1. Family members aren't "rich" by conventional standards, they worked for the government in mid-level jobs their whole lives and are retired.
2. They bought a house they planned to retire to, but then moved when they had issues with it. They planned to sell the house but due to timing issues (construction in the neighborhood) they wanted to wait, so temporarily rented it out.
3. They had bad timing: rented in early 2020, the renter paid 1 month of rent, and never after that. And I looked this guy up, he is a total freeloader, part of the blame is on my family for not better vetting him.
4. But the takeaway for small landlords is the government can basically appropriate your property whenever they want. So we're just left with giant landlords who can manage this risk, and which again leads to less available affordable housing and a further concentration of wealth.
The Supreme Court refused to weigh in because “it was soon to expire”
Feel the pain of 2A advocates. Or 14A (P&I) advocates. Or 10A advocates. Or..
The nature of government/authority is they will always creatively push the boundaries of what they can permissibly do. There are amendments that are considered "second-class" and even worse. If nobody defends it, it will not enforce itself.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/23/thoughts-on-the-sixth-c...
I never considered the 3rd amendment to be a protection against that but I can see how soldiers randomly living in your home could be seen as government appropriation
What happened here is that the government changed the rules (i.e. risk / reward profile) of a well-established market overnight with very little recourse for the players involved. It would be like the government removing FDIC insurance on savings accounts during a bank crisis.
Maybe necessary, but hard to argue it was fair.
My whole point is the government changed the rules in the middle of the game. Certainly bad tenants are always a risk, but not bad tenants that the government forces you to house for over a year.
What you're doing is like telling businesses that get nationalized by corrupt regimes "hey, business comes with risk". But my whole point is, eventually, nobody can accept those risks, so people choose not do to business, which actually makes things worse for everyone.
For the above reasons. I struggle to be sympathetic to landlords. They were taken care of. And quite frankly, I think they are the least deserving of the assistance. Rent seekers and speculators should be last in line for help. When you buy an expensive house or a hot stock, things like pandemics, wars, and financial shocks are part of the risk profile.
After 6 months she agreed she was going to start paying (September 2020). She had a job, she had stimulus and she was buying nice TVs and stuff.
She never started paying again. The “government said she didn’t need to”.
My friends parents owe taxes, had to make repairs, have to pay insurance. They are out at least ten thousand dollars. At the same time, they are out of work.
What are they supposed to do? Sell to black rock, who are getting free funds from the FED (ie their taxes)?
https://strangesounds.org/2021/07/blackrock-is-buying-up-us-...
Landowners are typically nice, small time people who are renting out an old home. They take care of everything the renter doesn’t want to and in return receive a fee. The landlord takes all the risk.
You’re basically saying “bankrupt the grandma and grandpa, because young people would rather buy meme stocks or TVs than pay rent” that’s not all cases, but the government did give out thousands in free money for the unemployed. The dominos by me in a rural community is offering $25/hr + tips and can’t find people to work. There are job openings everywhere and I think people can make it work.
There’s not a great solution, but saying the landlord is on the hook when the government is supposed to represent everyone is not reasonable.
(sincerely curious)
When it's harder to evict people start making judgement calls based on their perceptions. Some of those will be will be good judgment calls, but most won't be based on real data and good tenants will get passed up for bad reasons.
# of properties for sale went way up, # of properties for rent is way down, and to get approved for a rent you more or less have to agree to give out your first born son.
Laying the burden on landlords for more than a few weeks is unconscionable and inequitable. I wonder how many small landlords sold or lost previously profitable properties due to their cash flow being decimated.
The long term rental market is damaged; landlords will now be hesitant to rent long term without significant protection like larger deposit requirements or even rent for less time to avoid being susceptible to some of these government actions.
I agree, government transferring the wealth indirectly would be better, but it's politically infeasible. Barring that, I'd rather help renters and hurt landlords than the other way around, since the latter are generally more stable.
Also, I don't think the effort to distribute money was really a failure, I think some states squandered it because they didn't want to give handouts, but it was likely one of the largest disburtions of direct aid in the history of the United States and coupled with other programs avoided an economic disaster that would have dwarfed 2008.
They did. The houses they were in.
> or build them housing,
This takes time and wouldn’t be done in time for the pandemic
> or distribute compensation to landlords temporarily.
Millions of people lost income during the pandemic. Including the tenants were talking about who are at risk of eviction. Why should landlord income be any more sacred than any other income?
Restrictive zoning and bespoke, political hurdles against development do far more to restrict supply. I'm not understanding how housing that is in use can be considered supply available for others. Say we make it easier to evict and change nothing else: one family is evicted so another can take the unit. I don't see how that improves anything if the goal is to get both families housed. All it seems to do is enable landlords to play arbitrage and charge the highest possible price.
Well, look at what's happening in Vancouver (and a few other places, but Vancouver is just the most obvious example), and it will easily explain your confusion.
When it becomes too costly and problematic to deal with renting out your property to someone else, people who bought it as an investment will just hold onto it and let it sit empty[0]. It got bad enough, Vancouver ended up introducing a vacant property tax.
0. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/number-of-em...
Strangely enough, the locals are voting for the same parties that enabled the situation in the first place.
> Vancouver ended up introducing a vacant property tax.
So you end up with a "tenant" that's a family member but not living there.
Exactly. We are starting to recognize that, as a society, buying a house as an investment and letting it sit empty is anti-social, violent behavior that should be shunned, discouraged and punished to the fullest extent.
Have you been to the US?
From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street.
The poor do not deserve a roof.
---
Kind of sarcasm, but kind of true.
>From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street.
Have you ever been to the US other than the west coast?
There's the occasional tent in a discreet spot in a vacant lot or under a bridge and the occasional car being lived out of at a truck stop. Maybe if you got every person living on the streets (vs a shelter) in a city to pick the same spot you'd have enough to be described as a "camp". It's nothing like you see on the west coast where the homeless are practically everywhere.
Is exactly the implication of market-based housing.
I was hoping that my explanation would help to illustrate how facilitating eviction won't help with rising homelessness. How it alone can actually foster the growth of homelessness. "Supply" created by evicting tenants is only supply for the people that can afford the new price.
To be slightly more specific in my criticism, there are plenty of economies with far more protections for tenants, even non-paying ones, and they tend to have similar or lower rates of homelessness.
The effect on tenant selection would also not manifest in the current situation, where it’s a measure used once for a rather rare situation. And even if landlords were to try to avoid such risks, it isn’t clear how that would differ from the status quo? Presumably, they have always chosen the more financially secure tenant when given a choice.
They've created this giant eviction logjam that's making a mess of a lot of things.
Don't want folks evicted? Give poor folks money so they can pay their rent or move to a cheaper place and pay rent etc etc. As it is, folks are trapped in their one location, can't look for work elsewhere etc. Landlords are screwed etc. Courts are going to be jammed up. And now there is going to be a huge and complicated bureaucracy, filled with fraud to try to get money to landlords etc.
Want people to have healthcare? Make employers pay for it!
Want people to stay housed during a pandemic? Make landlords pay for it!
Want affordable housing? Make residential developers pay for it!
Turns out it's a lot easier to spend other people's money than it is to spend your own.
Simply letting developers build housing would do wonders for affordability.
They are literally doing that: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/coronavirus/assistan...
It's not.
[1] William Jennings Bryan described the concept using the metaphor of a "leak" in his Cross of Gold speech
That's all on top of 'the usual' government assistance, HUD, HEAP, etc.
Some tenants leveraged these programs and they won't be evicted. The ones who saw this as 'free money' and an opportunity to 'fuck those evil landlords' will be.
A common counter argument is that people should simply make more but I’d like to see the amounts of those opportunities relative to the people who need them. Also, given today’s rental background checking, I’d claim that the landlords would simply charge more.
So "what is minimum wage and how many people make it?" is an annoyingly complex question. One interesting stat is that about 28% of the US workforce makes under $15 an hour.
*EDIT: I meant this as some states have a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage, so they don't show up in stats like "how many Americans make the federal minimum wage". Sorry for the poor original phrasing.
It's seen as better than getting stuck with someone not paying who you can't evict.
What happened is landords renting to well off people did fine - white collar workers actually did OK during COVID, and folks with money by and large kept paying. Landlords on lower end got screwed by and large (this includes more immigrant / minority landords). Then if you had some property managers etc on payroll you got all sorts of bailout money - so rich got richer.
One group that actually I think was happy was section 8 landlords because section 8 kept paying - so good on them.
Pensions are either from taxes(Now who is going to pay that on properties where people stay for free?), or from profits made in investments in larger economy. Where do the profits come from? People who borrow money to run businesses(which now have no profits, and are running on losses because people stay for free).
Read that all in reverse. The effects will be felt all over the economy.
Most other nations had much stronger safety nets than a few one-time payments of a few hundred dollars.
Quite a set of priorities are on display here.
The supreme court said the CDC exceeded their statutory authority [0]:
> As he often does, Kavanaugh wrote to explain why he voted to allow the moratorium to remain in place. On the one hand, he said he agreed with the District Court that the CDC exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a nationwide moratorium.
> But, he said, because the CDC has said it will end the moratorium in a few weeks he would allow it to remain in place. He said the extra weeks will "allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds."
> Kavanaugh made clear however, that if the government were to extend the moratorium past July 31, it would need "specific congressional authorization."
So it sounds like the eviction moratorium was illegal.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/eviction-moratorium-expiring...
It hasn't impaired them? Owning an obligation is much worse than owning the cash. If someone didn't pay rent for 9 months, landlords might never see that money. When they could evict, they might only eat 3 months of losses, now they will have 9-12 months of losses. The owners are basically paying "rent" (debt service), so freeloaders can live there.
If anything, a chunk of relief money to renters should have been debt vouchers to their landlords that can redeem them for cash from the gov't. The gov't can then get repaid through federal tax returns. (or forgive them as a benefit)
The right way to deal with this issue is via the lawmaking process. If they want to extend the moratorium, they can do it at anytime, they just have to go through the process.
> On Thursday, the White House confirmed it would let the moratorium expire because the supreme court said it would block additional extensions unless they were authorized by Congress.
The Supreme Court did vote 5-4 to leave the moratorium in place, but this NPR article provides more context:
> Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who cast the fifth and deciding vote, wrote in a concurring opinion that he voted not to end the eviction program only because it is set to expire on July 31, "and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution" of the funds that Congress appropriated to provide rental assistance to those in need due to the pandemic. He added, however, that in his view Congress would have to pass new and clearer legislation to extend the moratorium past July 31
(https://www.npr.org/2021/06/29/1003268497/the-supreme-court-...)
It sounds like the Supreme Court would block any renewed attempt to ban evictions, unless Congress was behind the attempt.
I'm threading the needle here, but that's what SCOTUS does.
This is not rocket science. The question is not, "Did the CDC do the right thing?" or "Did the CDC have the right to do this thing?" but rather, "How long should the CDC be able to impose an emergency mandate like this before we insist on a more democratic approach?"
See how the ICC has been stretched beyond all reason to grant federal powers.
Keep in mind, the Bill of Rights was written during the tail end of the smallpox pandemic which had a 30% mortality rate.
The clear separation and limits on government powers were considered to be a higher priority.
In the early days of the country we had plenty of exercises of emergency powers. It was common for large numbers of buildings to be demolished in an attempt to prevent fires from spreading across cities, and nobody waited for a judge to rule on the acceptability and compensation requirements of such actions. There was never any doubt that if a foreign army was invading the President could immediately order the US army and state militias to respond, without waiting for Congress to vote on a declaration of war.
It is also worth remembering that when the constitution was drafted the prevailing theory of disease was the "miasma theory," and only a rudimentary understanding of disease containment that included some vague concepts of quarantine. Disease outbreaks would routinely create ghost towns all over the country. I have no doubt that the framers of constitution, had they understood disease as we understand it today, would have had no problem whatsoever with the CDC's emergency powers and would have focused on how Congress could regulate those emergency actions (as they did with the military).
The CDC should not have the authority to appropriate property, not for a month, not for a minute.
The CDC does not have the ability to pay everyone's rent. If we could have relied on state governments or Congress to bail out rent for people who were unable to make rent otherwise, maybe the moratorium would not have been necessary. Unfortunately, that is not even remotely something we can rely on -- we have spent over a year arguing about whether the "relief" checks, which would not even cover rent in many cities, are too generous.
Emergency powers are not a problem -- in an emergency there is no time for political parties to work out some kind of deal or for judges to review facts / legal arguments, and we allow certain government agencies to take emergency actions in such situations. Look at how long it took for the courts to overrule the CDC; if that is how long it took to react to emergencies we would be at the mercy of every fire, disease outbreak, hurricane, etc. The only relevant question to protecting democracy is, "How long should an emergency order remain in effect before the legislature or judiciary gets involved?"
However, the Supreme Court decided to punt and leave the moratorium in place since it is set to expire at the end of the month (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/29/1003268497/the-supreme-court-...) but warned that further extensions would need to go through Congress.
It's not like the CDC uses these rules all the time.
Others as well, including the sixth circuit. From https://reason.com/2021/07/26/federal-appeals-court-sneaks-i...:
> "The Sixth Circuit's ruling represents the sixth time a lower court has struck down the CDC's moratorium, with most decisions similarly criticizing the near-limitless powers the agency was trying to claim for itself."
It’s less clear cut than your suggesting. The Supreme Court left the memorandum in place 5-4 while saying they would reject continuing it without congressional involvement. So, it looks like the CDC could do this on the next pandemic, just not for this one.
Say I'm renting out some units and folks are many months behind... but they can pay for this month, and they are working and so on? Is it worth my time to evict them and get 0? or work something out?
I'm sure plenty of places would go for eviction but we'll see.
If they are paying now, I'd try to work out that they pay something extra towards the delinquency. If they can't, they can't. If you evict, that's probably another few months of process time minimum and they'll probably stop paying again once you serve notice.
Owning rental property is an investment, not a guaranteed income. There is investment risk. This is one of the times that the risk became reality.
Bottom line (I say this as a small-time landlord) if they are back to making payments I'd let them finish their lease. At renewal time both parties can decide if they want to continue. Write off any losses; it was a bad year and nobody is really at fault.
Renting is often risky even in good years, one bad tenant can't lose years of profit simply by not paying rent and leaving. If they don't trash the place, it'll need emptied before the next tenant moves in (cost). Then it's possible they do trash the place. And then it's possible they get mad and truly destroy the place (run the pipes). Generally people in these situations don't have money, so good luck getting it back in court. And there's countless stories before covid of people who knew how to play the game in certain areas and delay evictions for months.
Now on top of all those normal risks, you have to worry about the government handing out a year of free rent and not allowing you to evict someone.
Unless I find a renter who is literally a family friend, I don't believe I'd ever rent out a property I own.
On the other hand, I own my house and I’m very hesitant to rent out any space in it due to forfeiting control. I haven’t done much reading, but I think there may be some exceptions that make it easier to evict if someone is sharing your space vs renting an entire unit. That’s a different story but I don’t imagine this type of case having a significant impact on the market
Not saying this is a great thing for a society, but without some form of tenant protection that is probably what landlords will do.
Reminds me a little of 2003. The big defense companies had posters in the metro touting their patriotism while taking in record profits, paying 30 million dollar CEO paychecks and receiving big tax cuts. And that while in Iraq low paid soldiers were injured and dying for an ill conceived war.
I guess the old saying to never let a good crisis go to waste is very true.
Once the place is vacant sell the property or re-rent with short term rentals.
For one you have a certain number of actors who haven't paid their rent or mortgage simply because they haven't had to. This doesn't erase previous obligations but such people may be willing to walk away for other reasons or may attempt to negotiate with the owner or bank for a lower overall payment because that's better than the alternative.
For another, people still have to live somewhere. If anything you'll see the effect of this as a lowering of rents, which have otherwise soared. Residential landlords are generally less willing than commercial property owners to keep property vacant for extended periods to maintain the illusion of "market rate".
Lastly, unemployment is low and there's a lot of upward pressure on wages. This is not the environment where lots of people suddenly go homeless. This isn't the Great Depression. This isn't even 2008.
There are a lot of people who missed out on the spike in housing prices who are now rationalizing that result as this being a bubble about to burst.
Also, people who haven't been through this before have unrealistic views of the likelihood of actual doom and gloom scenarios. It happens less often than you think. If nothing else, governments have shown themselves more willing to intervene (for better or for worse) to stave off negative outcomes.
This just isn't a big deal.
