Reassessing views due to personal experience

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I could write a whole saga about this but my brain is fried from thinking about it so I'll give the short version that I gave not-particularly-close friends when I found out about it yesterday.

From 2007 to 2013 my family lived in a beautiful semi-detached Victorian row house in a small town in New Jersey. I was going to college here in Western Massachusetts for a lot of that period but I still have very good memories of that house, which my family still owns and has been renting out for the past six years because we haven't been able to find a seller for it. Now that the housing market favors sellers again my mom is finally trying to sell it off, but obviously needed to contact the tenant before doing so (and decided also to offer him right of first refusal on buying it). She's been trying to contact him to that end for months and has been unable to; she's also no longer getting his rent, which he had a habit of paying late to begin with.

Finally my mom sent over the property manager yesterday and it turned out the tenant had wrecked up the place to the tune of about 10k in damage and then abandoned it to mooch off his family in South Carolina.

The back door is physically broken, as are several stairs. The stove and washing machine are both broken. The back yard is overgrown and the stairs leading to the basement are covered with piping and wiring of unclear origin and purpose. And everything is strewn with his old dirty clothes and empty food and drink containers. The rugs, including the rug in what was my own bedroom for six and a half years of my life, have unidentifiable substances smeared into them, and the walls will have to be redone because they reek of cigarette smoke.

My reaction to this made me realize something. Tenants, like customers, are not always right. Sometimes a landlord really is trying to just get by in a hostile world the same as the tenant is, and sometimes a tenant really is an ungrateful viper who feels entitled to trash other people's property. I still believe that in most cases both public and private morals favor tenants, and I still believe in strong legal protections and rights for renters and in some situations even for squatters. But most cases are not all cases, and sometimes people abuse their rights.

It's going to take a while to work out how exactly to incorporate this experience into my broader leftist values, which, at their core, are unshakeable. But I pride myself on being willing to reassess my non-core values and beliefs on the basis of my experiences, and this experience does seem to put the lie to some of my specific views on power relationships as they relate to housing policy.

I'd like this to be a more general thread than just a whinefest on my part, so why don't we all discuss situations in our own lives that have caused us to reassess aspects of our political attitudes?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I agree with CraneHusband that this issue looks very different from the point of view of a renter because the kinds of "big" property owners who can afford to develop seriously predatory practices, well, own more property than people like my mother do. So the question of "what most landlords are like" has an entirely different answer depending on whether you're looking at it from a supply-side or a demand-side perspective, which is why this experience hasn't turned me and isn't going to turn me into a full Dulean on housing policy.

However,

That's a simplistic and not very accurate way of looking at it.

Well, I'm often forced to simplify things in order to communicate with Atlas leftists.

CraneHusband walked right into this one.