A bill awaiting Gov. Phil Bryant’s signature will allow landlords to move forward with removing tenants behind on their rent as soon as a judge signs off on an eviction rather than waiting 10 days.
Critics say Senate Bill 2716, which was introduced by Marion County’s state senator, Angela Hill, will cause families to be kicked out of their homes too quickly.
“Under this statute they can be locked out before they get home from court, and all their belongings seized and destroyed. It is a travesty,” Jeremy Eisler, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice, was quoted as saying in a Mississippi Today story.
However, I think the new law will more fairly balance the relationship between renters and landlords.
Ask anyone who owns or manages rental property and they’ll tell you that some tenants are professional exploiters of eviction laws. They know that the process usually drags on for at least a couple of months after they stop paying rent and they stay in the home for as long as possible before moving on and doing the same thing somewhere else.
Meanwhile, the owner of the home has his hands tied while he waits for the court process.
“Quite honestly people are not in the business of having rental property for charity, they have to protect their investment and I think that by the time you’ve gone through the court proceeding and all, that still allows time (for tenants),” Hill, a Republican from Picayune, was quoted as saying in the same Mississippi Today story. “Many of them are getting that (three days) and more now, they’re getting that now. This just clarifies that they can’t be left in the property indefinitely.”
The Mississippi Today story said tenants could be evicted as soon as three days late on rent, but I don’t believe in practice that would ever be the case.
Let’s say rent for April is due April 1. No landlord is going to go to court on April 4 if they haven’t been paid, especially if the tenant has been in communication with them. And even then, the landlord is going have to go and file for eviction and get a court date set. That’s never going to happen in just one day.
Most landlords are not going to go to court in that scenario until at least May 1 and then it’s going to be at least several more weeks before things are settled in court.
The basic principle, I think, is that shelter should be everyone’s top priority when it comes to paying the bills, before even those other two necessities of food and clothing. What I’m saying is when you get paid, the first dollars should go to making sure the rent is paid. Then you take care of anything else.
Most people who get evicted don’t do so because they are truly impoverished and unable to bring in enough income to pay the rent; most all of us would have tender hearts to help someone out in that situation of true need.
Rather they don’t pay because they have squandered their income on unnecessary expenses, often involving drugs and alcohol. That’s the real world, not the theoretical one that critics of Senate Bill 2716 are talking about.
Frequently laws have to be adjusted to maintain a balance between personal freedoms and security. This is a never-ending seesaw in a free society, and one that applies to just about every issue imaginable. This is one of those cases: the personal freedoms of tenants versus the economic security of landlords. I think it’s a situation where the rights of the landlord have been overlooked, and there needs to be a swinging back of the pendulum in their favor. Here’s hoping the governor signs the law.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at (601) 736-2611 or csmith@columbianprogress.com.
