Well of course they are months behind on rent, as the eviction moratorium didn't forgive anyone of rent that was due, it merely stopped the eviction process so that the due rent could continue to accumulate. In this way, the moratorium contributed to people owing more rent than they otherwise would have.
This is like saying "Millions of Americans still have credit card debt after law prohibiting cancelling of credit cards due to unpaid debts".
You have a good point. In fact, it's surprising that (per the article) only 2.2M renters are 4+ months behind, considering how long the moratorium was in place.
I think the Federal government has allocated about $21B in rent assistance and the states have distributed about $8B of that through their programs so far.
Perhaps fewer would be behind in rent if more of the rental assistance funds were released to those in need? The percentage of obligated funds vs. used funds is pretty lopsided at the moment, and time sensitive:
Paying people to spend more than they can afford in order to let them keep paying rent is a bad idea that ultimately helps only landlords.
If someone lost their job due to covid, then they need to find a new job, and that often means finding a new job somewhere else and quite possibly for different pay. Similarly landlords in areas where jobs have dissapeared need to know what the true demand is for their units so they can be priced appropriately.
Just paying money to pretend nothing has changed in each location is not good for either the rental market, or the job market, or the people who are pretending.
This only works at a macro level when you refer to “people” as an abstract concept and totally ignore the fact that the government caused the market asymmetry not people. It occurred everywhere. At the same time. There is no magic place to go.
Further, during COVID with schools closed you could not find child care let alone affordable care. During COVID your job may not be available (restaurants / bars / gyms) because the government forced their business to close.
This was meant to be temporary stopgap measure to pay people whose jobs were lost due to the government closing their businesses. This isn’t the hand of the market at work.
Landlords also had relief. Everybody was offered money as a temporary measure. Prices will return.
Funding people to get through these rough times is not pretending at all.
Really, it is an investment. These people have agency they would not have otherwise and that counts for a lot!
Maybe they need to build a skill.
Or, they can get another job that pays well enough to keep them on a similar life path with similar expectations.
In the case of families, a forced move, or transition to being homeless has a huge impact on kids amd their development. Development which will have a significant impact on their politics.
"True demamd"
While I get what you mean here, it is also important to recognize a majority of the labor force at this point is underpaid. That same investment has educated people about markets and what they mean for labor better than most anything else has.
In many cases, getting another job is increasingly likely to result in under compensation. Some info out there pegs this at somewhere in the 10's of trillions over the last few decades, since late 70's.
Landlords are increasingly aware of what remote work means. If they are in an undesirable area, yeah rent is likely to have to go down, but given the low wage scenario out there, they could make the case it happens that way more than it should.
Some people are saving that money. Others may catch up on debts and such.
One member of my family basically arranged to be laid off so they can prep their home for sale and go mobile, homeless by choice with enough in their savings to live reasonably for a couple decades taking work where they can get it.
I think this has been great for the lower wage job market. People are balking, asking questions and often figuring out they can ask them in large numbers too.
A primary one being why they need to continue working for a wage that pays less than it costs them to exist and show up for work. Large employers have huge numbers of people on assistance while putting billions in profit in the bank.
They can still put most of those billions in the bank and pay people enough to make it and should.
Why should we be subsidizing labor like that?
Given new and better answers, more equitable from a labor point of view, landlords evaluating "true demand" may well realize they may not have to reduce rent as much as support labor getting paid enough to make it more than happens now.
And that is just for starters. We have all these things intertwined and need to think through higher order effects more than is happening today.
I have no idea whether you are a Libertarian or not but comments like these expose the ugly nature of Libertarian philosophy.
> that ultimately helps only landlords
or, in the situation like COVID, helps the entire society.
> then they need to find a new job, and that often means finding a new job somewhere else and quite possibly for different pay
What if you are a certified gym instructor and the gyms are closed? Or a great childcare worker with all the daycares closed? Or a travel agent? Should they all just go and start bagging groceries or flipping burgers because those are the only jobs open?
What if you have children who are now stuck at home due to school closures? Who would look after them?
It might be interesting to see what the consequence of a moratorium on bankruptcy proceedings in states failing to distribute rental relief funds might be.
If tenants aren't paying rents, and landlords aren't paying mortgages, banks and real estate trusts have illiquid assets of difficult-to-assess (and likely low) value.
With evictions, failures to assess risk ripple downwards, to tenants. Without evictions or bankruptcy closure, risk ripples upwards to creditors.
> the moratorium contributed to people owing more rent than they otherwise would have
the moratorium didn't contribute to owing more, because the alternative was to have those people evicted and in the streets (in the middle of a pandemic no less). unless if they could have gone to a lower-rent shelter had they been evicted, they are going to owe just as much.
If they were evicted and living on the streets, then they would not have accrued a rent liability for those months. So the total liability now would be less.
You could argue that the current state of large accrued rent liabilities is better than the alternative world of smaller liabilities, more homeless, more deaths, etc, but the OP is not making the inverse claim.
Further, IIRC the moratorium relied on self-reported hardship. Is it so hard to imagine that people who could have actually afforded their rent decided to game the system a bit and accrue (rather than pay) their liability? Such behavior would also cause the current liabilities to be higher.
Almost all people who are evicted find a cheaper place to live. They do not live on the streets. That is why there is a large range of places in this country with a large range of rents. They may need to move in with friends or family, they may need to move out of SF and into Oakland, or even out of California and to Arizona, etc, but they can find some place.
This idea that if you can't afford a meal in a restaurant then you must immediately go begging for food is just odd. People have agency. They plan out their lives according to what they can afford.
One drawback of trying to keep people who experience an income loss from living within their new (lower) means is that it prevents more rental units from coming online and thus rental prices from falling. A unit occupied by someone not paying rent is one taken out of the market, propping up prices for those that remain, and thus making it more expensive for the household to find a cheaper place to live. Many of the business that shut down during covid aren't coming back. They will be replaced by other businesses, and at some point you have to recognize that life has knocked you down a bit and it might take some time to get back to your previous spending level. When that happens, you don't move to the streets, you move to a place you can afford. The last thing you want to do is tell everyone to keep living in their old place and pretending as if nothing has changed.
But during a pandemic when lots of businesses were impacted, lots of jobs were lost. Many companies had hiring freezes, even in sectors that didn't care( e.g. Google).
If someone lost their job due to this, and gets evicted, there was no guarantee they would be able to find any job, anywhere. So moving to a cheaper place wasn't really an option.
I find it weird that Americans still argue about the eviction moratoriums and the money given to people to avoid mass homelessness and hopefulness. Nobody in France is arguing against the "partial unemployment" scheme that was implemented here that allowed employers to not lay off people and instead the government paid their salary( to an extent of course), or eviction moratoriums.
If anything, the criticism was that many people fell through the cracks.
> there was no guarantee they would be able to find any job,
Yes, there are no guarantees - ever.
> So moving to a cheaper place wasn't really an option.
Woah. How does that follow, now? While it's true that there are no guarantees in life, you always have options. But living in a place that you can't afford is not really one of them. Life is full of all sorts of crazy things that happen to you unexpectedly, and absolutely none of them entitle you to live beyond your means once your savings are exhausted. Now there are safety nets for income like unemployment insurance or SS disability, and with covid additional tax refunds were given, but none of these income insurance programs will be enough to make up for a lost job, so if you are one of those who lost their job due to covid, then your means will be reduced. And whatever those lower means are, you need to be able to pay rent from those means. It doesn't matter whether your means were reduced by covid or foreign competition or rising interest rates or going through a divorce.
Moreover the alternative view, that you don't need to pay your bills because covid happened, is a truly toxic form of entitlement.
If you have no revenues and don't know when you'll have any, moving to a cheaper place is a temporary "fix" you don't know for how long you could afford.
Landlords almost never "settle" with the renter in this way, they keep the deposit and if they are a corporate landlord they sell off the debt to a collection agency and move on to the next tenant. If they are an individual landlord, then it really depends -- California has a lot of accidental landlords holding onto property because of Prop 13, and they can themselves be pretty incompetent in running their business. Negotiating with them is worth a try.
Part of the reason it doesn't happen is that if a tenant is not savvy enough to move to a cheaper unit when their income declines, they are unlikely to be savvy enough to try to negotiate with the landlord for a reduced debt obligation in exchange for quickly vacating.
The responsible tenants move out promptly to a place they can afford (or move in with family) and the irresponsible ones wait to be evicted. Unfortunately there isn't much middle ground.
I honestly can't tell if you're just being pedantic or have a point. At the time that a landlord sends the debt to collections, they are no longer expecting to recoup 100%. As a degenerate example, say the renter offers to pay money owed minus one dollar, prior to sending to collections. Any rational landlord will accept this offer - which is settling for less than 100%. So alright yea, a landlord may not settle directly, but sending to collections is conceptually the same thing as settling, inasmuch as it means the debt will be resolved with the landlord receiving less than 100% and the debtor paying less than 100%.
There are absolutely some % of people who are so poor at financial management that they used the last year as a chance to not pay rent and instead buy luxuries. These people have dug themselves a huge hole.
Does it seem unlikely? the rise of buy now pay later services for non essential retail shows the average person is fairly financially illiterate and will put present comforts ahead of future finances.
> In this way, the moratorium contributed to people owing more rent than they otherwise would have.
Only if for those who decided to stop paying rent when they otherwise could have continued paying it. But those people were just really misinformed given their credit is wrecked and getting another apartment will be really hard (doubly so now that landlords scared of future moratoriums will shy away from low or even lower middle income tenants).
Or maybe you meant that the moratorium allowed the normal eviction rate to accumulate?
Yes, they really should have removed people of rent obligations if they lost income (in tiers) and bailed those people out instead of big corporations.
Unfortunately that's not something you can do with legislation. Even the Federal moratorium was found unconstitutional. The government can't just step in and void a lease agreement.
What you can do is give people money to pay rent. But there is no guarantee they will actually use it to pay rent. My guess is that the combination of a moratorium on evictions and giving people rent money would lead to a lot of rental debt accumulating, when what people need to do (if they lost a job due to covid) is reduce their expenses and move to a place they can afford at their new income level, rather than trying to keep staying in an apartment they can no longer afford to live in, waiting for a job to return that is likely to never return.
If everyone did this, rental rates would decline as they would reflect the new levels of income people are actually earning, rather than the levels of income people wish they would still be earning. With the current approach, false price signals are created that make it seem like there is more demand for apartments at a given price point than what people can actually afford, and long term this hurts everyone.
No, it's not, it's called "living with your means". But yes, hardship -- living in a place you'd rather not live in -- is the consequence of shutting the economy down. Life has tough choices, and complaining about those choices instead of making the best ones available is a good way to make terrible decisions.
Australia did it better by just providing a regular income to everyone who lost their job. That way everyone keeps paying their bills/rent and things return to normal after.
The US did the same thing through the unemployment system. Back in 2008 you could be on unemployment for 2 years and get bonus payments on top of what’s standard.
From the ruling: “The C.D.C. has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion said. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the C.D.C. the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
To be clear, SCOTUS did not find that the government didn't have the authority. It rather explicitly stated that the C.D.C. does not, but Congress does. Which for good or ill, it declined to exercise.
the eviction moratorium was implemented because the alternative was a good fraction of the population getting evicted on a very short timescale. the legal and police infrastructure to carry it out simply did not exist, and any attempt would have been overwhelmed with refusal and defensive organizing.
any solution would have been problematic and disruptive to property rights. the CDC exceeding their authority just provided some realpolitik deniability for elected officials, and prevented open revolt.
The language in the ruling also suggests it was the length of time which caused the court to believe the motivation had to do with financial policy more than public health policy. It is not that the CDC has no authority, just that they exceeded it.
I don't think this is an important point. There's no law allowing it.
If the "government" wanted something enough, they could get a supermajority together in congress and amend the constitution to make literally anything legal. But they haven't, in this case, done so.
I'm not sure such a proposal would fly. It would be overtly acknowledging the policy shift toward a federal power grab. There would be some resistance and perhaps even some re-balancing of federal/state powers in the end.
As long as the Tenth is there, it is part of the constitution which all elected officials have sworn an oath to uphold.
I think GP has a misunderstanding involving the difference between 'government' in the American English sense versus in other countries[0]:
> In the United States, "government" is considered to be divided into three branches; the legislature (the House of Representatives and the Senate) which makes law, the Administration (under the President) which runs sections of government within the law, and the Courts, which adjudicate on matters of the law. This is a much wider meaning of "government" than exists in other countries where the term "government" means the ruling political force of the prime minister and his/her cabinet ministers (what Americans would call the Administration).
I believe usually in countries with a parliamentary system, the government refers specifically to the executive branch, and neither the legislature nor the judiciary.
It's not just a technical distinction, the executive is under much stricter rules than the congress, which is only bound by the constitution (although it can also change that, with some extra steps).
The debt ceiling is a great example. The executive cannot spend what congress hasn't authorized.
I was explaining that there is no "government branch", but as someone else pointed out that may have just been a translation error.
What you say about spending is correct. And, yeah, the differences between the legislative and executive branches are important and more than technicalities.
I wouldn't say the executive branch is under "stricter rules" than the legislative branch. It just has different rules and different responsibilities.
The legislative branch creates laws.
The executive branch enforces/executes laws.
The judicial branch makes sure those laws are constitutional and identifies their limits/scope.
Of course there is some gray area as congress likes to give some of its powers to the executive branch so that they can say "that wasn't my idea" to unpopular ideas.
Rather than make a law that says "forget about all that rent from last year" they would more likely make a law that says "someone in the executive branch has the power to say: forget about all that rent"
The other route would be for the judicial branch to say the executive branch already has that power... But they just said it doesn't.
And that's how the wheel of government turns... In the US
This comment is somewhat disingenuous. The full text of the statutory provision (42 U.S.C. § 264) is :
"The Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary."
While it's true that the majority wasn't willing to separate the first and second sentences, the decision was along party lines, and it just does not seem reasonable to me that a federal law intended to give the HHS "responsibility for preventing the introduction, transmission and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States" would limit the authority granted in the section "Regulations to control communicable diseases" to nothing more than fumigation and pest control.
Yes, but a liberal interpretation of "and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary" would imply unlimited executive power for the Surgeon General.
The US Congress can't just delete every single authority of the legislative and executive branch to the Surgeon General, a single sentence about "and other measures" cannot allow a Surgeon General to assume complete power.
This is where judicial interpretation comes into play with these laws. Congress writes bad laws sometimes.
Why not? To what would Congress would limit the authority then, if not to what it explicitly says they are allowed to? I mean, there must be some limits on what CDC is allowed to do based on that statue, as it would be completely absurd to expect that Surgeon General gets all powers of federal government limited only by what “may be necessary in his judgment”. So, if there are some limits, why not understand those in terms of what that very section explicitly lists?
> So, if there are some limits, why not understand those in terms of what that very section explicitly lists?
Because the list ends with "and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.", and the text forces you believe that either a) the federal government intended to express a belief (in the same bill that officially gives the federal government quarantine authority) that disease could be contained via sanitation and pest control, or that b) they intended to give the Surgeon General a lot of latitude.
The CDC’s interpretation puts the law in contention with the 5th amendment. It’s a lot more reasonable for SCOTUS to rule that the CDC exceeded the law than it is to evaluate the constitutionality of the law based upon the CDC’s new interpretation.
Asked and answered by the Supreme Court a hundred years ago in Home Building & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell. In times of emergency (in that case it was the depression), the federal government can delay the repayment of debts without running afoul of the contracts clause or the fifth amendment.
There’s some significant differences between that case law, and this situation.
The mortgagee in that case applied to the court for relief, and had to make ongoing payments during the period that relief was granted. The relief did not put the creditor at a substantial risk of bankruptcy.
If the regulation was tested, I think it would have survived the constitution. But I don’t think all of the conditions of it would. I’m skeptical that the criteria for qualifying, and the process for applying would have passed, and I think SCOTUS would probably expect more clarity on the obligations of applicants (ie around partial payments).
The constitution still exists during an emergency, and there’s still a bar that must be met when infringing upon the rights it grants. But SCOTUS tends to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of a law in cases where the simpler explanation is that the law was not appropriately applied.
> The mortgagee in that case applied to the court for relief, and had to make ongoing payments during the period that relief was granted. The relief did not put the creditor at a substantial risk of bankruptcy.
I'm not sure how these are related to due process and the fifth amendment so I don't see how they would distinguish the two cases. Under the CDC moratorium eviction, tenants still needed to show the appropriate degree of financial hardship.
> But SCOTUS tends to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of a law in cases where the simpler explanation is that the law was not appropriately applied.
They're not arguing about that, because to do so would require something resembling a consensus on what the actual law is. They're arguing about statutory interpretation. The main thread of the dissent in Alabama Assn. of Realtors was that "[T]o make and enforce such regulations as in [its] judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, trans-mission, or spread of communicable diseases [inter-state]." means exactly what it says.
> I'm not sure how these are related to due process and the fifth amendment so I don't see how they would distinguish the two cases
They seem to be the most obvious areas to appeal for a judicial review. According to the case law, all of the following have to be considered:
* The impact to the property owner
* Whether the compensation is just
* The level of due process afforded
* The overall rationality of the policy
The fact that the process doesn’t consider the financial impact to the landlords is an obvious point of contention. The fact that it essentially applied to all tenants, regardless of their circumstances, was a very extreme compromise of due process, and could be seen as undermining the rationale of the entire policy. The fact that tenants were not compelled to make the payments that they could afford to make undermines the justness of the compensation, and further undermines due process.
Just because the state has the power to infringe upon your rights in an emergency, doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want. The avenues from which you could approach a judicial review of the policy are perfectly obvious. Even if the moratorium itself is constitutional, there’s plenty of implementation details that are absolutely not obviously constitutional.
One of the dissenting opinions (Sotomayor, I think?) stated that the CDC is allowed to do things like quarantines, and therefore something more benign like an eviction moratorium ought to be allowed too. I found that logic pretty convincing that the Trump-appointed justices were in the wrong. But, right and wrong don't really matter -- just winning.
The CDC is allowed to do what is authorized by Congress within the limits of the Constitution. If that does not include eviction moratoriums but it does include quarantines, then it does not follow that because the CDC may quarantine people it may also issue a nation-wide eviction moratorium.
I know multiple people who just didn't pay rent last year. They didn't need to and decided they weren't going to. They took trips to Vegas, bought GME, etc, etc.
I also know landlords who haven't been paid in 18 months. They don't even want rent, they just want them to leave.
Based on what I've seen, I strongly suspect there are people who legitimately couldn't pay. I'm also confident many (perhaps a majority) chose not to pay. The landlords I know aren't trying to recoup their losses (one landlord I know has ~100 families living on his properties and 1/4 haven't been paying him and it's nearly bankrupted his operation).
This is a very complicated situation, but from what I've seen the government should have stayed out of it. The checks could have covered peoples rent to a degree, landlords were / are pretty understanding in many cases, unemployment should have been more than enough... If not, unfortunately, that's life.
Now, we have these sob stories and the cascading issues to landlords. We also have a mass movement all at once, WITHOUT them having unemployment or much support, etc.
Also cars. The bus line is the only public transportation in my city. They went from being so full you may have to wait for the next bus to almost empty.
I've also noticed a lot of people got 'new' cars (financed I'm sure), and are letting their old ones collect dust rather than selling them.
I'm guessing a lot of stuff is going to wind up being sold here shortly.
I find that hard to believe. Between the chip shortage and the supply chain issues, new car supply has been constrained and the used car market has gone gangbusters.
You can look at it like that. But you could also realize that landlords in these areas have had government assistance for ages. They got tax abatements, low financing and protections against competition.
That's not even close to a free market. They benefited from that government interference, but now they are annoyed that their tenants are getting that support.
This is one of the strangest things I have ever heard anyone say.
Landlords buy something, and then charge someone else more than it is worth to use it- because it is necessary. They are essentially home scalpers. Don’t feel bad for them.
Have you ever ran the numbers for a rental property? I have — after interest on the mortgage, taxes, repairs, insurance, HOA fees (if applicable), management costs, etc., margins wear thin to non-existent in most areas. Plus you’re taking on risk in the case of being unable to find renters / rent / home depreciation.
Running rental properties is largely a commodity business like any other, which means competition drives down margins (all else equal, I understand there are local idiosyncrasies that might make this not the case).
For sure it can be lucrative if you’re smart, and prudent, and lucky, and manage to keep your head above water on a 30 year loan or few, and I imagine there are big players that can command lower interest rates and those sorts of thing; but there’s plenty of Joe Schmoe landlords who are running small businesses, and they’ve been forced arbitrarily to take the brunt of the economic downturn on the chin in order to protect their tenants. Why should they be forced to disproportionately pay for this?
Those “Joe Scmoe” landlords are mostly graduates/victims of real estate guru nonsense who over leveraged themselves thinking of how rich they’d be in 5 years. I have no sympathy for them.
They(the landlord) has agreed to take on a risk to profit on someone else’s need. I’m not going to _ever_ feel bad if that risk played out unfavorably for them. That’s insane.
In an important sense, taking on risk to profit on someone else’s need is how the entire economy works…
You can argue that much of what we produce nowadays isn’t a fundamental “need” like shelter, but that’s really beside the point, and a function of our relative prosperity as compared to previous eras.
How do you propose housing be managed if not by voluntary exchanges?
I think public housing should be provided to those that need it and private housing should be available to those that can afford it. Same with food, same with water, same with healthcare, same with education.
Part of that risk calculation never was government banning them from evicting renters if they don't pay rents. Maybe in future they need to add substantial increase on rents to take in account next pandemic. As clearly the government does not protect their property.
I don't necessarily have issue with someone renting out their second property, but I am starting to think the societal problems with large scale rental operations and the disappearance of land ownership as an achievable goal for so many, outweighs the right of large scale landlords to exist.
Modern landlords are mostly government subsidized (tax abetements, low financing rates for "business", etc).
There are definitely landlords that provide a valuable service, but there's a reason why profiteering landlords are almost universally disliked.
PS: Remember where we get the term "landlord" - the feudal lord that collected tax(aka rent) while providing a very specific service to the peasants on the land plot that was grated to him by the superior nobleman.
It's nothing like that today... Even the losses in their income get socialized - how do you think Donald paid only $750 in federal taxes? The whole system is setup to protect "landlords".
I happily pay to buy directly from local sources. Also; people don’t need meat, they do need housing.
You’re missing the point of what I am saying entirely though. If you treat housing as an investment and the investment goes sideways for whatever reason, why should anyone feel bad for you? It sucks, but that’s how investing works!
You don’t think other legislation/govt intervention impacts non-housing financial investments? Thems the breaks. They took the risk, let them own it. That’s literally the entire freaking point!
Not everyone wants to be a homeowner. A lot of people enjoy the flexibility of being able to just pay the monthly rent and not worry about anything else, and being free to move on a whim when they need to. You expect the owner of the property to do the upkeep work for free in that scenario?
I think renting is great. I’ve done it many a time. I’ve also been screwed over once or twice. That’s not really the issue.
The people who are landlords agree to the risk of owning a property and renting it out to someone. Why should I feel bad when the risk comes to fruition? Why should anyone?
Should you be able to just profit endlessly on housing risk free for no dang reason other than you had money before someone else? I don’t know. I don’t really care. I have a feeling these landlords will be just fine.
> Why should I feel bad when the risk comes to fruition? Why should anyone?
The landlord didn't assume the risk that they couldn't remove the resident AND the resident wouldn't have to pay.
This was effectively the state seizing property, forcing the landlord to maintain the property and providing it to someone else.
You also probably don't know who most landlords are, but in way of example, say I rent out a room. Should I be subjected to someone living in my house, then lose my house because they aren't paying and I cannot afford to not rent out that room?
>The landlord didn't assume the risk that they couldn't remove the resident AND the resident wouldn't have to pay.
Then they assumed wrong. National emergencies happen, in this instance a pandemic (that is still very much ongoing) meant that potentially millions of people stood to lose their livelihoods and their place to live. Millions of people with no jobs and no homes, a catastrophe, to put it mildly. Ordinary rules do not apply the same way in extraordinary situations.
How many landlords lost their homes due to this? How many could sell one of their properties and weather the storm with the profits?
>This was effectively the state seizing property, forcing the landlord to maintain the property and providing it to someone else.
No property was seized. The government did its most important job, namely supporting citizens who are unable to support themselves, those who do not have enough capital to weather a storm.
Someone who rents out a room is not going to lose their home from such a moratorium. It is a deliberately misleading argument to frame it like that, and it is not a common situation.
Some risks should belong to those people if they can't save enough to survive a year or two without pay they don't deserve to rent. They should be out on streets or find place where they can afford to buffer a year or two for rent. It's not up to landlords to take that burden, but instead it should have been on renters.
You don't plan, you get out. Maybe then government can find you some tiny box or tent to live in until you can plan and pay.
You should sit down and calculate the absolutely disastrous consequences for the economy if you put millions of (jobless) people on the streets, during a massive epidemic.
The rise in property values alone over the last 10+ years should have been more than plenty to cover any landlord's expenses due to the moratorium. They did not plan for the bad times, too bad for them. They had the means to mitigate by preparing, renters living paycheck to paycheck have no such possibility, so the government did its job for once and helped out the under-privileged.
So the landlords can just sell some of their properties, downsize and scale back until better times. They gambled on stability and lost.
Why don't renters have to take reasonable responsibility during pandemic? That is have enough funds on hand to cover their living cost in any situation? Being jobless is no excuse as they could have lived cheaper and saved more previously. Maybe by being homeless for a few years or decades.
> The landlord didn't assume the risk that they couldn't remove the resident AND the resident wouldn't have to pay.
That’s not how risk works.
> You also probably don't know who most landlords are, but in way of example, say I rent out a room. Should I be subjected to someone living in my house, then lose my house because they aren't paying and I cannot afford to not rent out that room?
My parents are landlords, god bless their souls. But they know what they got into. I chose to distance myself from their business because I find it morally revolting.
Also; don’t gamble your house away if you can’t afford to lose! That is how this works!
PS: my parents are making fucking bank as landlords right now! Don’t feel bad for any of them! They literally just made an offer on a third lake house.
> The people who are landlords agree to the risk of owning a property and renting it out to someone. Why should I feel bad when the risk comes to fruition? Why should anyone?
Ok then. People who didn't take on the risk to buy a home in 2009 when homes were cheap should not complain that homes are too expensive now, therefore we should not have tax payer funded affordable housing. Those same people didn't take on the risk to go to school and get a better job. Why should I feel bad when someone wants the fruits of risk, but doesn't want to take on any of the risk?
Better still: sublease but don’t pay the landlord! I know someone in New York who tried to buy their neighbor’s apartment. The deal fell through because the tenant was nearly a year behind on a rent and couldn’t be evicted. Except the tenant didn’t live there anymore. They subleased the apartment and pocketed the cash instead of paying the owner.
Obviously this is fraud and maybe this person could be prosecuted for it, maybe, but it seems like the kind of thing that just slips through the yawning cracks.
This should be easy to sort out for many landlords. See who was still employed and yet didn't pay rent.
Prospective future landlords should be able to tell this easily when they do a credit check. Good luck ever renting again! And if the landlord sues for the rent owed, and the person was still employed and making the same salary, many tenants will get a judgement against them.
I think in the future, landlords will only deal with two types of tenants -- those who paid rent during the pandemic, and those on Section 8.
> This should be easy to sort out! See who was still employed and yet didn't pay rent.
> Prospective future landlords should be able to tell this easily when they do a credit check. Good luck ever renting again!
This is illegal in Seattle. Basically impossible to enforce, but illegal all the same. You are supposed to take the first renter that qualifies and passes a standard pre-screen - not with in-depth looks like that.
I don't know about this take. We're supposed to shed tears for the landlord managing properties worth probably 8 figures but for the families if unemployment checks and the generosity of their landlords isn't enough... then that's just life? That's not exactly what I want to hear from policy makers.
> The Supreme Court in late August rejected the last in a series of eviction moratorium extensions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Think what you will about the eviction moratorium, but why is it in the purview of the CDC to pass a rule that prevents evictions and under what authority? What does this have to do with disease control or prevention? I read through their charter [0] and it's weird that they have the authority to do this and no one questions it.
Not to comment on authority but from a pandemic perspective it’s probably better to keep low income people in their apartment than the alternative. They either end up having to move in with friends, start using shelters, or have to move to other places of the country. All those situation increase the spread of the virus a lot more than… staying in your own house.
On top of society benefits, once someone becomes homeless, it’s a lot harder for them to get a job and re-integrate society / working world.
I am fine with that as long as the government took over responsibility for paying the tenant’s rent. And not in a convoluted, bureaucratic mess kind of way. The payment needs to be on time and hassle free.
I know hotel owners that have people staying in the rooms for free for over a year causing damage and they cannot get rid of them.
Right now, what has happened is politicians found a way to dump the costs homeless/poor people onto select businesses/land owners rather than all taxpayers.
In usual cases, I agree that landlords have to bear the risk. In case of a pandemic where we need mass coordinated action, I prefer the Government to coordinate the response.
There are certain situations where otherwise important aspects like "individual freedom" and "individual are not really useful. Pandemic is one of them. War is another.
According to the Supreme Court's summary [0], the CDC was arguing it derived its authority primarily from US Code 42 section 264(a) [1]
> The Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.
There is also 42 CFR 70.2 [2]
> Whenever the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines that the measures taken by health authorities of any State or possession (including political subdivisions thereof) are insufficient to prevent the spread of any of the communicable diseases from such State or possession to any other State or possession, he/she may take such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.
The main legal arguement is weather the second sentence of 264(a) should be read as expanding or restricting the authority granted by the first one. Even without that question, it is not clear that the first sentence on its own should be interpreted so broadly as to allow an eviction moratorium.
It is also weird to say that no one challanged it. It has been a controversial action from the start. And has been succesfully challenged in the courts.
They move out and go live somewhere else, usually. This might sometimes lead to spread of the disease, if the eviction just so happens to happen during the time when the tenants are infectious. But, as it happens, there are other ways these tenants might spread the disease, like going to work, meeting family or friends (typically the very same ones they will move in with when they get evicted), eating at restaurants, riding a bus, or generally living their normal life. These are much more likely to contribute to spread, and, as does not require mention, these activities haven’t been burdened with year+ long moratorium. The idea that evictions have anything beyond superficial impact on spread of the disease just beggars belief.
There is centuries of legal precedent about the ability to quarantine and take other appropriate measures to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Noting...I'm not an expert, but my partner lives in this world and I have learned an enormous amount over the yearas because it is profoundly interesting to me.
Public health laws predate not just the constitution but the bible...the Romans had sanitary building codes, quarantine authority, etc. Protecting public welfare and safety, i.e., public health, is one of the duties of the state and until this pandemic very few actions taken in support of that have been questioned...especially by the courts. Historically, the first actions the US took related to public health came in the yellow fever epidemic in the late 1700s. That include banning trade between New York and Philadelphia, moving the seat of federal government, quarantining whole cities.
To your point, this power to quarantine isn't strictly part of the CDC charter but it is a power of the CDC workforce...specifically the Public Health Commissioned Corps (c.f. the Surgeon General). However, those actions occur through the CDC or the US public health service or the Department of Health and Human Services. Why the Trump administration chose to have the CDC issue the moratorium I'm not entirely clear. However, what you linked to is not the charter of the CDC, it is the charter of an advisory committee. Historically, for process reasons related to statutory authority and management of the Public Health Commissioned Corps, quarantine orders have come from the CDC when done for people at borders, the USDA for animals, and HHS for inside of the US.
But really what you want to know is about statutory authority...the Surgeon General, typically acting through the CDC, has clear authority at the border, and would seem to be reasonably assumed to have authority in the US. Quoting from USC 42.6A.II.G.264
>The Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.
Does that mean that because it was done by the CDC rather than the surgeon general it is invalid? Maybe...but clearly congress sought to give reasonably broad authority. Does restrictions on commerce via eviction moratoriums specifically fall under 'such regulations as in his judgement are necessary to prevent ...spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries? Maybe...I would say it does and traditionally courts say it does.
Quoting a source here "The only successful attacks on such exercises of state police power have been based on federal preemption of state laws that restricted interstate commerce or on laws that were mere shams for racial discrimination. Yet even interference with interstate commerce is not always fatal to health regulations. *If a state regulation is substantially related to health and safety, the Supreme Court will uphold it. This is true even if the regulation interferes with interstate commerce, such as would result from a cordon sanitaria in which all travel is forbidden. From vaccinations to quarantines, laws enacted to protect society have been upheld even when they force individuals to sacrifice liberty and privacy.*
Rent is a form of commerce, it is insanity that this was meaningfully challenged by the SCOTUS. It has never, in history of this country's, been meaningfully challenged. The government's responsibility is to the public health...not landlord's profits.
I realize landlords aren't viewed in a favorable light, but in addition to ~10M losing housing, it stands to reason that a decent percentage of those houses will go into forbearance, if they haven't already. So ~10M people will have a blemish on their renting record, and 10M - n houses will be auctioned off or sold. Where do those people live? Does this inflate or deflate the housing market prices?
Inventory is at all time lows. Landlords having to sell helps that, and it's not like they will be starving in the street. Few have sympathy for a person needing to sell non-primary residences.
All of that said, I think you overestimate the number of homes held by struggling landlords, if even such a thing exists. Corps own a -lot- of rental homes.
Corps own a lot of rental properties (apartment buildings), but I don't think they own a lot of single family home-style rentals yet.
The corps are the most cautious with rental background checks, and are probably suffering less from non-payment than less cautious individual landlords.
"Investment Firms Aren’t Buying All the Houses. But They Are Buying the Most Important Ones."
Let’s focus on Invitation Homes, a $21 billion publicly traded company that was spun off from Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity company, in 2017. Invitation Homes operates in 16 cities, with the biggest concentration in Atlanta, where it owns 12,556 houses. (Though that’s not much compared with the 80,000 homes sold in Atlanta each year, Invitation Homes bought 90 percent of the homes for sale in some ZIP codes in Atlanta in the early 2010s.) While normal people typically pay a mortgage interest rate between 2 percent and 4 percent these days, Invitation Homes can borrow money for far less: It’s getting billion-dollar loans at interest rates around 1.4 percent. In practice, this means that Invitation Homes can afford to tack on an extra $5,000 to $20,000 to the purchase price of every home, while getting the house at the same actual cost as a typical homeowner. While Invitation Homes uses a mixture of debt and cash from renters to buy houses, its offers are almost always all cash, which is a big leg up in a competitive market....
Didn't mean to accuse or say you're wrong, but with 10m - n, and pondering if it would affect house prices, I figured in that model n would be a small number. I feel n would be a huge number and not affect house prices.
That said, I don't know. I only know 75% of all rental houses in my market are owned by Blackrock.
I didn't take it as an accusation, no worries. what I am wondering is, what happens to the 25% of houses that aren't owned by Blackrock? And what happens to all of the people who get evicted?
I didn't address that part, mainly because I don't know specifics, only observations. In my area, they move in with family when they can. It's not uncommon to see 3 generation houses here. I have no idea what happens to those who don't have such a luxury.
What scares me is the homeless clusters I see popping up in my county.
It seems like many just gave up--for good reasons.
I have noticed towns, like Sausalito CA, are doing everything they can to get the homeless to move on.
I have a feeling a lot of towns, seemingly Liberal towns, are are using that Broken Window Pane theory to get the down, and out, out of their lily white upperclass lives.
They vote Democratic, but don't want those people near them.
(In all fairness Sausalito created their own problem before Covid. For years, we had Anchorouts. Sausalito decided to get tough with the Anchorouts. Sausalito claims the numbers were rising, but I feel they pulled those numbers out of their bungholes. I have watched the Anchorouts for years from my office, and if anything it looked like the numbers diminished. They decided to demolish boats they deemed unworthy.
They gave that power to a angry, drunkard, otherwise known as the Harbor Master. (Just a citizen who decided who's going to stay, and who's going to go. No rhyme or reason to his decisions, and wealthy yacht owners could moor in the same spot for months. As to the Drunkard charge, ask anyone at The No Name Bar. (If ever in Sausalito, visit the No Name Bar. You will see some funny very personal pictures of Clint Eastwood scattered about.)
These people's boats were demolished. They had nowhere to go, so they set if camp on the shore. Of course, Liberal Loaded Larry didn't like seeing the free loafers, and complained.
The end result is a bunch of homeless land bound campers are being harassed by local law enforcment, like $500 citations for petty violations. The Cops told the IJ, these people will never pay, so who cares how much the citation is? Cops don't realize citations eventually turn into warrants?
I'm sorry about my rant. I live in Marin County, CA, and my neighbors are unbelievable hippocrates, and this issue has been bothering me for awhile. Marin is home to our Governor, and his spoiled wife. Leave her Gavin. You know you want to.)
Maybe I am missing something because I am not from the US, but why wasn't it an option to make evictions permanently impossible for precisely the rent that was due during the moratorium? Then people would have had to start paying again once the moratorium ended, and landlords would have to use other forms of debt collection on what was still owed, but without being able to evict anyone.
Also this part struck me as odd:
> The Supreme Court’s ruling creates a particular risk of eviction for families still recovering from the pandemic’s economic fallout.
In my understanding the court didn't say that a moratorium was unconstitutional, they only said that the CDC lacked that authority. So if Congress wanted to have that moratorium, they could have acted, but they didn't.
Regardless of constitutionality or practicality of that approach, to even try it, government would have to pass a law to that effect. The most important part of the entire debacle was that it did not in fact do so, instead it attempted a ridiculous administrative sleight of hand, which was completely illegal.
Hey, so here's something I don't understand, some people are saying that the end of the eviction moratorium will push rent prices up as from now on the landlords will demand some higher premium for future events like this.
But isn't it the case that we're about to hit a massive supply of new homes for sale and places to rent once the evictions get processed? And wouldn't such premiums be already embedded in new rents?
I agree, it’s contradictory. Here’s a hot take for you: people generally have a preset agenda that they want to push and will use anything they can to push it as long as it makes sense on a surface level because it’s just a means to an end and their intended audience doesn’t care because the audience wants to hear about things that conform to their opinions. Yeah that’s pretty cynical and I’m not usually that way but I just took that train of thought to its logical end. I guess people like to be told what to think and don’t care if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny
I think you're conflating two events which are correlated with the pandemic and claiming
The "boom" in housing sales is more like that decade-old canard about the "shortage" of software engineers. Many of those sales aren't to the average joe moving to bottom-of-the-barrel low cost areas. Rather the to urban professionals (and a small but increasing part to financial firms) who wish to reside in an area cheaper than those in major metropolitan areas without being too distant from them. In other words it's a new suburban exodus and white it had begun a few years ago, it's been catapulted forward by state quarantining policies and WFH. In addition, greater individual access to market data has allowed for deals to be made across state (and even international) lines. The housing stock hasn't increased, just the options of where to live.
With regards to landlords, many don't have any guarantee that they'll have any new paying tenants, leave alone one that would subsidize the contractual violations of the previous tenants. As rent isn't infinitely elastic, landlords will likely have to sell their property to a financial holding company or a luxury property developer in order to recoup the losses sustained under the moratorium.
You could evict a ton of people in say Seattle, be extra strict about who you rent to next and still have no problem finding tenants.
And that’s what’s happening. In the past, landlord’s knew they had a formal eviction process to rely on if rent wasn’t paid. Now they are assuming that’s either unavailable or severely delayed, so they adjust who they rent to. Marginal tenant? Leave the place empty for a month and wait for someone better.
So not necessarily rents going up, but much more strict criteria for renting in the first place, which reduces supply (at least for certain demographics).
I’m a landlord and I don’t think that’s the average landlords rationale. Yes you become more picky regarding tenants because you don’t want to deal with an eviction. That was always the case though. You’re just going to need to carefully understand how the tenant behaved during Covid. Eg. Did the get evicted from being 18 months in arrears that they will never repay? Did they lose stable income for a period of time but now it’s back? Did the sell a billion dollar tiny house in $HUB and move to your town flush with cash and a remote work lifestyle? All very different and likely already biased groups demographically speaking.
But now, you may have some losses to recoup and this whole thing is akin to theft/shrinkage of goods. It has to get factored into the price. Also, the biggest thing pushing rental prices IMO, housing prices. Since buying is the alternative to renting, they are strongly correlated.
I think the main point is that Covid is not over, and another eviction moratorium is not out of the question.
So yes, you can be more picky to avoid an eviction, but what if an eviction is not an option next year? What do you do then? From what I've heard some landlords are moving the bar from the top 30% of tenants to the top 10% and would prefer to keep a unit empty just to get them.
> whole thing is akin to theft/shrinkage of goods. It has to get factored into the price
I’d agree and in my mind it’s the risk factor I alluded to with this above quote. In my experience, increasing prices substantially automatically moves the bar for you since only people willing to pay the new price are actually highly qualified tenants.
FWIW, I had a $2700/month house that’s now at $4000/month. I did Essentially what you mentioned. In past, I’d list it and have it rented in a week or two. But had to sort through a bunch of under qualified applications. The new price only got a few applicants but they were all highly qualified. The tenant I accepted pre-paid for 12 months lease. The tight housing market and cash rich buys are the driving force though. My tenants probably would have bought a house but couldn’t find one and got pushed to renting until they do. This didn’t exist before, at least not to current levels, and without it I don’t think I’d be able to charge a premium.
I don’t know what I’d do if I was a landlord of low rent units. You cannot “go up market” like I did. I would certainly have to find a way to be more picky. Definitely not renting to someone who has a past due debt to their previous landlord. Being more diligent about checking landlord references, etc.
There must be a percentage of people that attempted to exploit the protection afforded to genuinely impacted people, there must be a ratio that cautiously intentionally reserved the rent into a just in case stash
I heard form a realtor that they had 30% applied for rent hold but the number dropped (maybe 18%) when asked to fill forms provide documentation… etc
Re-reading, I’m so cynical
Edit: sometime between posting other people have chimed in with speculation on how rent money was spent !
as well as land lords the have exploited it by refusing to take or provide information to efforts at rent relied. I.e., the landlords themselves refused efforts to pay them
Deferred rent payments by tenant, and deferred mortgage payments by debtors means if tenants and owners get liquidated we'll see a flood of properties hit the market, driving down prices. Thusfar the bottom has fallen out due to covid, and the whole system has been propped along by the eviction moratorium, leading to the final hobbling days of the bubble....?
The equity gain on single family is probably much more than the rents lost in the pandemic for most smaller cities. Small landlords might be hurting a bit but they are likely still ahead if they sell their single family property.
Most homes in my area have gained over 4 years of rent in value with the reduced interest rates.
What is the word "still" doing in the title? People pay their rent to avoid eviction, and of course if you remove that possibility many will not pay and fall behind. Meanwhile landlords have property taxes and mortgages to pay. Ending the moratorium pushes tenants to get current on their rent or leave apartments they are not paying for.
That's the crazy thing about this. Rent costs higher then ever because now people are required to have more and more stringent income requirements and rental history just to get a place because of this insane risk we place on landlords. And rental inventory is mainly coming from large companies cause they can eat the cost of it but one family with a house can't.
I’m not convinced that this is a story of unfortunate circumstances affecting responsible but unlucky Americans. I know several people who openly talk about gaming the pandemic benefits and protections, purposely staying unemployed, using the time and money for an extended vacation. My feeling is this isn’t uncommon - it seems more like a well known script everyone is aware of. It is easy to demonize landlords and owners of small businesses but those are people working hard and taking risks to make their way, while others are abusing this pandemic to freeload by skipping rent and avoiding work.
This is like saying "Millions of Americans still have credit card debt after law prohibiting cancelling of credit cards due to unpaid debts".