Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Amazing.
We live in a first world country, where most of the the U.S.'s population and its businesses pay (in aggregate, collectively) what amounts to absolutely staggering amounts of tax money to its various governments (City, State, Federal), and yet, and yet:
>"Inside the shelter, there wasn’t room for everyone who sought its refuge: On average, more than 100 people were turned away every week."
To anyone that works in Government, at any level:
Please explain to the American People exactly how this is possible, because this phenomenon does not only exist solely in Phoenix.
(1) https://www.daily-journal.com/news/local/fortitude-shelter-r...
(2) https://gothamist.com/news/angry-upper-west-siders-wanted-ho...
(3) https://jerseydigs.com/homeless-shelter-denied-apartments-co...
(4) https://www.kcur.org/community/2019-11-25/church-sues-lenexa...
(5) https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/voting-can-be-h...
The employees of the city laboring under these politicians are burnt out and have little good to say about their bosses in private. The politicians won't devote effort to anything that isn't: extinguishing a fire, enriching themselves,or getting re-elected. So the managers of various departments settle into autopilot because they don't have the support they need, and this apathy trickles down through the ranks destroying morale, wasting money, and ultimately causing far greater costs to the taxpayers in the long run.
My personal view is that the natural birth rights in a social contract for a functioning society must include basic needs being met. People have to exist, they need shelter, food, medicine, etc. If these are denied they are not part of society, and thus the more brutal laws of nature apply. I don't like those outcomes, I vote accordingly.
If someone is rich enough to rent things to others, by definition, they have more than they need. This includes landlords, banks, anyone that holds a legal title to something someone else is physically using to live.
Losses and deferments should be taken by banks, land/property-owners, and generally the 1%. You know, the people that bribe politicians with campaign funding.
a) Many landlords have financing at their disposal that renters don't: loan forbearance, mortgage freezes (and yet rent freezes are unfair?), etc.
b) In good times, the defense for landlords raising rents is "they're taking a financial risk by renting out their property others" -- if that's the case, then why is it the government's priority to protect them more than the tenants these landlords are evicting? You invested in the opportunity to generate income. Not the guarantee. If you lose your shirt, that's on you -- nothing prevented you from putting the money in savings or less risky account.
This may be my own subjective view and politics coming through, but I firmly believe that if you're wealthy enough to afford a property to rent out to the less wealthy, the needs of the tenants trump the needs of the landlords; similarly, the needs of the landlords should trump the needs of the banks. The economy is hurting, everyone is hurting, yes. But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most?
The people above them would have it that way. In a functioning democracy, the will of the people would naturally prevent that, but many of the people have been convinced that those in low places "deserve it".
It's one thing if the risk is tenants don't pay, and the landlord won't get the rent, plus they'll have to pay legal fees and what not to evict, plus they may need to fix damages that they will be unlikely to recoup from the departing tenant and then have the uncertainty of finding a new tenant. That's the risk they signed up for in becoming a landlord.
It's another thing if the government says hey, we know people can't/aren't paying rent, but you can't evict them cause it's a bad situation for everyone. If the landlords then have trouble paying the mortgage and employees/contractors and what not, if there's no consessions that's going to be a problem.
Maybe you tell the banks not to forclose and the banks have to eat it, because they're banks and universally reviled. It seems easier to drop helicopter money and keep most bills paid, and maybe just slow down the courts rather than prohibit evictions and foreclosure. But helicopter money has to be federal, and states can block evictions and foreclosures, so that's what we get without agreement at the federal level.
They may still have the opportunity to get income from another tennant but you want them to be responsible for the tenant that can't/won't pay. The state would effectively offload any social responsibility it has.
Also, who says the living conditions have to be the same under crisis? The state could sub-rent out some places but double the density. After all, if you are staying for free a shared bathroom is not the end of the world.
> But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most?
The $1200 stimulus was probably the most generous in the world. Seems to me everybody is pretending it didn't happen.
Of course Canada has other benefits like socialized medicine.
Yet most other wealthy countries opted for a recurring payment or subsidy of some sort -- on top of an expanded social safety net, which, by and large in Europe, were already much more robust than the US's to begin with.
What safety net when schools were closed and hospitals closed with only emergencies and COVID?! There was NO safety net.
Oh, you mean generous free money? This also didn't apply to everybody.
Actually, some did get to stay at home on free money while folks that teleworked had no option that to do full-time plus homeschool plus everything else.
Not sure what you mean by "on top of an expanded social safety net" though
...except you are preventing the landlord from making money. Presumably there is another potential tenant that would pay rent. It is pretty interesting for you to argue that landlords shouldn't be able to evict people and also if landlords "lose their shirt" it is their own fault.
>the needs of the tenants trump the needs of the landlords
Which tenant? The one that is currently in the building, or the one that could move in and pay rent?
>But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most?
The US gave everyone a $1,200 check and an additional $600 PER WEEK in unemployment benefits. People were making $60,000+ annualized during the peak of covid. There is also an eviction moratorium. How much more do you think people need?
The market is relatively inelastic in it's needs. More money in goes right through to the other side. Those extra 600 per week did not get banked, it got spent. Granted, I didn't see any of it because I'm thankfully still working; but I'm under zero illusions that it didn't pay for things like TV, cable, maybe a computer; and most probably some touchless delivery meals.
I think all people deserve a place to call home; food; water; electricity; education; healthcare; a reliable means of transportation; a guaranteed retirement plan or pension.
Even with an above-minimum-wage job, or even two, this is no longer feasible for so many citizens of the US: you either end up compromising or forgoing some options entirely. I don't believe having access to these things should be a standard to aspire to that many struggle to achieve -- rather, this should be the bare minimum that, were you to lose your job tomorrow and have almost no savings (as is the situation for so many people in the US), you would have no fear of losing.
But if you want to attach a number to it (which I think is the wrong way to put it into terms, as money focuses the conversation on short term cost, when really it's a long term investment), let's start at $5000/mo. $60,000 per year, annualized, all the time, in perpetuity. Per adult. Afraid someone who is otherwise able to work is abusing the system? Start up a large national public works program: I think we can all agree there's SO much to rebuild, fix, and improve in the US and in our communities.
FDR envisioned something close to this when he signed minimum wage into law:
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By ‘business’ I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of decent living"
> Which tenant? The one that is currently in the building, or the one that could move in and pay rent?
The one currently in the building. This is quite clear cut, the two tenants are not equivalent.
Rationale:
The one that could move in and pay straight away almost certainly has a place to live already. It's possible they are currently homeless and yet able to start paying immediately and convince you it's sustainable, but it's very unlikely.
The one being asked to leave is likely to end up homeless, in a pandemic. Unless your place is significantly above market rates and there's a realistic cheaper place available to them. Even if there's a cheaper place they could move to, with all the checks in place, most potential new landlords will reject a tenant who just got kicked out of somewhere for non-payment of rent. There may also be high competition for a small number of "last resort" places to live which accept people in this situation. And moving when you have no money is also very difficult, sometimes impossible and they will lose their possessions too.
So if the value being prioritised here is to minimise avoidable homelessness, then priority should be given to the person who would be made homeless, not the person who wouldn't.
This is not the case. There are a significant number of landlords for which renting out properties is their occupation. You have someone who owns a small apartment complex, lives in one of the units, rents out the others, and their primary job is to be the superintendent and caretaker of the property. The rents pay their salary and the property tax and insurance on the building. Without them they can't pay their taxes or expenses and have nothing with which to buy food. Meanwhile the tenants are still living there and expecting the property to be maintained. In many cases the rent includes utilities, which the landlord can't pay if they don't receive rent to pay it with. And they're not the 1%, they're just a regular person whose full-time occupation is property maintenance.
There is no reason in putting the cost on such people, but also no fairness in waiving the rents of only those people who live in housing that really is owned by the 1%.
Which is why things like rent forgiveness and student loan forgiveness are intrinsically unfair and the better way to deal with those sorts of problems is stimulus checks. Anyone who needs the money gets it, meanwhile people who don't need it as much aren't punished for being more responsible and have the money to stimulate demand at a time when unemployment is higher than normal, and the money can come from taxes paid disproportionately by the people who actually do have more than they need rather than people we're only assuming do (and some of them don't).
But if they put it into their home equity instead, any loss is unacceptable to us.
Why?
But, no worries, once people figure out the risk involved in home equity this will be derisked and have surprising outcomes.
If you put all your money in Tesla stock and then it yielded an ordinary market rate of return but the government decided to take all your profits because if you have enough money to own stock then you must not need it very much, yet not take all the profits of landlords or Bitcoin speculators or privately held corporations, can you see why someone might regard that as unreasonable?
I recognize you're responding to a post that was somewhat extreme, but it's worth noting that right now America is nowhere close to this point. There's a trade-off to be had between equity for citizens and allowing individuals to reap the rewards of their choices and work in a way necessary for a capatalist society to function. I don't know exactly where that balance is, but I think it's pretty clear we are way off the mark right now!
However I'll disagree with the binary solution you've reached.
For direct end renters a combination of rent reduction (E.G. 25% of the contracted rate), the option to continue in-contract rate on a per-month basis until the end of the crisis (which is currently optimistically thought to be mid-next year), as well as forbearance and interest free payment at a rate of X (I'll say 2 per 25% months, this number should be tweaked in tandem) forborne months per year after the crisis, for any hardship including loss of job, any illness that prevents full 'normal' work, etc.
For people making payments on primary properties also 25%, as a figure to start the discussion at.
Businesses that are shuttered entirely (E.G. should be gyms) should just have their current contracts frozen, and terms extended accordingly after the pandemic is over.
Buisnesses that are open should be required to pay their employees as normal, but have reduced rent (again I'll just start the discussion with 25%) and automatic forbearance if the numbers aren't adding up.
Suppose there are two people, one who pays $1000/month in rent and $1000/month in utilities, another who pays $2000/month in rent for an equivalent unit with utilities included. Does it make sense for one of them to get 25% of $1000 and the other to get 25% of $2000? What about someone who rents a less expensive apartment which is further away, and so has lower rent but higher commuting expenses and no less need for assistance. Is there some justifiable reason they should receive less?
What happens to someone who isn't paying rent? It's common for a part time superintendent to not get paid but to get a free apartment. If they lose their primary job they're still in trouble -- they get free rent, not free food -- but a discount on rent doesn't get them anything because they don't pay it.
What is this going to do to people who need to move? Isn't the new landlord just going to raise the asking price by 25%?
The amount of rent someone pays has only a tenuous relationship with the amount of assistance they need, so it makes no sense to tie them together.
My general idea phrased differently: The current global situation is a __war__ against a microscopic enemy that hijacks our very bodies to release deadly gasses indiscriminately among anywhere else a compromised citizen goes. It is not unreasonable to take drastic ''war time'' economic actions the likes of which have not been seen in my entire lifetime. Efforts and adjustments far more like those seen during the first and second world wars. An orderly idle-mode adjustment to the economy and stabilization of social situations built around a plan to minimize suffering and maximize safety is extremely rational.
Trying to break this down a bit more since you had specific questions:
=== Payment for places to live (as seen by buyers / renters) ===
Everyone needs assistance, and if they don't currently they probably would in an orderly idling of the economy to promote health and safety.
Across the board, 'qualifying circumstances' would enable forbearance of payments and a no-interest repayment over a reasonable time after the crisis .
Those who are buying their primary residence* (it might be arguable that anyplace lived in for 40% or more of the year is such a residence; mostly as a concession to those who have a summer and winter home; however if someone's doing that maybe they don't need this help and would have to pick ONE accommodation location) would only be required to pay "the rate" (25% of the non covid-19 plan rate), and would not be penalized for paying a reduced quantity. This would also include, during the duration of the crisis, a corresponding reduction in, or outright elimination of, the interest on the loan.
Similarly anyone renting would have their primary residence reduced similarly; only the term on the rental would still continue, all other conditions would apply.
=== Those being paid for places to live ===
All land owners and renters would see the equally reduced rate of income, across the board. Since I think the housing market is distorted I'm against leverage financing, but people need to live places now and this is the situation we're in. An actual economist should try to figure out a fair solution to cutting through this gordian knot; ideally with the elimination of rent-seeking as a net drag on the overall economy and fair distribution of resources.
Offhand, I believe that with a proper social safety net, so that the unemployed can still eat and pay rent, it's actually _more_ likely that the rent of the poor would still be paid.
===
The other circumstances and situations you bring up make it sound like you've misunderstood the idea I was talking about; this is not about giving anyone more money (that's an entirely different topic); this is about reducing (part of) the cost of living, by making payment / rent 25% (a thrown out figure, not something an economist has adjusted and arrived at) of the currently contracted value during the pandemic.
Given an absence of society, it’s fair to argue self-reliance, and that no one should have to carry another.
However, being born into a society strips you of certain natural rights. You can’t just choose a nice place to build shelter for yourself - that’s “property” and it’s owned by someone already. You can’t hunt or farm your own food for similar reasons. Society demands, from birth, that you follow social laws that limit your own ability to be self-reliant.
I believe it’s reasonable then when OP proposes that the balance of that social contract might mean that society should also provide a safety net for the basic necessities of life.
- If someone is reliant on the government for basic necessities of life, should they ideally work to reach a state where they can provide for themselves using their own income/skills/etc. and wean themselves off of government aid?
- If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', how can we subsidize/incentive getting off of government aid? It seems to me that it's easy to get stuck in an inter-generational trench where the government provides your food, shelter, etc. I'm interested in how to help people help themselves.
In some countries there is. In some there isn't. Where I live, no chance, people who have found unoccupied patches and built on them tend to eventually have their property destroyed by government.
So maybe you're thinking, move countries.
Nope. A lot of people in the world are prevented from moving to countries they'd like to move to. Heck, sometimes married couples are prevented from being together. It's a pretty restrictive world.
Rental housing is a business. If the marginal return to capital of providing rental housing goes up relative to other investments, then more capital will be invested in providing rental house, until equilibrium. Likewise, if the marginal return to capital of providing rental housing goes down, capital will be moved out of rental housing.
If the risk of being a landlord is increased, then a small landlord has a bit of problem in that it will be hard to diversify their portfolio. They will need to enter into some kind of risk-transfer transaction. The simplest would be to purchase some kind of insurance that pays out in case of government-mandated rent moratorium. Insurance company actuaries would work out a reasonable premium, and that premium would be added to the rent required of tenants.
All-in-all, that would be a reasonably orderly solution -- with the net effect of raising rents to cover the insurance premium.
Of course, we can all imagine a world in which we have both rent control and government-mandated rent moratoriums. In which case, the return to capital in rental house goes down and the supply dries up. Which means instead of an orderly market, rental units are transferred based on non-monetary consideration. I don't see how this world is better for anybody.
The business of real estate is not to increase housing supply but to increase housing value as an asset class. And, given an inherently inelastic supply and rising demand, the best way to do this is by artificially constraining supply: keepin unnits off-market, limiting construction, density limmits, setbacks and separations, height limits, restrictions on multuple tenancies, and some aspects of building codes.
This isn't new:
When recently the mechanized industries, particularly in metal, entered the housing field with the production of “prefabricated houses”, they were met by the resistance of property holders, especially of the banks, who hold mortgages on about 58 percent of all 1933 value of all urban real estate, and who fear that an influx of cheap modern dwellings would subtract substantially from the market value of existing structures. These banks and loan companies have been unwilling to finance prefabricated houses except in rare exceptions and then on a limited basis.
-- Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
That’s a 2017 article. Now the fall is much greater because of COVID market shifts, but the rents really did slow or drop before in Downtown Los Angeles.
Real estate in California’s two large metro areas (SF Bay and Greater LA) is a mess, largely thanks to regulation and NIMBYism. That’s not a normal market. Add to it Prop 13 that prevents property tax adjusting tax base to market value of housing, even for corporations and rentals, and you have the recipe for really constraint supply. As the result, prices remain high.
Putting the burden on landlords will cause small-time landlords to exit and be either replaced by large corps that can afford the insurance-equivalent or the rentals will be sold to owner users and the people who have to rent will have even less supply to go around.
Of the various corrective measures, a land value tax (tax on the unimproved value of property) is likely the most widely known, understood, and accepted by economists. Other issues are more difficult to address (see e.g., Mancur Olsen's Logic of Collective Action), but also arise and create dysfunctions through economic logic giving rise to pathologies.
A reading of Adam Smith's sections on prices of various economic products and services suggests a set of differentiable behaviours by types:
1. Commodity goods.
2. Labour wages and services. Extended to include pleasantness, skill, training, constancy, success probability, and trust.
3. Natural resources (developed further by Ricardo, Grey, and Hotelling, though still fundamentally flawed).
4. Returns to stock.
5. Rents: monopoly and network services.
6. Assets and money (to Smith: gold and silver).
7. Interest.
8. Public goods.
9. Taxes.
Each has distinct behavious, much explained by later concepts of the marginalists and political theorists (class and power), though these are suggested by Smith.
There's some likely consolidation of these (rents, assets, and interest, say). Commodity goods follow laws of supply and demand as commonly understood, but only where goods are undifferentiated (no "luxury" branding, monopoly, or lock-in effects). Many of the others, for confounding reasons, deviate markedly some or much of the time. Smith was largely addressing these failures under merchantilism and politically-influential monopolists and classes.
The bigger issue is that you have land use lock-in due to the tax advantage and zoning.
In simple terms, if you take 0.5 acre lot in Los Altos within close commute to Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. If taxes were market rate, then a lot more inventory would be available because these “assets” would be too expensive to just keep.
If zoning was not a factor, then the lot prices would be even higher due to being able to cram in more shared use spaces (condos) into it.
Of course, all these have extreme negative externalities (impacts) on those living around these lots and those living on them. That’s why we need some protections and middle ground between these as a society.
You're also ignoring a pretty big option. Rather than choosing between landlords who rent and landlords who speculate, you could have local ownership of the building you live in.
More capital may be invested, but not necessarily in "providing" rental housing. Housing, being dependent on location/land, is not a commodity. In fact, you'll often see the opposite: Home owners (investors in their own right) and even developers trying to inflate housing prices by restricting supply by exploiting zoning laws: it pays to be a home owner in a neighborhood where the minimum lot size is 1 acre (Atherton), or, say, a developer interested in building only luxury apartments in desirable areas (Solana Beach, which is a city in California with 0 low-income housing, or really anywhere along a CA Coast).
The funny thing is, as home prices in major US cities become out of reach to the average American (as evidenced by the fact that many cities have higher renter rates than owner rates), a drop in property values could be a GOOD thing -- in that it could allow tenants to potentially own the dwelling they already live in which is currently out of reach.
Housing is also a basic human need. Both can be true, but when markets fail, we risk failing basic human needs and all the associated costs to society.
> Which means instead of an orderly market, rental units are transferred based on non-monetary consideration. I don't see how this world is better for anybody.
I think you should consider economics courses from different schools. Absolute market normativity cannot solve every problem on earth, nor always form orderly markets by themselves. Governments are needed to intervene on these market failures and undertake other duties that cannot be properly market-ified. By your perspective non-monetary transfers or government intervention on basic medicine, food, water or law enforcement also wouldn’t make the world better for anybody.
The answer to a socialist utopia is not a liberalist utopia, as neither can transcend the complexity of the problem at hand alone.
This doesn't mean that free unregulated markets are a solution to everything. But they're a great first step on a road of progressive [in a technical sense, not the commonly associated political sense of the word] refinement.
Perfect information symmetry is a precondition for the theoretical free market construct, but by no means a magical, inherent property to markets. In fact, there are many instances in which information flow has to be legislated in order to help the market operate; from nutrition labels on our food to real estate transactions in which information flow is necessitated, and for example making insider trading illegal in which information flow is prevented.
> Non-market systems hide incentives under opaque covers and increase the potential for catastrophic failure.
Market based systems can and have done this too. Most recent example is the 2008 crisis in which in the name of financial instrument innovation, toxic assets were blended under opaque covers and people bought them, leading to catastrophic failure.
Information flow and markets are mostly unrelated. Think of the stock market; only information it can tell us is the current and historical price points, everything else has to come from side channels, which will never add up to telling if a stock will go up or not for sure.
I don't agree. This is view not indicative of how things operate in reality.
As a market participant, one can always determine incentives by "following the money", as long as the actors are somewhat rational. Talented traders, middle-men, etc develop an instinct for these flows which can never be perfectly legibilized into economic models. This intuition then leads them to deduce information that is hidden. The corollary to this is one shouldn't participate in markets without this ability, which is why almost every retail investor should not be directly involved in stock markets and just invest in index funds instead. The second corollary is because these flows are impossible to realistically quantitatively model, no faithful model of the market is possible unless the model replicates the market structure itself. All thats left are impermanent imperfect models, some may be based on historical data, some on various heuristics specific to a given market, some even partially successful in predicting what will happen for some time, but all ultimately doomed to failure as other market participants game them.
Your examples, food labeling, real estate txns, insider trading are great arguments for progressive refinement of market dynamics, which is the position I'm arguing. They are not arguments for an alternative to markets and no known alternative to markets can solve these problems while maintaining the same level of functional efficiency that markets do.
> Market based systems can and have done this too.
Yet society recovered. Under non-market systems, an irreversible catastrophe is more likely than under market systems. Because market systems are unstable, they transmit critical information faster than non-market alternatives, allowing for preventive measures. Even if this information is imminent collapse. Market collapse and dysfunction prefigure collapse and are valuable information in-and-of themselves. This remains the case despite anthropogenic climate change, etc.
Markets are ultimately not about money, but information. What sort of system can transmit information more efficiently than a market can? No centralized system has been proven to be as successful. And, for foundational math reasons, I don't believe any sort of planning algorithm can beat a network of decentralized profit maximizing agents. So our two options are 1) to improve market function via progressive refinement or 2) find an alternative analog that preserves the information fluidity that markets provide. I have very little optimism on 2) but am open to being surprised.
If the law said landlords could not require those kinds of references when advertising a tenancy, that would be a legal framework hostile to landlords without the reference problem you described.
(Admittedly there would be unintended consequences. Maybe the reference problem would continue surreptitiously.)
We would all do fine if long term rentals were replaced with purchase, and those that can't afford to purchase put in free government housing until they can.
Rent dates back to kings that owned all the land and made commoners pay to live on it. I don't think it's right to profit off something so essential as the place you reside, it gives landlords near infinite leverage if tenants are too poor to move.
I agree with above, somebody has to eat the losses, and it should be the entities speculating on investment properties, not the (usually poor) people renting single units in them
1) If owning a rental property makes me responsible for my tenant's failures and misfortune beyond a rental contract:
- Why am I not also entitled to a cut of their successes beyond the rental contract?
- If they are making decisions that affect my financial prosperity, when will I get a say? Can I demand they go into IT rather than going for a communications degree?
- What do you think of the incentives that puts on me not to ever rent my property out to poor people?
2) People have to exist, they need ... medicine ...
That word "medicine" is much more flexible than the others (fed & shelter are binary things), it changes over time. What standard are we applying here? Does the landlord get to object if they give themselves a lifestyle disease, eg, smoker gets lung cancer or tenant refuses to wear a mask for political reasons and then gets COVID? Where is the line for rare conditions that cost a large fortune to treat, verging on untreatable?
Leave it to the landlord to miss whom property appreciation comes from. It ain’t you! It’s the people living there that make your property more valuable over time. If your renters do well your property value rises.
I don’t know. I mean you might be coming from a place culturally that simply diminishes how you benefit from the system. It’s a narrow minded, ill conceived, jingoist, reductionist culture that attributes all personal good to multi-generational hard work and independence or whatever and belittles the losers for being stupid or lazy or having inadequate families or whatever. But a professional landlord must certainly understand the basic economics of why their renters doing well is also good for them. It boggles the mind to make an error like that, which is why I’m suspecting it would take years of conditioning to be skeptical of your customer’s success.
* Can I force my tenant to make up the difference if I sell into a down market?
* If I support policies that keep house prices steady, do I get any brownie points in this conversation? I'm something of a Georgist btw,
That appreciation ain't worth much to an owner forced to sell cheaply after losing their rental stream. You're talking about trading very real value right now for reasonable but ultimately speculative returns.
Could you explain this more fully? I would say that the value rises because there is more demand for the property, not because someone who makes $200,000 a year lives there. If your claim is true, then how does the market know which properties contain successful individuals so the property value increases accordingly?
You don't like people who own property. You don't think people should be able to own property that they don't live in. You don't think banks should be able to foreclose. And when push comes to shove, you want property owners and banks to lose money first.
And you falsely believe that owning property puts you into the top 1%.
I think that about sums it up?
-------------
Nearly half of landlords are what is called "mom and pop" landlords. Just normal people who happen to own rental property, a duplex, or a small apartment complex. These aren't rich people. They aren't 1%ers. I genuinely think you need to venture out into the world more and meet some different people. Meet some of these evil people that need to pay.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-frm-asst-sec...
What simplistic 'screw the rich' takes like this miss is that no actually many of these people are not by any reasonable measure rich, and even for 'the rich' what we're largely talking about really is businesses which most of us work for directly or indirectly, and what hurts them very often hurts us.
So to me the socialist 'screw the rich' rhetoric is rubbish because it's economically illiterate, and the dog eat dog radical capitalist take that the poor are all lazy losers is equally ignorant and harmfull. The reality is we're all in this together, society imposes responsibilities on it's citizens and in return owes them obligations, or vice versa depending how you look at it. Blaming everything on some other group is just putting up obstacles to finding actual workable solutions.
Landlords extract the marginal difference between what people can buy and what people can rent. By participating in real estate markets, they leverage inequality of capital to overcharge renters beyond what the market would clear at without landlords.
I know most tax evaders are poor too, paid under the table. I'm sorry for them but I don't forgive their theft from the rest of us. Likewise, I don't forgive market-distorting landlords extracting rents from would-be buyers.
This statement presumes that people, if given the choice, would always choose to buy. Not so! People rent for numerous reasons, many of which have nothing to do with their income or ability to buy.
>Small-time embezzlers are just normal people too! Loan sharks, shady mechanics, and bail bondsmen are also extractive everymen.
Fairly absurd for you to compare people who own a second home or a duplex to embezzlers or loan sharks. Give me a break.
I don't think my comparisons are absurd, which is why I made them: They are illustrative. Just as loan sharks occasionally do provide valuable loans to people with no other option, so too do landlords occasionally provide valuable flexibility. However, it's not their primary effect.
The notion of positive rights is inherently absurd. Nobody is entitled to nobody's labor or resources except from their caretakers when they are a minor. This may seem like a needlessly harsh position but think about it: farmers can't be forced to grow food, doctors and nurses can't be forced into taking care of patients and nobody has an obligation to build anything for anybody just because "it is a basic right".
Making the government pay for it does not make more of it nor does it make it cost less. Unless the basic problem has not been addressed, that is scarcity, then any solutions is pure utopian bs. Why drugs and treatments cost so much? Why we can't build new buildings? Why do we insist on living in impractical over-packed big cities?
> Losses and deferments should be taken by banks, land/property-owners, and generally the 1%. You know, the people that bribe politicians with campaign funding.
Banning foreclosures will backfire very quickly. Where I come from a law was passed that banned banks from foreclosing houses built on native grounds / reservations. Result? Now no one has access to the credit needed to own a house and everything are in the hands of a very few corrupt individuals.
What about the people who aren’t in the 1% but their pension investments include bank stocks?
You’re ignoring that economic shocks work their way through the system. Let banks take the hit and shareholders and employees all get hit, which then impacts others as well.
Generally the landlord's mortgage holiday is not being passed on to the tenant though.
If you think the government should pay rent to prevent the banks from losing income from landlords, what's wrong with this simpler system: Tenant stops paying -> landlord stops paying -> government pays the bank?
But it's not really a concern. Unless they really screw up, serious banks don't run out of money at this scale. There are problems from stopping mortgage payments, but "the bank closes" isn't likely to be one.
Same reason you can talk about government covering the rent. The government doesn't have more money than the banks. Its super power is the ability to obtain or create money as needed.
It could give it to tenants to pay landlords, give it to landlords to pay the bank, or give it to the bank directly.
(Btw, I don't think it should give direct to the bank, because people need to cover more than just rent, they need food and other things, and individuals have different urgent priorities which any blanket directed payment would miss. For this reason, I don't think it should pay rent directly either.)
From what I know in the UK and in Kazakhstan it was a very small proportion of landlords
I don't know of many landlords who will continue to own property if the rent does not pay their expenses and a reasonable profit. Profit is not bad, it is the reward society gives individuals for taking risks. Rental prices start from basic supply and demand. People who need a place to live will pay what they can afford, often unwisely paying more than they would need to if they were content with less. Landlords adjust prices accordingly - up if there is more demand, down if there is less.
Add in the emotional component of "owning my own place", which drives up the price of single family properties and forces landlords to raise prices if they will cover costs and profit. Add in the property value increase caused by tax benefits the government has, in my opinion, unwisely handed out to homeowners. Push up prices more due to large minimum lot sizes and NIMBYism constraining supply in desirable areas. (After all, what makes an area desirable? From an economic standpoint, the ability to easily exchange labor for money or some other store of value.) The result? Society largely is responsible for its own dilemmas.
The economic system failing is a technical problem. Technical as in technology.
What I am saying is that our failure to properly apply our technology is putting everyone at risk.
And when enough millions of people globally are desperate for food or shelter, that is when you get a world war.
The old people dying in American streets are just the tip of the iceberg.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_D...
I specifically did not say that the US was worse off than MOST countries. I said MANY countries.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-glo...
There are almost 200 countries. Many of them are quite poor compared to the "developed" world and prior to the pandemic had severe social and even humanitarian deficits. The pandemic has been devastating there also. But they were starting from a more challenged point.
Germany still falls short for those at the bottom, but there are not several million people there who are unable to get a cavity filled or are terrified of the financial consequences of an ambulance ride.
If you base policy for "the greatest nation in the world" on such countries, well...
And in France a month in elderly care (EHPAD) is currently around 1800 euro (it depends of the severity of the illnesses). This is nearly the mid salary in France!
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tablissement_d%27h%C3%A9...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/26/german-elderly...
That is not even remotely in the same ballpark as the ~70 million elderly unable to buy food in the US (cited in the OP). However it is true that there is an underlying problem in probably most of the West...