IN GARRY Hertzberg’s column, Court order needed to evict tenant, week ending 6 November, he wrote about how a tenant who hasn’t paid rent can avoid eviction.
He said you (as a tenant who has entered voluntarily into a lease in terms of which you occupy a home in return for paying rent) can avoid paying that rent and not be evicted from the home. He seems to be on the side of those who decide not to keep to their side of an agreement but seek to get something for nothing.
The words used in his column stick in my craw: ‘You are being evicted by your landlord’s henchmen’. That suggests something underhand, but my dictionary describes a henchman as a trusty follower or a political ally. Also… ‘many (unpaying tenants) have been kicked out of their own homes’. It is not their own homes – the home belongs to the landlord.
He also talks about ‘victims’. These are the people who refuse to pay the rent they agreed to pay.
As Dewey Hertzberg Levy Attorneys have shown me, I can have a home for a year or three at little cost – only paying a month’s deposit and the first month’s rent. Then I will have my aged parents, my unmarried daughter with her five young children, my wife and myself staying in the home. According to Mr Hertzberg, the law does not take kindly to the eviction of children and the elderly, so I could probably prolong my occupation for a long time. Then I’ll do the same with another landlord.
To my mind, there is a perception in this country that people are entitled to hold their hands out and get something for nothing. Garry Hertzberg’s column reinforces this view.
