I read both articles. . . . I suspect that while I think Olen is correct from a macro point of view, Dave's way is far more likely to help the individual person struggling financially.
I faced this same dilemma when I was in law school eons ago.
At Yale, we had a very strong clinical law program. Among other things, they represented tenants in eviction proceedings. Very intelligent, very inventive and very dedicated law students would appear in court and raise innumerable legal obstacles to the eviction proceeding, with the goal of keeping the tenant in the apartment as long as possible. Failing that, they tried to squeeze a "cash for keys" deal, so that the tenants could afford to move somewhere else. The people involved always justified their actions by saying that they were fighting the slumlords.
I hypothesized that while the students participating in the clinic felt good about what they were doing, they were not actually doing good. So, along with two of my classmates, I researched the state of the rental market in one of the worst slums of New Haven to test my hypothesis. We determined who owned every property in the area and how many other properties they owned, we learned how much each property was worth and the market forces affecting the rents. We interviewed many of the owners and learned their cash on cash returns for the properties. We researched the court eviction proceedings to determine how much the various delaying tactics employed by the law school students were costing the landlords in excess of a typical eviction.
At the end of our research, we learned the following -- 1) that most of the properties in the area were triple deckers, owned by the family that lived on the first floor, with the upper two floors rented out; 2) that the owners generally owned only that one building (i.e. - there actually weren't many slumlords); 2) that the market rents were essentially dictated by the Section 8 subsidies available; 3) that, taking into account mortgage payments, taxes, repairs, and allowance for vacancies, the return to the owners was minimal; 4) that the costs associated with trying to evict a tenant represented by the Yale clinical program would often result in negative returns to owners and that they would often respond by selling the property to one of the small but growing number of real slumlords who could better afford the overhead associated with legal proceedings.
The conclusion of our research was that the clinical program was creating the very monsters they were purporting to slay, and that their efforts would be better directed toward obtaining more government support for affordable housing in the area. We opined that it was unfair to impose the societal burden of housing poor people on a few unfortunate landlords and that all of us should contribute to the solution.
Needless to say, our project was not popular in some quarters. They pointed out that our proposed solution did nothing for those poor people who, absent the efforts of the clinic, would be sleeping in the street that night. And they were right about that.
These issues, just like saving money for retirement, need to be approached from both ends -- individuals need to do what they can, but society as a whole must also address the issues that are beyond the ability of individuals to change.
