Why The “Free Rent” Movement Is Going Nowhere

There is a national push to attack landlords under what many call the “free rent movement”. This woke ideology is that landlords are inherently evil and that housing rent should be controlled by the government or – better yet – forced to be provided at no charge. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explain, in detail, why this movement is going nowhere, despite what some politicians may promise. 

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Welcome to the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast where you will learn how to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, finance, turn-around and operate mobile home parks! Your host is Frank Rolfe, the 5th largest mobile home park owner in the United State with his partner Dave Reynolds. Together, they also own and operate Mobile Home University, the leading educational website for both new and experienced mobile home park investors!

If you are a landlord in America, and I don't mean just a mobile home park owner, you might be a single family homeowner, a duplex owner, an apartment complex owner, anyone who owns real estate, which they then rent out to others for housing. If you are one of those people, you probably notice this growing, swelling notion out there, which is flavoring much of what you read in the media, and you can sense the hostility and this is all collectively called the Free Rent movement. And all landlords are now facing this challenge, a challenge that wants to throughout the concept that rent should be limited, it should be controlled by the government. Oh, what the heck, let's just make it all free, that's the true movement's concept. And can they do it, can they pull it off, can they make rent free, can they make it where you can't raise your rents at all regardless of market forces, supply and demand, all economics just threw it all out the window.

That's what the Free Rent movement folks will tell you. But I'm here to tell you that the Free Rent movement is going absolutely nowhere, regardless of what politicians may tell you. Now let's first start off while trying to explore why landlords are so hated, that's an easy answer. About half of all Americans don't own their home, they rent their housing, and as a result, half of all Americans despise paying monthly rent. They just don't like it, there's a lot of more fun things you can do than paying your rent. And since it's a large part of most Americans budget, anyone who has the mere mention of some plan, some device to lower or eliminate their rent is suddenly their savior. They're just so excited, they just can't help themselves with enthusiasm about the whole idea of not having to pay rent any longer. But if you really look at the cost structure out there of the average American, if you go to one of the websites that helps you budget.

There's all these government-sponsored websites to help the average American come up with a household budget. And if you look at those, and I welcome you to do so, you'll see that housing is not number one, it's not number two, it's not number three, it's not even number four, but yet it's only number five in size of the average household's expenditures. What's ahead of rent? Here it is straight off the website. Healthcare is ahead of rent, healthcare premiums for a family of four in America can be as much as $2,000 a month, that's a ridiculous amount. I remember back when you could have a family, in my case it was a family of three, with good insurance prior to Obamacare for about $400 a month. But that's one of the top four. And then you also have childcare. So if you have a job and you've got a child, the price to have that child looked after every day while you're at work is a substantial amount, or again, over $1,000 a month.

And then you've got transportation, your good old automobile that you probably bought in the US at an average of $50,000 per car, plus interest, plus gas, plus tax, plus insurance, plus wear and tear, repair and maintenance. Again, that's larger than rent for most Americans according to these budget modelings. And then you have taxes, federal and state, and of course sales tax in there too. And all of those categories exceed housing, so where the heck is the free healthcare, free childcare, free transportation and free tax movement, I might ask? Well, that's a little harder for many of the woke folks who are really the huge champions of this idea to put their arms around. Because if you are a true woke in mindset, you can't really come after transportation because we're trying to redo cars into an EV empire in which gas powered cars go away and electrics take over. And of course, the electrics are far more expensive than the gas powered ones.

So you really don't wanna talk about the transportation thing, we don't wanna lower the cost of transportation 'cause that would preclude people buying electric cars. And then you have the healthcare issue and well, that whole healthcare issue, that's not very popular or fun to talk about is it? Because companies like Pfizer have ruled the world ever since COVID and all of the various vaccines that the government required everyone to take, although they didn't bother to mention that many of them were stockholders in the companies providing those vaccines, things like that. So if you're a woke person again, you don't wanna have an initiative against healthcare, gosh darn it, that's not any fun. And then what about childcare? Well, the problem is if we start criticizing childcare and start talking about how we wanna reduce the cost, of course, the parallel to that would be one member of the household to stay at home to not have to then have outside childcare.

But again, that's not an initiative that that many people who are Free Rent movement folk wanna embrace. And then of course, you have taxation. Well, for many Americans, there is no tax, less than half of Americans actually pay income tax at all, the top 1% in America pay 40% of all total taxes. So once again, that argument is not fun to hammer on. And so then you fall back to category number five, fifth and priority on expense and that's housing. So that's the only one that's really free game to attack and that's why landlords are the only ones having to face this crazy Free Rent movement because everything else is off limits to those who wanna criticize and undo American society. So let's move on then to why none of this is ever going to happen, 'cause you're right now watching on television, many political promises from presidential people such as Kamala Harris, who tries to tell us that she is going to have a national rent control ban, things like that.

Why can't she do it? If Harris is elected why can't she do it? Why can't no one just jump out there and do a national rent control? Well, the first problem is that if you're gonna do it, you're probably going to have to have control of all three chambers. You're probably gonna have to be the president and you'll also have to control the Senate and the House. And although we know that this presidential election which is coming up soon is gonna be very, very tight, I don't know anyone who's projecting the Democrats to win all three houses. So if you can show me that study, please let me know and in fact, it's very rare to see any group that controls all three. And even when they do control all three, they still have the issue of the filibuster in the Senate to overcome. So you'd have to have at least 10 people on the losing side of the Senate who would then approve whatever you wanna do. So that is a big hurdle right there.

We're gonna have to have all three things in order to pass legislation on some kind of national rent control. And then once you've cleared all that, well, you better expect there's gonna be massive litigation because landlords are a fairly large group. And as a result, they're going to be able to pool the resources to amount of fairly large legal challenge to that if it were to be passed. And so that will tie things up in court and don't forget the Chevron doctrine that was overturned recently by the Supreme Court, which makes everything now subject to litigation and going through all the way through the court system. So you figure whatever challenge they would have would ultimately land probably in the Supreme Court. And we know the Supreme Court probably isn't gonna be much in favor of things like a national rent control thing. So that may make all of that really kind of hard. And then the problem is that even if you were to do it, and even though it then goes into years of litigation.

You'll have to hold all three chambers till the end of time, until all the litigation goes through because all you'd have to do is to pass legislation again and just undo it. So it would be really, really hard if not impossible to get it done. You'd have to basically be like the thing that's never happened in the NFL, not only a three-peat, you'd have to be more like a four, five or six-peat and I just don't see that happening. Now since it can't really happen as far as I can see, I don't see any workable way, and I had this discussion with others frequently. There's no way you can academically theorize how national rent control could actually pass into law. Further problems that you have with this entire concept is that landlords do great things for society. We're the folks that basically provide a roof over the heads for the half of the population that don't have the ability to own their own housing. I am not one to pass judgment on what people must rent as opposed to own.

But it clearly has something to do with amassing the capital for a down payment, attaining a credit-worthy status and holding the job that makes enough money to make those payments of mortgage possible. So until that time, without landlords, there would be no housing for about half of all Americans. On top of that, remember, the government has done a very, very poor job of managing housing itself. Their housing initiatives have been utter failures now for the longest time. Section 8, total mess, don't have the capacity to add more people who need it onto the system, and the quality of the housing that people receive is terrible. It's also subsidized, it costs the taxpayers a fortune. And then you hear all the time that the government is going to create more affordable housing. Well, you probably have noticed none of that ever happened, we've heard about it now for almost four years under the Biden administration, endless chatter about it.

But I haven't seen a single initiative that has gone anywhere. So the problem with the Free Rent movement is that, not only can you not attain free rent, but if you did, if you were able to enact laws restricting the freedom of people to own property, to set rents based on market conditions, if they just did like the book Atlas Shrugged and stopped doing it, half of the nation would have absolutely nowhere to live. So instead, what Americans need to do is they need to embrace the opposite of free housing, they need to embrace the fact that people need to pay a good, solid, fair market rent. Because that's what allows people to reinvest in housing, that's what allows them to create a great quality of life for those who must rent. That is what you need as a country to prosper when it comes to housing Americans. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.