The Village And Its Families Better Get Their Act Together

I first became aware of the problem when a neighbor called. My renter of three years was causing trouble. We’d never seen anything amiss at the house, but I investigated anyway and found it was true. The place had been trashed.

The tenant was fighting with everyone and her 6-year-old son had set several fires in the neighborhood. On one occasion, she gave the boy a pistol and sent him outside to play. Another time, she emerged wearing nothing but a coat of paint, and did a dance on top of a car.

We posted the required 10-day notice for her to clean up her act. A day or two later, she threatened to kill herself and her son, and was committed to a psychiatric ward. One week later she was released.

It took two months to evict her and her violent boyfriend. The water had been off for a month and they’d lit several “camp fires” inside the house.

On eviction day, the neighbors brought us coffee, the police filed reports, and I ate about $6,000 in damages. Last I heard, this clearly mentally ill lady was wandering the streets.

Earlier, this same house had been vandalized by a 13-year-old in front of witnesses. No arrest or restitution were ever made because, according to the juvenile officer, the boy’s mother wouldn’t cooperate.

About two years ago, we determined that an apartment renter was selling drugs. After some pressure from us, she found another place and I high-tailed it to the Spokane Housing Authority to sign a lease release. My mention of drug activity to the agent was met with total silence and a quick change of the subject. The departing tenant’s rent subsidy and welfare check followed her to her new place, and a police officer told me later that she’d been living with a gang member.

These days a local police-sponsored organization, Safe Streets Now, is urging people to sue landlords who rent to objectionable tenants. I will not question their motives. Community involvement is an important part of a neighborhood.

I’m afraid, however, that we’re making landlords scapegoats for problems that go far deeper.

Renters to a large degree represent what we’ve become as a society. We make drugs illegal and thus profitable to sell, then pretend to fight a war on drugs by putting some little people in jail, while epidemic drug use continues at all levels of society.

That’s why a drug house exists. The landlord rented to a lady with two nice kids. He’s losing his shirt since she moved the dealers in, and he doesn’t like it any more than you do.

As individuals and as a society, we’ve stopped raising our kids. We’ve substituted counseling for discipline and rights for responsibilities. We promote single motherhood almost as an ideal. This is why the 15-year-old neighbor steals from your kids - not because the landlord rents to his mother.

The sex offender in your neighborhood was put there by the courts, not the landlord.

The mentally ill live on the streets and go untreated because, in most cases, they can’t be institutionalized against their will.

Most crime goes unpunished and far too many of us contribute to the problem by such things as ignoring stolen merchandise or protecting our kids when they get into trouble.

State law requires police to notify property owners in writing when a tenant is arrested for drug use or assaults committed on the property. Our police refuse to obey this law and give little if any help to the owner trying to build a legally sound case against a problem renter. Meanwhile, government-paid bounty hunters like the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance slap fines on landlords and Realtors for such horrific crimes as using the phrase “empty nesters’ delight” to describe a small house.

Like it or not, we the people have created and endorsed this breakdown in society. We have done so in numerous ways, including our glorification of violence in entertainment, our rejection of time-proven child-raising techniques, and by several decades of freely elected welfare-state politicians.

Bob Dole says that it takes a family to raise a child. Hillary Clinton says it takes a village. Both are correct. A similar thing applies to crime.

As an individual landlord, I support the neighborhood by maintaining my property and choosing tenants and managers carefully. If I don’t do so, we both lose and you have a right to get on my case.

At the same time, I have to live within the rules and realities imposed by the village. I’m not my tenant’s daddy or guardian. I cannot ignore his legal rights. I cannot choose his friends or dictate the hours he keeps.

Discrimination is both unethical and illegal. I cannot protect you from the inability of the justice system to keep criminals off the streets. Housing and welfare agencies that subsidize and protect alcoholics and drug addicts are only doing the job government created them to do. It’s not their fault - or mine - that this policy creates havoc in the neighborhood.

I cannot, by myself, protect society from the realities of a world that all of us have helped create.

The village has to help.

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