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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, who else is the landlord going to rent the space to right now? Seems to me it's in the landlord's interest to corporate. All lessees are going to be in more-or-less the same boat.

What surprises me is that they didn't just work this out quietly...

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Yes, this is a critical point. It’s one advantage of the fact that this is happening simultaneously across the whole nation. The entire commercial real estate market has no choice but to work out a single solution of some sort.

“If you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem. If a million people owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem.”

The problem is, the landlord probably has a mortgage, and their mortgage has been securitized just like everything else. So modifying the terms probably has more of a ripple effect than you’d think. And who knows who is left holding the bag when thousands of commercial mortgage-backed securities suddenly get down-rated and start to default.

Possibly many did but the ones that didn't went to the press. The press is always on the lookout for stories that either demonstrate some new societal trend or generate outrage, and this is both. All it takes is a couple of disputes between major brand names and their landlords and they have a story.

For that to happen there needs to be strong leadership from the top incentivizing standing down behavior with subsidies, not winner take all rock em sock em race to tragedy of the commons

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