In exchange for a reasonable rent, a landlord is responsible for ensuring that the building is kept safe and well maintained and that any necessary repairs happen as quickly as is reasonably possible. What I’d really like to see is landlords being held accountable for failing to do so.

Most of the lack of enforcement is for obvious reasons (landlords lobby and in some cases run the government), but there’s also a practical constraint: individual renters in a building tend to litigate this individually.

It should be easier to either start up a class action lawsuit, or there should be a mechanism to “unionize” renters in large buildings automatically or something. Slumlords are a very real thing, and there ought to be a better way to litigate them out of existence.