The Empire of Trebizond

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Choose Your Rump State

The empire of Trebizond (Trabzon, in Turkey today) was a monarchy situate on the south shore of the Euxine Sea initially formed as a semi-autonomous client state of the Byzantine Empire.  It survived the sack of Constantinople in 1453 by eight years; its offshoot, the Principality of Theodoro, located on the Crimean Penninsula, fell to the Ottomans in 1475.  During the window between the fall of Constantinople and the loss of Trebizond, the city on the Black Sea was the last vestige of Greek-controlled political power in Anatolia.  For a decade or so, the two enclaves were the medieval Greek version of Fort Apache, Dien Bien Phu, or Corregidor.

(We do not endorse any ethnic or national viewpoint at Dirtlease.com.  We neither condone nor censure any lifestyle.  We understand that the Dine’é, the Viet Minh, and the Japanese remember the sieges mentioned above differently from Western audiences.  The foregoing merely presents one perspective of many.)

New York State is not purple.  It votes reliably Democratic in national elections.  It is, however, striped.  Downstate districts, where the majority of the population resides, are deep blue.  More rural upstate districts tend to be conservative.  This has had sub-optimal results in recent years, when down-state progressives have supported legislation that is appropriate for down-state districts but not so much for other parts of the state.  For our purposes, the grimmest consequences have come in the form of the regulation of the mobile home park industry.  These include the 2019 rent control law (the “Nakba”) and the recent eviction moratorium.  These laws, disastrous for owners and residents alike, may reflect the will of down-state legislators; they do not reflect the will of the people in the parks that they regulate.

I learned yesterday about a suit instituted by a group of property owners based in Erie County, a political entity far to the north and west of the de facto capital situate on the southern shore of a vast fresh-water sea separating the United States from the barbarians to the north (I had already known about, and been deeply grateful for, the Chrysafis suit, which was brought by a bunch of down-state property owners) .  The suit is well covered in this article in the Buffalo News, so I will not re-write it. (Newfies, Kerrymen, and other people who missed the link can click here).  Here are two money quotes:

“’The act claims to provide landlords with the opportunity to challenge hardship claims, but that process is illusory,'” according to court papers filed by attorneys Jeffrey Reina, Paul Cambria and Erin McCampbell Paris, who represent the landlords. 

“‘Landlords cannot challenge hardship claims unless they are able to swear, under penalty of perjury, that they have a good faith belief that the hardship claims are false,’ they said.

“’But landlords almost never have access to the information necessary to do so, such as tenant paychecks and savings account information, according to the attorneys.“

And,

“What’s more, circumstances are different now than in March 2020, when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order prohibiting evictions, and also than in December 2020, when the Legislature passed the law putting in place the moratorium.

“In March 2020, the economy was closed, with unemployment spiking to more than 16%, and the health concerns in the early days of the pandemic had unnerved the public.

“Now, the economy is fully reopened, the attorneys said. Schools are open for in-person learning five days a week. Offices have begun to return to in-person operations. And there are severe hiring shortages in many industries.

Plus, now there are three highly effective vaccines, the attorneys said.

“‘The act did not take into account any of these material changes of circumstances,’ according the court papers. ‘The act did not include any measures to allow courts, rather than tenants, to make an objective determination whether any of the individuals who claimed a hardship actually, in fact, had one. It was enacted as if the Legislature buried its head in the sand to the substantial progress that has been made since March 2020.’”

It is unseemly to say, “I told you so”, but that has not stopped me yet.

I wish both the Erie-county plaintiffs and Mr. Chrysafis all the luck in the world.  They are fighting the good fight.  The Buffalo-area litigants are defending civilization as we know it. They are doing so using a base of operations located in a rump state on the southern shore of an inland sea.