if you sort through this mess, you'll see me talking about this somewhere or other...

private property? well, look up. i'm not a fan.

that said, you have to understand private property for what it is, which is a theory of how some dead people thought things ought to work. like this theory or hate it, you must fully realize that walking around a court room throwing around the idea of private property is never going to get you anywhere at all.

maybe it's the greatest idea of all time. maybe it's shit. we can have these debates - but they exist purely in the abstract.

in reality, private property is not a well-formed legal concept. it does not describe how we govern relationships, and it especially does not describe how we govern relationships between tenants or between tenants and landlords.

the reality is that the rules are set not by a property owner but by the state. the state writes and enforces just about every aspect of a tenant agreement and resulting tenancy that you can imagine, including the process of eviction.

and, if you think you're a smart landowner and can trick your tenant into signing away rights? nope. that piece of paper you signed is functionally worthless.

if you read the laws closely enough, something kind of odd jumps out: it's almost as though the legal reality is that we live in co-ops. odd.

so, why don't we act like it, then?

when i talk about behaving as though i live in a co-op, there's more than hubris to it and more than some starry-eyed concept of anarchism. the co-op model is just that - a model. it does not perfectly describe the reality we live in, either. but, it is a lot closer to the reality we live in than the private property model and you will consistently get to more accurate real-world analyses by utilizing the co-op model than by utilizing the private property model.

i'm ultimately not sure why the upstairs tenants contacted the landlord instead of contacting me, but it reflects a defect in their thinking. instead of seeking me out and looking for a way to collaborate on a solution to the problem, they deferred to an authority that doesn't truly exist. in the end, i am on firm ground in demanding that the so-called property owners take steps to mitigate the smoke issues, and i will win this fight one way or another. it would have been a lot easier on everybody had the tenants realized the greater explanatory power of the co-op model and jumped to working with me rather than against me.

as it is, the next step is going to need to be all of us sitting down not with the live-in landlord but with the actual property owner. i feel that the property owner should not need to be present. but, the other tenants are insisting upon it.

maybe a better concept of understanding, and a change of mindset, will come out of the meeting. we only need management if we insist upon it, but that means we won't abolish it if we continue to rely upon it.