Democracy in Action: How MassLandlords Will Best Defend Property Rights

Back Bay Boston and American Flag. Wikimedia - Luciof CC-SA.

By Executive Director Doug Quattrochi

In Massachusetts, owning and renting are two sides of the same grubby coin. Let me tell you why it’s grubby.
Two years ago I was in a meeting with some tenant advocates. It was a working session, off the record. We were trying to come up with wording for our proposal to help the homeless. The details of the proposal don’t matter. What mattered was what a prominent member of the advocacy community said.

This tenant advocate said, “It would be better for us if homelessness got worse under a Republican administration.” The implication was that we’d get more funding to fight homelessness the next time a Democrat became governor!

More recently, I was in a meeting with some landlord advocates. It was a working session, off the record. We were trying to offer MassLandlords services. A landlord advocate who stood to lose under MassLandlords said we weren’t needed. A member survey was suggested.

The landlord advocate said, “We don’t need a survey. We’re the board. We tell our members what to think!”

These statements impressed themselves upon me as truly evil. MassLandlords stands for the public good. We put the public ahead of self interest. Yet there are many people who make decisions otherwise. They are wrong to do so.

Our Mission and Governance are Good and Right

MassLandlords’ mission is “to create better rental housing by helping current, new, and prospective owners run profitable, compliant, and quality businesses.” This mission is fundamental and universal. Housing is a fundamental need. Rental housing affects most people, either when we’re just starting out, or in many cases our entire life.

We cannot know in a vacuum what will constitute “better rental housing.” This is why the founding group in Worcester set MassLandlords on a democratic foundation. Every year one director must leave the Board of Directors and the membership must elect a new director. As times and people change, so will our civic organization.

In each location we serve, we have a partner Board focused on their region. Some are Boards of Directors who run independent associations. Others are Boards of Advisors who steer chapters directly operated by MassLandlords. These boards are all-volunteer and all owners, managers, or service providers. We work hard to find good people, and to create the conditions under which good people continue to volunteer their time.

No Board members may carry out operational responsibilities. This is the job of MassLandlords staff. The separation between oversight and action leaves volunteers free to consider what is in the public good, as opposed to what is in anyone’s self interest.

Our value: We will put the public good ahead of private interests.

Our Electronic Pulse is Strong

Thanks to the miracle of technology, we can identify individual people and have secure elections online. This ability to collect democratic input extends to more than the annual election for director. We have an ongoing Policy Priorities Survey which gives us a snapshot of member needs.

There is a connection between the struggles owners have, the cost of rental housing, and the economy. The more burdensome, difficult, and risky it is to provide housing, the more our housing costs, the poorer we all are. It is possible to draw a line from property rights to the public good. This line can avoid running roughshod over renter protections, especially as so many renters – like so many owners – are in need of better education and protection.

That property ownership is in the public interest was best explained by Alan Greenspan in his book, The Age of Turbulence. Greenspan, who served under Republican and Democrat administrations, stated clearly that we incentivize home ownership through low-cost mortgages because, “The expansion of ownership [in the 20^th century] gave more people a stake in the future of our country” (p. 230).

Greenspan wrote in great detail about the importance of property rights in the US, and how lack of property rights in other parts of the world has decreased their standard of living. He wrote, “The rule of law and property rights appear to me to be the most prominent institutional pillars of economic growth and prosperity.” (p. 255).

Property rights are not a landlord value, they are an American value. And there is no better way to discover where our rights are at risk than by asking owners themselves.

Our value: We will advocate for property rights according to democratic input.

MassLandlords for the Long Haul

Being students of economics helped us to design MassLandlords to survive indefinitely, independently of volunteer largess. Like other established trade associations, we are starting to collect enough money in dues, tickets, and other services to cover the costs of professional staff.

These staff are bound by our mission to create better rental housing. They are guided by our democratically elected Board of Directors. They are responsible to us members. In this way we will rise above human fraility on both sides of the issue. We will turn Massachusetts into the best place to own and to rent. These are two sides of the same grubby coin, one we’re well prepared to mint anew.