too. That does not make them good people.

But who has time to sit down and really think about character in our society? It seems we only care about character when we want to damage a foe with some embarrassing "flaw." And once again, we do that to merely to advance ourselves at their expense. By hurting them, we help ourselves. And hurting others is rarely good.

IT'S GOOD TO BE A LANDLORD

By : Mr. Marty H. Landsman, Owner of Seven Choice Apartment Buildings in New York City; Chairman and CEO, Landsman Management Group; Honorary Member, The National Association for the Protection and Dignity of Private Property in America, LLC (a for-profit Association).

It’s good to be a landlord. I don’t pay you; you pay me. It’s not your land; it’s mine. You spend your life working so you can pay me rent. I just sit here and collect your checks. Then I deposit your checks and buy expensive gifts for my relatives before going on vacation. Ah, yes, it’s good to be a landlord. Just say the word out loud: Land Lord. It’s my land. You’re on it. I’m your lord. Pay your lord or get off his stinking land. It doesn’t belong to you.

Yes, I’m your lord, all right. You might think you have some rights against me because you signed a lease before you set foot on my land. You think I’m required to make sure the land is safe. You think that I have to leave you alone while you pay rent. But did you ever stop and read the lease? Guess what, all the obligations are on you, pal. If you don’t pay, I get to charge late fees, penalties and hire a lawyer against you at your expense. If that doesn’t make you cough up what you owe, I can bring over the sheriff to forcibly eject you from my land. After that I can go to court and get a judgment against you for all the money you owe under the lease. Then I can garnish your wages, seize your pathetic household trinkets and take the shirt off your back—all with legal authority. You no pay, you no play. And me get all of your money. Silly tenant.

You think you have power? Think again. You can’t throw me out of my house, but I sure as fuck can throw you out of yours. It’s my land. It doesn’t belong to you. I’m just letting you stay there because I’m being nice and you’re paying for it. But you’d better not forget who holds the cards in this relationship, my friend. You’d better not cross me or forget to mail your check. Because if you do, I’ll sic the law on you faster than you can say: “Oh God, please don’t throw my clothes on the street!” And you thought the law was on your side. Ha ha ha ha ha! You naïve little renting person. Here’s a little secret: If you own no property, the law will not help you.

So you think it’s unfair that I get the money and you don’t, eh? Well that’s life. My dad owned this land and he left it to me. Your dad didn’t own any land and now you have to ask landlords like me to rent to you. What can I say? That’s the way the ball bounces, buddy. I am the landlord. You are the tenant. You signed the lease. You owe money. This is the way things are. There’s no sense complaining about it. Look, if you become successful and buy some land yourself, then you can be a landlord, too. So there’s something you can aspire to. You need goals, right? Hey, this is America. You can be anything you want. But in the meantime, send me your goddamn rent checks.

Tenants like you really make me angry. In recent years, you’ve banded together and lobbied lawmakers to impose new responsibilities on landlords. You’ve actually won a few court cases and communist judges have ordered us to keep our land “habitable” and “quiet” for your “enjoyment.” They say that when we accept your rent money, we “warrant” that the ceiling won’t collapse on your renting face, or that flesh-eating worms won’t burrow through the floor and kill your girlfriend when she sleeps over on our land.

This is total rubbish. We believe in contracts. The lease contract says you pay rent and we let you live on our land. It doesn’t say anything about protecting you from falling ceilings, flesh-eating worms or anything else. You’re a big boy. You can defend yourself against these things. I mean, worms move slowly; you can dodge them. It makes no sense to saddle landlords with additional responsibilities when grownup tenants like you are in a much better position to look out for their own safety. If America stands for anything, it stands for responsible, self-aware individuals who are mature enough to understand what they are bargaining for. We don’t “read things into” contracts. We follow them, because they represent responsible, free will. When the law steps in to modify what we bargained for, it assumes we are childish. Oh no we’re not. We know exactly what we’re bargaining for. We bargained to let you stay on my land for one year. We did not bargain to protect your lazy ass against collapsing ceilings or deadly worms. That’s your deal, not mine. My life is difficult enough as it is going down to my P.O. box to pick up checks. I can’t start worrying about worms in your apartment. That would seriously complicate my life; and I wrote the contract so I wouldn’t have to worry about shit like this. God damn judges.

Still, I can’t really complain that much. I don’t lose lawsuits against tenants. They either pay me or I evict them; it’s pretty simple stuff. I just don’t like the idea that the law has recognized some “tenant rights.” I mean, come on, part of the fun of being a landlord is that you get to do whatever you want, even fuck around with tenants without consequence. I mean, we’re land lords, just like the feudal landowners in England who got to snatch peasant wives from their tenants’ homes on their wedding nights. We are the lords; the tenants are our peasants. Since when did peasants have rights against their noble lords? This is just contrary to everything the law stands for. The law is about property, not peasants. We have property and we get to take what we want from it. But now these judges are actually giving rights to peasants? It’s just mind-boggling.

Rent control is the worst thing that ever happened. During the New Deal, State legislatures and city councils mandated that landlords were forbidden to charge more than a token amount for rent. Worse, these laws attached themselves to the property, so that even if a rent-controlled tenant died, the rent control continued for the next tenant. Never before has a law so dangerously impinged on the right of private contract in America. Never before has a law so insolently encroached upon economic freedom as rent control has. Rent control took power away from landlords and put it in the hands of pathetic wage-earners. It forced landlords to forgo potential profits in order to accommodate poor people. It thumbed its nose in the face of free market economics, maintaining artificially low prices even when the market clearly reflected demand warranting higher rents. In short, rent control waged war on contract, freedom and economic empowerment for landlords. And why? To help people “weather tough economic times” and to “make housing affordable for all.”

This is beyond stupid. Real estate markets are no different from any other private market. If a prospective tenant is willing to pay $4,000 a month for a single room, he should be allowed to bargain with me to pay that amount. But rent control laws mandate that I can only charge $50 a month for the property, even if the prospective tenant and I want to conclude a contract for $4,000 a month. This is sheer madness. I did not become a landlord for some lesbian city council commissioner to tell me I can’t maximize the profit I make from my land. It’s mine, goddamn it, not hers. Mine, mine, mine, mine! I have a right to charge whatever the goddamn fucking shit I want for my property. I have a right to make whatever goddamn fucking shit contracts I want with people who have the money to pay what I demand. Yet rent control takes away my freedom, and it takes all the fun out of being a landlord. America is supposed to be about freedom, not “affordable housing for all.” Worse, rent control takes away my freedom to provide “affordable housing” to someone who is willing to pay market rates.

I’m sorry, but this is unjust. It is difficult to pick up checks at the post office and evict delinquent tenants. Rent control adds insult to injury by: (1) Reducing the amount of my checks; and (2) Allowing tenants to more easily meet their financial obligations to me, obviating my right to evict them. I can’t tell you how many times rent control forced me to take a six-week cruise instead of a seven-week cruise, or buy a $45,000 diamond necklace for my wife instead of a $50,000 one. All because these communist laws trampled on my right as an American to charge whatever I want for people to live on my land.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Most State legislatures and city councils have abolished rent control. During the 1980s and 1990s, legislators came to their senses and realized that this country does not stand for “affordable housing.” They remembered that it stands for private property rights. So now I can basically charge whatever I want for my properties, with a few exceptions. I’ll be honest with you: The few old coots who still have rent controlled apartments really put a bug up my ass. I mean, how would you feel if you knew Mrs. Myriam H. Finkelblatt (age 90) is only paying $75 a month for a choice 2-bedroom apartment at 456 Park Avenue, while her neighbor, Mr. Charles G. Witherspoon, Esq. (Age 41), pays $6,700 a month for the same space? If the old hag would just hurry up and die in a pool of her own urine, I’d make an extra $6,625 every month; that’s $75,000 every year. People don’t earn that much slaving away at an insurance company every year, yet I would get it simply if the crone would keel over and exit my building feet first.

Polite society says it’s wrong to wish death on others. But I’m not afraid to defy convention: I wish death on every single last son-of-an-elderly-bitch who has rent control on my property. I hope they all die quickly so I can fill their apartments with young strappers with the money to pay market rates. And they’re out there, too. Demand is up and supply is short. I own the supply. I’m the landlord. You need to bargain with me for something you need. I set the price; you sign the lease.

And there is nothing wrong with this. You wish you could be me, because you’d be doing exactly the same thing if you were in my position. But you’re not, so you need to lick my boots to live on my land. You might complain that the lease is unfair or the rent is too high. Go ahead and complain; it’s a free country. But you need a place to live, don’t you? You won’t get to live on my property if you don’t sign. Don’t want to sign, eh? Then get the hell out, because there’s a guy right behind you with cash in hand ready to go. So would you please make up your mind? You are interfering with my right to contract and you’re really annoying the guy behind you who wants to contract with me. You believe in freedom, don’t you? Then sign or get out of the way.

Don’t hate me because I’m a landlord. I’m just living the American dream. Freedom is a wonderful thing, especially if you own lots of land. Praise the lord… the land lord, that is. And may I remind you that your rent is due on the 1st, no later.