Landlords have long been an object of derision. The ongoing affordable housing crisis has only exacerbated the attacks. Landlords are called greedy and negligent. It is argued that they put profits before people. All of this is intended to make it acceptable to hate landlords. Now, CNN informs us, landlords are also guilty of hate crimes.
The opening paragraph of the article states:
A Chicago-area landlord was arrested and charged with murder and hate crimes after authorities said he stabbed and killed a 6-year-old boy and seriously wounded his mother, allegedly because the tenants are Muslim.
Landlords, the article implies, are not only profiteers, they are also bigots.
Joe and Jill Biden released a statement denouncing the attack:
I have said repeatedly that I will not be silent in the face of hate. We must be unequivocal. There is no place in America for hate against anyone.
The Bidens are simply repeating a common mantra: we shouldn’t hate people for what they are. Unless, of course, they are landlords. It is acceptable to vilify landlords and denounce those who own rental housing.
Nowhere in the article are we told why it is relevant that the accused was the victim’s landlord. The alleged murderer wasn’t motivated by a landlord/tenant conflict. He was, apparently, motivated by Islamophobia.
Housing activists and their ilk are quick to point out transgressions on the part of landlords. They then portray these relatively rare examples as the rule rather than the exception. However, what is true of one member of a group does not mean that it is true of all members of that group. That one landlord is a bigot does not mean that all landlords are as well.
Portraying landlords in a negative light makes it easier to enlist support for more controls and restrictions on the owners of rental property. Such efforts are intended to make it acceptable to hate landlords.