I think the right procedure works something like this: 1) Tenants notice that one of them has trashed the garden, and tell the landlord who. 2) The landlord tells the offending tenant to clean up or they’ll be billed. 3) If the offending tenant doesn’t clean up, the cleaning fee gets added to their next rent bill.
In your case it seems like the offending tenant wasn’t pointed out. Maybe because other tenants didn’t care, or maybe some tenants had a mafia mentality and made “snitching” unsafe. Either way, you were right to move away.
The whole thing was much more banal than what you’re imagining. It was an interim-use building with mainly student residents. There was no coordination between residents that I knew of.
The garden wasn’t trashed before the letter. It was just a table and a couple of chairs, that didn’t fit the house rules. If the city had just said “please, take the table out of the garden”, I’d have given a 70% chance of it working. If the city had not said a thing, there would not have been (a lot of) additional furniture in the garden.
By issuing the threat, the city introduced an incentive they didn’t intend. Some residents who picked up on the incentive destroyed the garden because they were overconfident in the authority following through with the threat – no matter what.
I don’t think [1] or [2] are even (reasonably) ‘possible’ in most similar situations.
I think the only plausible possibilities are:
The relevant people persuade the litterers to remove the items they left in the garden. (Assuming the story in the post is accurate, this didn’t work or wasn’t tried.)
Some people, i.e. not the litterers, and maybe ‘the city’, remove the items.
[1] requires fairly ‘expensive social technology’, e.g. trust, common values, or effective persuasion being feasible at all, and it is not-uncommonly either absent or prohibitively costly to develop.
I think the right procedure works something like this: 1) Tenants notice that one of them has trashed the garden, and tell the landlord who. 2) The landlord tells the offending tenant to clean up or they’ll be billed. 3) If the offending tenant doesn’t clean up, the cleaning fee gets added to their next rent bill.
In your case it seems like the offending tenant wasn’t pointed out. Maybe because other tenants didn’t care, or maybe some tenants had a mafia mentality and made “snitching” unsafe. Either way, you were right to move away.
The whole thing was much more banal than what you’re imagining. It was an interim-use building with mainly student residents. There was no coordination between residents that I knew of.
The garden wasn’t trashed before the letter. It was just a table and a couple of chairs, that didn’t fit the house rules. If the city had just said “please, take the table out of the garden”, I’d have given a 70% chance of it working. If the city had not said a thing, there would not have been (a lot of) additional furniture in the garden.
By issuing the threat, the city introduced an incentive they didn’t intend.
Some residents who picked up on the incentive destroyed the garden because they were overconfident in the authority following through with the threat – no matter what.
I don’t think [1] or [2] are even (reasonably) ‘possible’ in most similar situations.
I think the only plausible possibilities are:
The relevant people persuade the litterers to remove the items they left in the garden. (Assuming the story in the post is accurate, this didn’t work or wasn’t tried.)
Some people, i.e. not the litterers, and maybe ‘the city’, remove the items.
[1] requires fairly ‘expensive social technology’, e.g. trust, common values, or effective persuasion being feasible at all, and it is not-uncommonly either absent or prohibitively costly to develop.