2002-10-06 10:23 p.m.
This Ballot Measure Will Corrupt Your Children, Trash Your Yard and Drink All Your Beer
So there's a measure on the local ballot that is supposed to cut down on the number of unjust evictions in my fair city. The landlords, unsurprisingly, are completely against it and are bankrolling the campaign to bring it down. The latest salvo is a little leaflet with "three facts you should know" about this, two of which are just intended to support the third -- that landlords can't evict subletters.
Now in the real world, this makes sense. Imagine a typical Bay Area renting scenario, where several people rent a place together and one tenant is the leaseholder. A tenant moves out, the roomies find a new person, all is well and good.
But if the landlord has to approve the new roomie first, then the landlord can choose to be difficult and cause some real problems for the existing tenants. He or she can delay reviewing the new roomie, s/he can reject every tenant out of hand, and if s/he keeps it up long enough, the existing tenants will eventually have to move because they can't afford to cover the rent without the replacement tenant. Voila -- de facto eviction, without the pesky notices and due process and such. This is most likely the kind of scenario this provision of the measure was intended to guard against.
But in Bizarro Election Time World, here's what it's really for:
An example of how this measure works:
You live in a quiet neighborhood. Next door is a rental unit.
Without approval of the owner the tenant sublets his apartment to a
convicted sex offender. There is nothing the owner of the property,
you, or the neighbors can do about it. This measure prohibits eviction
of the sex offender.
In other words, if you support tenants' rights at all, the sex offenders lurking around the edges of your neighborhood, coveting your lifestyle, will go knocking door to door until they find a suitably gullible renter to sublet from and just move on in.
Never mind that there's nothing stopping convicted sex offenders from buying a house in your neighborhood. After all, if you're the nervous, white middle-class homeowner targeted by this ad, people like that could never afford to buy next door to you, because white middle-class homeowners like you never rape women or molest children. See, people just like you -- the mailing address is in one of those neighborhoods that pretends it's its own town and not part of the larger city -- are just looking out for your safety! Aren't you concerned about safe neighborhoods too?
What this really is is cleverly coded racism. The ad's aimed squarely at people who never really wanted to live in this city but couldn't afford to buy somewhere else. The campaigners want to play into these people's unspoken fear that the poor, black people with guns, the ones they hear about all the time on the evening news, are just dying to march up the hills, invade their neighborhoods and ruin their precarious middle-class existence in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
This ad is just creepy, and what's worse, probably very carefully researched to push the hot buttons of just the right segment of voters. No wonder people are so cynical about the political process. What's the point of organizing when your efforts can just get shot down by one scummy, well-funded ad campaign?
-=-
The A's were knocked out in the 9th inning of Game 5, thus guaranteeing that at least 3/4 of Baseball Prospectus' postseason predictions were dead wrong. At least they were right about one thing -- within an hour of the game being over, I saw my first ad for the ALCS describing the Twins' win as a fluke.