For example it can be a long drawn out process to evict someone in NYC for non payment of rent, and super easy in TX. Which means landlords in Texas run a credit check and take first and last months deposit and you’re in business because if you don’t pay, you’re gone shortly thereafter. In NYC you need to provide bank accounts, tax returns, have co-signers etc. because if you end up not paying it could be a long drawn out struggle to get you out and they don’t want to take that risk. Which leads to my comment that perversely the bar to renting becomes higher where there are more tenants rights
it's kind of a trade off. i've definitely found it to be a pain in the ass to rent in places with strong tenant's rights.
On the other hand, I've also lived in a town with very weak tenant's rights. When the heater broke one winter, the landlord's solution was to give me 6-8 space heaters and tell me to leave them on 24/7. Since these technically kept the temperature above 68 degrees, he had no legal obligation to do anything more.
Anything that increase the hassle/cost of dealing with an actual bad actor will raise the barriers to entry.
If a company can fire someone they just hired for basically no reason at all via a layoff, they'll be much more willing to expand quickly and be less thorough in screening applicants.
If once they hire someone, they cannot fire them for 40 years without an actual honest-to-goodness crime prosecuted; they'll be more cautious about hiring.
There are genuinely bad tenants. There are genuinely bad landlords. The system does a poor job of filtering the two. If the system worked well, good participants from either group would have little to fear from doing business with a bad actor on the other side. The system we have-and that you described well-forces a policy choice between favoring landlords (including the bad ones) or favoring tenants (including the bad ones). It is not a fair and free market.
