October 31, 2012Dear Sir,I am responding to a letter in yesterday’s Royal Gazette concerning rent control. I don’t get the gist of his point. The writer isn’t even making sense as to what exactly the problem is and what exactly he expects to be done about it. He also sounds like he’s living in ancient times or something. Yes, landlords own the property but tenants have rights, too. There are bad tenants out there but there are just as many bad landlords who try to exploit people. The Rent Control Act serves a purpose, and because this guy doesn’t like it, he writes a whining letter. He talks about young people and the police. I assume he’s trying to say that children know they have rights and their parents can’t beat the c**p out of them and so utilise those rights. The same with tenants.Landlords think they can have a unit that’s under rent control and triple the price between tenants without following the correct procedures. Then when the tenant finds out-which is what I assume the writer is saying and exercises their rights, the landlords have a problem. Well, if they obeyed the law like the mature adults they claim to be, they wouldn’t have any problems, would they? You have landlords who want foreigners because they can charge them by the head. Just like this writer, I know people who prefer to rent to foreigners for that reason. They’ll have crummy, rent-controlled properties and put four to six people in there charging them $1,000 each. Then when they get called out on it, they want to complain?I won’t even get into landlords who just collect money but don’t give a hoot about their tenants well-being if there’s a problem, they are nowhere to be found until they show up the next month looking to collect. When you remind them of the problem, they promise to get to it but again, you don’t see them again until they show up the next month with outstretched hand. You have landlords who have things attached to tenants’ meters that the tenant knows nothing about. I know a landlord who had coin-operated washers/dryers in a utility room on one tenant’s meter and did not tell him about it. The guy was wondering why his bills were so high, not knowing he was paying while the other tenants did laundry with the landlord collecting the coins!The law is there for a reason. We can’t change the law because one person decides he doesn’t like it. If he was on the up-and-up, he’d have nothing to worry about. Then he says the landlord should be given the benefit of the doubt? Why? Are all landlords automatically more honest than all tenants? Of course not! The benefit of the doubt goes to the person who is doing what is lawful, and the Rent Commissioner can tell who is and who isn’t. If you raise the rent without getting permission, then the tenant is in the right to object case closed. If the landlord gets hauled before the Rent Commissioner he has no one to blame but himself for not following proper procedures!A TENANTSt David’s