Seattle has apparently passed a law that intends to force landlords to rent to qualified tenants on a first-come, first-served basis. The point is to avoid discrimination, but I would expect many small single family residence landlords to bail or work around this. Most small scale landlords I know seem to have their own idiosyncratic systems for finding quality tenants, which they consider part of their competitive advantage.
It seems like this will surely increase rents. That would normally drive more tenants to ownership, but since we have implemented non-monetary obstacles to ownership, I'm not sure how much of a shift could happen in the current regime.
Looks like landlords will be taking an even larger risk premium than they currently do.
PS. This reminds me of the New Deal's NIRA, as described by Amity Shlaes in The Forgotten Man.
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