Texas Courts Open Eviction Floodgates: 'We Just Stepped Off a Cliff'
npr.org
npr.org
Shawna is not the only person in that situation. Here's the story of another New York landlord, left homeless after financially-able tenant brazenly exploited the eviction moratorium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7pbAnaHxXg
This problem is definitely wider than just New York state. Recently a couple in California were barred from moving into their new home by a seller that took their money and exploited the eviction moratorium: https://www.businessinsider.com/california-couple-barred-fro...
While I certainly don't want to see a flood of people that are behind on rent dumped on the streets, the answer can't be to do what New York and California have done either.
EDIT: dear downvoter, why did you downvote me? Are any of the three examples I've supplied false? Or is there some reason that my conclusion does not follow or is otherwise unreasonable?
It’s happened in lockstep with the political radicalization and censorship across the internet, eg Twitter and YouTube.
Contrary to fluffy language, HN is a censorious community that uses downvotes and shadowbans to shape narratives.
Edit:
For overly literal readers — note, I’m commenting on rates not saying it never happened historically.
It went from being rare and limited to contentious topics to routinely finding quality replies buried for wronngthink.
It creates bad incentives to have quality and agreement in the same signal.
The agree/disagree options would only be visible on comments within an article
and the OP you are responding to is nearly dead for stating an obvious problem on this site, down voting is rampant if not flagging.
I'd also like to point out that the landlords mentioned here have an option that keeps them financially solvent, namely to sell the property. The tenants, on the other hand, have no options.
LOL. No prospective buyer will be allowed to see the inside of the property. Anyone buying it knows it might be months or years before they can even take possession of the property and inspect whatever state it is in. IF landlords are even able to offload properties occupied by tenants, for sure they are doing that at a huge loss.
That's the risk of having no savings and no stable employement beyond operating a business which has entered a liquidity crisis.
A real estate owner shouldn’t be forced to liquidate at below market rates due to unfunded federal mandates.
As it stands, it was known to landlords that the CDC has the power, during pandemics, to engage in action such as this one or even more severe. Yet they chose to take on risk, which provides essentially no service to society.
This is simply false. They couldn’t have known that, because CDC never had constitutional authority to issue this order in the first place. There is no way this order could survive strict scrutiny test: it is not nearly enough narrowly tailored.
It is almost certainly legal, and precedent has shown much worse.
The government should have been forced to cover the costs or percentage of the lost rental costs. Just like the government should be the entity covering hero pay requirements.
Instead they abuse a class which garners little sympathy to score political points at no cost to them (that group is landlords and in some cases businesses with out of state ownership). Or you could find similar examples like using a local BBQ joint near me which was not allowed to sell alcohol during parts of the pandemic yet was not refunded any of the licensing fees paid to the city, county, or state.
> Shawna Eccles brought the two-story, semi-detached home for about $477,000 in February 2019 and exhausted her savings to renovate it. [...] "all of my money covers the mortgage, water bill and property taxes,” Eccles told The Post.
I am not going to say it's a good outcome that Eccles is effectively broke and homeless - but it seems absolutely bizarre to me that someone would put their entire savings into a house to use as a rental property when they don't have the budget to spend on mortgage + upkeep and also on their own needs.
What happens if Eccles' tenant moves out and nobody moves in, for instance? It could happen for many reasons. It could have happened that the tenant died of COVID in late March 2020 just as housing demand started to plummet! It could happen that the place gets damaged and becomes uninhabitable and needs repairs, and even if you put off paying for the repair, you still have to pay the mortgage and the property tax and nobody can pay you rent.
If Eccles had a down payment for a $477K house in the bank, why didn't she keep some of it as an emergency fund? What if she or a family member she cares about gets sick?
I have enough money for such a down payment in the bank, and I have a very high-paying tech job, and I'm paying rent on an apartment for myself and looking for a small place to buy for myself - I barely think I've crossed the point where a down payment would leave me with a reasonable amount of savings for an emergency fund (objectively I'm well past that point, but I still worry about it), I have the option of living with my parents if something bad happens, etc. The idea that you would put your entire savings and your entire income into a place for someone else to live is just incomprehensible to me.
I don't have an answer for this particular case, but it seems absolutely good to me that potential new Shawna Eccleses understand that a house is not the sort of thing you put your entire life savings into in the expectation that it will be a money-making vehicle. If you want to put your whole savings into a house for yourself, great. If you have a place for yourself to live and you have the savings (or income) to deal with a vacant property, sure, you may as well buy a property and rent it out. But this is reckless, and if our society's policy discourages people in the future from being reckless, that seems good in the long run.
The choice is probably subtler than between making people who simply can't afford a place homeless and making people who can definitely afford a place and were irresponsible with their money homeless, but if that's really the choice, the latter seems like the obvious right choice.
A rental house is an asset; a house you live in is a liability.
Your argument doesn’t make sense to me if you replace “rental house” with another business:
“Why would you put your life savings into gardening equipment to cut other peoples lawns when you don’t have enough savings to also be out of work for months?”
If your point is just that you should have 6-12 months of runway before you start any kind of business, that’s lovely advice.
That nearly no one can follow and only makes sense to extremely privileged tech workers, who already have stable and high paying employment.
If you shouldn’t put your whole savings into a rental property, you definitely shouldn’t put it into a house for yourself.
I do actually agree with that hypothetical you've posed! But the amount of gardening equipment you need to cut other people's lawns is pretty minimal, and you would hopefully be buying the equipment outright. A lawn mower costs a couple of hundred dollars. If your entire life savings are couple of hundred dollars, you should probably hold onto those savings instead of starting a lawn-mowing business. Spend some time working for someone else in a low-risk job and grow your savings. And if your entire life savings are merely the down payment on a lawn mower, it's definitely reckless to get that loan.
Also, importantly, the market for lawn care equipment is pretty liquid, the upkeep costs are low, and there are no property taxes. If your lawn-mowing business goes nowhere, you can resell your lawn mower quickly and make back a good amount of the money.
So maybe it makes perfect financial sense to try starting a lawn-mowing business if you only have about a week of runway, because if it doesn't work out, you can get mostly back to where you were within a week.
Buying a house is expensive, and buying a house with a mortgage is even more expensive even though it involves less immediate cash. Maintaining a house is expensive. Selling a house is a slow and arduous process, all the more so if you have a tenant (even a paying tenant). All of these things mean that you objectively need more money to pull it off. And if you want to get out of the house-renting business, you should expect that it will take you a while and it will come at a significant loss.
It may well be true that my advice only makes sense to privileged, rich people - but the invisible hand of the market is not going to take your lack of money, let alone privilege, into account and be nice to you. Rather the opposite: a $500K house will cost you well over $500K if all you can afford right now is a $100K down payment. The rich and privileged person who can make an all-cash offer saves money. I do actually believe tech workers are overpaid relative to society (though underpaid relative to their employer's profits), and I am a fan of absurdly high marginal taxes on my salary level, because I think that's a practical solution to the problem of income inequality, even though it is extremely politically unpopular. Pretending that you can do things that need a lot of money even if you don't have money is not a practical solution, even if it sounds great and is politically popular.
(And all of this is leaving aside the qualitative difference that if you evict a non-paying tenant, they become homeless, and if you get rid of a non-paying lawn-mowing customer, their grass gets overgrown. If you want to build a society that's good for people other than extremely privileged tech workers, it seems to be that a great place to start is through policies that ensures that people who cannot afford alternatives from becoming homeless - for instance, by encouraging people who desire to go into business to go into the lawnmowing business instead of the landlord business, unless they're extremely financially secure. In the extreme, as in this case, those policies might make people with alternatives homeless. That's not great, and as I said I don't like it, but it seems the clear right choice between two bad choices, because it gets rid of the moral hazard.)
Where are the minimum-wage-affordable apartments in nyc?
“Choice”
If people could manage stepping off the boat at Ellis island with maybe a suitcase but not a scrap of English or a dollar to their name a hundred years ago, people can manage a trip out of the city or out of the state today. Hell, today there's probably a subreddit and series of Youtube tutorials that will lay the plan out for you step by step.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but it's obviously not impossible. Being able to move isn't a sign of privilege in modern society, stability is privilege. The poor are always at risk of losing what little they have and needing to move on or start over.
Otherwise you wouldn't have given that advice, since simply buying a bus ticket doesn't save them from barely even being able to afford food. Right?
You implied it was simply an issue of buying a bus ticket - magical hand wave. It’s not pedantic to ask the obvious follow-up question: then what?
It's not difficult. I moved thousands of kilometers and countries away on my own.
If the state willingly makes their market unattractive for "people that can take a risk", then that can be criticized holistically as well. But just saying "they took a risk" and allowing for any outcome because of that is cognitively negligent.
To reply to your edit, to take a risk and have a control on the bad outcomes kinda makes it not taking a risk.
Would you hold that same opinion for other things as well? Say you own your house, and suddenly the local government mandates that you give it to them with no compensation. Would you say "that's just a risk of owning a house"?
Let's be reasonable here, having a clear, consistent and enforced legal system is a key requirement to make long term investments in anything. If you want to have a stable country and strong economy you must have such a legal system
That is actually a normal risk of ANY business - government passing legislation that makes you less profitable. ISP? Google? Cable Companies? All face government pressure. And they also lobby the governments to get their way. No different from REITs also probably lobbying hard to force rents up, and force money to be spent on shelter instead of productive uses like investment, buying goods and services, hiring employees. I think you have a bit of reverse logic there, thinking that by kicking renters out and protecting landlords, we are "improving the economy".
Which is to say, if your activities as a landlord bring in more than a small fraction of your income, or actually constitute any part of your day job at all, then you are running it like a business. As with any business concern, you should have planned for and assembled a contingency fund to cover just such an interruption of cash flow. And like any business, if you cannot run it efficiently and effectively enough to survive without having the losses socialized away, your business should be allowed to fail such that its valuable parts can be picked up and recapitalized by others who are better at the business.
But if you have no landlording activities as your day job, and this income only mildly supplements your other income that has nothing to do with landlording, then you are not running it like a business. You are much, much closer to your renters in nature, and should be provided much the same assistance.
What this assistance presents itself as is not something I have the gumption to slap on the table and set in stone, but _should_ include things like either direct waiving (forgiveness) of mortgages by the banks or the mortgages being paid for during the no-eviction period.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-eviction-dec...
The order itself gives no justification for how the CDC has the constitutional authority to order these things.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/02/03/2021-02...
It isn't the CDC's job to prove that acts of Congress are constitutional, but it is their job to stay within the constitution, whether or not an act of Congress says they can go further. (It's also Congress's job to not write legislation that authorizes acts outside the legal authority of the federal government, but that's not the subject at hand here.)
What I called "somewhat better than nothing" was the significance of acts of Congress as giving authority for CDC actions. Yeah, they do... and they don't. The constitution is the outer perimeter of the CDC's authority. An act of Congress can assign them some territory within that perimeter, but it cannot extend the perimeter. I'd like the CDC to be keeping an eye on that outer perimeter, not just on the acts of Congress that say they can do something. (And not just the CDC. I'd like every federal agency to do that.)
Turning back to the original question: Has there ever been a case that established the constitutionality of a federal agency banning evictions? It would have been nice if the CDC cited it in their order, because most people that I know have never heard of such a case. Or, if there hasn't been one (which I think is the actual situation, but I'm not certain enough to say definitely that it is), then I would like for somebody at the CDC to think more seriously about the question than to just say "yeah, we've got an act of Congress that says we can do stuff to deal with health emergencies". "We can do stuff" does not mean "we can do absolutely anything we decide", because some parts of "absolutely anything" are clearly outside the authority of the federal government.
Does the federal government have the constitutional authority (for whatever reason) to order a nationwide ban on evictions? Where in the constitution do they think that comes from? That is what I want to see in an "Authority" section of the order. (And then, yeah, I still want to see the act of Congress that says that the CDC can do it.)
It seems like you should be arguing that that law is unconstitutional, or unconstitutionally applied, or that the whole Health Department shouldn't exist or something... But instead you're saying that the order doesn't even claim to be authorized by law, which is false.