I think one of the big difficulties around rent is the high transaction cost on both sides.
Your proposal helps address some of the friction that makes it costly for landlords to take a risk on tenets, and having lived places where eviction is generally fairly easy (Florida, where you you can evict someone in between 3 and 10 days) and where it is fairly hard (California, where you can’t really evict someone in less than 30 days and 60 to 90 days is more realistic) I can say that the rental market certainly felt more efficient where eviction was easier rather than harder.
Alas, housing is not a commodity good where one house/apartment is as good as another at the same price point and there are a lot of complicated factors involved with finding something that is a good fit between renter and landlord, not to mention all the emotional friction present in the market (people become emotionally attached to the places they live; they become part of their identity and then experience emotional pain if they are forced to move, making them more hesitant to switch). And of course there are the costs associated with moving stuff from one place to another, both in personal labor, emotional labor, and financial.
This all points to a market that people are likely to want more regulated rather than less, and to want more restrictions on evictions rather than less when they have the political capital to make that happen. There are likely ways to improve the situation dramatically, but they probably don’t look like something as simple as changing eviction rules to make eviction easier (Singapore is widely held up as a model of how housing policy can work really well).
I think one of the big difficulties around rent is the high transaction cost on both sides.
Your proposal helps address some of the friction that makes it costly for landlords to take a risk on tenets, and having lived places where eviction is generally fairly easy (Florida, where you you can evict someone in between 3 and 10 days) and where it is fairly hard (California, where you can’t really evict someone in less than 30 days and 60 to 90 days is more realistic) I can say that the rental market certainly felt more efficient where eviction was easier rather than harder.
Alas, housing is not a commodity good where one house/apartment is as good as another at the same price point and there are a lot of complicated factors involved with finding something that is a good fit between renter and landlord, not to mention all the emotional friction present in the market (people become emotionally attached to the places they live; they become part of their identity and then experience emotional pain if they are forced to move, making them more hesitant to switch). And of course there are the costs associated with moving stuff from one place to another, both in personal labor, emotional labor, and financial.
This all points to a market that people are likely to want more regulated rather than less, and to want more restrictions on evictions rather than less when they have the political capital to make that happen. There are likely ways to improve the situation dramatically, but they probably don’t look like something as simple as changing eviction rules to make eviction easier (Singapore is widely held up as a model of how housing policy can work really well).