The Number One Reason People Do Not Pay Their Rent: Their Utility Bill. And many of these people (the honest ones) can either pay for power and try to convince their landlord to give them an extension on rent or pay their rent and hope the city doesn't cut off their power. Property Managers (and/or "Landlords") can only give residents a certain amount of time before they have to file for eviction. I've been to a few of these proceedings, and suffice it to say, the city probably makes a good bit of money on eviction cases (or someone does). What does this mean? In many cases, the high price of utilities is causing people to lose their homes. (You could attempt to argue that it's the "high" price of rent, but that'd be totally bogus in Alexandria, where rents haven't significantly increased in at least eight years. In fact, Alexandria is probably way below market, considering the current demand is substantially higher than our supply). The city may have ways of solving this problem in the future, but the damage that has already been done is irreparable. They should focus on cutting energy costs however than can and increasing efficiency; then, we could pass the savings back to the consumer. But for now, a utility bill is a utility bill, and if it's not paid, your power is turned off. We don't need to refund. We need to reduce.

This entry was posted by Blogger, on Tuesday, April 18, 2006.