California will pay off all past due rent
politicalwire.com
politicalwire.com
There was no moratorium on paying mortgages and a lot of people have made huge sacrifices in order to hang onto their properties in the last 14 months.
Personally I am not opposed to this type of bottom-up bailout, however I think this move should not end up being profit-generating for landlords. Not sure how you'd determine that, etc.
It’s in vogue to harp on landlords, but it’s one of the more common small business models; owning a rental property is probably the most realistic way you or I could earn some income on the side. They’re not all Scrooge McDucks.
'in the future you will not own anything' #WEF https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/06/is-blackrock-buying...
Plenty of housing available before blackrock snatches it all up
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3723-Bridlewood-Dr-Montgo...
- more traffic since buying and selling a new home takes a lot more effort.
- barrier to moving to a different city with better opportunities / QoL
- lots of capital (most of one's net worth) tied up in a very emotional and personal investment
- incentives that pit their housing investment against things that they might otherwise support, like more housing being built, homeless services, etc
In my experience, landlords are often a pretty toxic element in local politics (opposing upzoning, opposing progressive policies in general.) IME as a renter corporate landlords were not really better or worse than small-time landlords. At least with the corporate landlords, I can buy shares in the company and reap some of the rewards back. Even better, the government could buy shares through a social wealth fund, and return some of the profits to the whole of society.
Why is enforcing legal contracts so important?
Besides being one of the very primal functions of a working government.
It also probably pulls wealth out of the local area, depending on where the owners of those larger corporations are.
I would rather give ~$500 a month in profit to a member of my community, than a national chain. I think it's odd to be against "the rich staying rich" while shrugging your shoulders at corporations throwing their weight around in the rental market.
Landlord are absolutely fine.
A sensible solution 12 months ago would have been to pay renters rent for them directly, but that wouldn't have been as desirable politically.
Housing would also be far cheaper if it wasn’t common to speculate on it, by landlords small and large. It used to be, in fact.
A far more sensible solution would be to outlaw owning a property one doesn’t live in, so housing prices would come down to levels where us renters would be able to buy.
An in-between solution would be massive social housing programmes, so people can rent much more cheaply from a non-profit entity. After all, building housing is a tiny fraction of the cost of housing, the rest is all speculation.
Homeowners speculate too. It would be hard to find someone buying a home who was not considering its future value.
After all, most cities have large numbers of unoccupied homes, owned merely as a financial instrument.
A single minimum wage used to be enough for a family to get a mortgage, that has not been true in many decades in most countries.
You truly can not determine if you can afford to buy a place until you take a multitude of factors into account, and they vary for each person and each property.
Not to mention, housing has high fixed costs and just isn't available for a lot of people. You need a down payment, various closing costs, proof of decent credit (not just that you haven't defaulted on a loan, but that you've been actively building credit), and ofttimes proof of some moderately high amount of income or sustained bank balance. Even with enough income to make the monthly payments you could still have to save and plan for years to get over the hump of actually buying a home.
Once you've actually bought the house, your actual expenses are burstier than when renting. You might get lucky, but if the furnace or something dies in the first couple of years you won't be able to weather that loss if you were just on the cusp of affording home ownership (whereas a renter would be just fine because it's their landlord's problem). Since certain major components of the house are effectively self insured, that raises the bar for initial savings you need to purchase a house with the same financial safety as renting.
There's an additional assumption you're glossing over -- that for every apartment there exists an equivalent or worse house. At times when I needed really cheap rent I could grab a 200sq ft studio apartment, but that option isn't readily available for most home buyers.
Even assuming buying were feasible for everyone it still wouldn't be close to optimal. The extra fixed costs associated with a home purchase or sale make it much more difficult to move for family issues, school, job opportunities, .... If you're in a situation where you plan to move every couple years then renting is likely cheaper (certainly easier) than purchasing a home, even in places where the rent is higher than an equivalent mortgage.
And on and on and on. If you're going to stay somewhere a few years and have a bit of a financial buffer then I totally agree that home ownership is often a good idea. It's not that clear cut for huge swathes of people though.
Maybe not for large commercial loans, but traditional mortgages (usually for 1-4 unit properties) absolutely could be deferred for ~1 year if you could show a loss of income from the pandemic.
But I doubt most of them are really "crippled" in light of crazy price appreciation on the other hand. They might be forced to sell due to cash flow problems (immediate cause of most business failures anyway, no?), but should still be in the plus after the sale goes through.
Governments that do such things tend to have very poor economies as a result, as very few businesses are willing to undertake such risks.
This is a textbook case of a moral hazard.
If you see someone steal something you shouldn't think you have to steal too because others will have benefit you don't.
It sounds less like moral hazard and more like jealousy. The people who didn't pay took a risk, ruined relationships with management. It will probably follow them around to credit reports and to the next place.
This isn't the situation, though. The situation is more like the government announced that theft of Playstations wouldn't be prosecuted; my friend stole a Playstation, I paid for my Playstation, and at the end of the day the government stepped and paid of my friend's Playstation off for him.
You're totally right that the government isn't punishing me for having paid for my Playstation. But economically I am being penalized for having not stolen my Playstation.
When the responsible thing to do and the economically advantageous thing to do are at odds, it's not far-fetched to expect fewer people doing the responsible thing.
Not allowing an owner to exercise all of his rights of ownership is a taking, even if it's not permanent.
You see this often with construction projects that expropriate not only the title to land needed, but also temporary servitudes (leases) on adjacent land for site access or extra room for construction.
Point being, the "temporary" nature of the order, and the fact that the landlord retains title/ ownership, doesn't preclude it from being an (un)constitutional "taking" of private property.
See, e.g., https://www.inversecondemnation.com/files/eviction-moratoriu... (massachusetts)
(A federal court also declined to block it)
I am too lazy to look at all of them.
The reason they are usually found not to be takings is twofold.
First, they only prevent a specific type of relief. In most of them, nothing in them stops the landlord from suing for money damages, or even necessarily for breach of contract with ejection as a remedy. They only usually prevent you from filing eviction petitions.
Second, they generally do not state that you are not owed the money, only that you may not temporarily collect it.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/takings goes through most of the current tests, and most moratorium rules fail them.
For example, taking again the MA one:
1. It does not allow permanent physical occupation (they are temporary)
2. It does not cause loss of all beneficial/productive uses of the land (you are still owed the money, and in fact can sue for money damages)
etc
To my mind, if the government suddenly refuses to evict anyone for public health reasons, the taking of intangible property rights is minimal, non-discriminatory and justified. We’re at war with a virus here, some sacrifices will have to be made. If people can be evicted, more people will die than if they stay put.
It's not that the judge needs to step in to decide whether failing to pay rent should result in eviction. It's that you can't forcibly evict someone as an individual (because forcible eviction can go nasty, from either party, very quickly, and historically abused).
You need the judge to determine that it's now time to invoke the police to enact a forcible eviction, because the renter won't leave quietly/on his own.
The judge does not determine whether the renter is qualified to live there despite not owning up to his side of the renter's agreement -- the judge determines whether the use of force is now justified.
>To my mind, if the government suddenly refuses to evict anyone for public health reasons, the taking of intangible property rights is minimal, non-discriminatory and justified.
But that's not the problem at hand. Any reasonable person over the last 1.5 years should have not paid rent, regardless of capability to do so, because the law guaranteed you couldn't be evicted for it (inability to pay was a qualification for the law, but it's hardly trivial to prove it wasn't covid-related). The worst case scenario is you have to pony-up when the moratorium expired (and did you really expect the majority of the population who couldn't pay rent, to suddenly have enough money to cover 1.5 years of rent? The government bailing them out was inevitable -- the alternative is a massive wave of backed-up evictions).
Furthermore, you could barely even evict misbehaving tenants, let alone sufficiently-wealthy-but-not-paying, because the courts assumed it would fall under a covid eviction.
The entire thing was a naively well-intended shitshow.
I say "if not someone actively worsening the system" because if you're buying property with the exclusive intention to rent it, there's a decent chance you're just taking available property off the market and contributing to ever-increasing prices, even though the value of the property is kind of just fake number, which increases the need to rent (and be dependent on you) in the first place.
Arbitrary regulation is not the economy.
If CA decides tomorrow to pass a bill that mandates all tech workers to have proper accreditation, including a bar exam, and to fine to oblivion companies that don't comply, is that the economy?
While not explicitly designed for landlords they technically qualified - even if the only person on payroll is themselves. I know multiple people, albeit in different lines or business, that had 5 to 6 figures of payroll loans forgiven.
The real loser here is the future of the US dollar.
This presumes that the quantity theory of money (and/or the theory of Ricardian equivalence) is correct, which it most likely is not[0]. Money printing does not cause hyper-inflation, as demonstrated in this CATO paper[1]. Governments are not households[2], because they hold monopolies on currency creation[3]. Also, currency creation is not 'debt'.[4]
It follows from this that there is a vast and largely unexplored space on the graph of currency creation over time, where the line can rise before it triggers negative systemic effects. A fiscally sovereign nation can never run out of its own currency.
This policy space is where the future lies, awaiting us. The worldview-assumptions implicit in your question would discourage us from exploring this space. That, in my view, would be the heart of folly.
Many thinking people in the economic and policy professions are realizing this, and not a moment too soon.
0. https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_money-and-banking-v2.0/s... 1. https://www.cato.org/working-paper/world-hyperinflations 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AyT9zftNrE 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIe_BiRIlgU
Governments that do such things tend to have excellent economies as a result by preventing a cascade of unneeded financial collapses and the social costs associated with dealing with that along with the increased human suffering of an already significant homeless population.
And, no, no one is going to buy your house if it has non-paying tenants that can't be evicted. They would just be inheriting your problem due to tenant's rights.
This would have required ~1 year of reserves, full on, for every unit. Thats a lot to ask if we want a real estate market that is diverse and not feudalistic in nature.
This is truly a moral hazard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
You must give a tax refund to anyone that did pay rent fair and square and also prove they paid under duress (paycheck to paycheck or some threshold near it). The only ones that don’t get a refund are those who live in affluent areas, or are well off beyond reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBbXwQTvl_g
It circumvents the moral hazard you mention while alleviating the problems that are impacting all of us.
It is not immediately. This has been going on for a year.
>This is a frustrating thing as someone who saves and has a safety net and other fallbacks in place.
It is one thing to save, but many people are not able to save for a year or more. They may have lost their job AND no longer get any rent money for a year.
You're just confused about who the parasites are.
Outside of that, like all investments renting a dwelling involves risks including the risk that you may not able to boot your tenet if they stop paying for a time.
I agree that this is a risk landlords must consider, but there is a big difference between ordinary investment risk (mispredicting future supply/demand/cost/etc.), or unforeseen accidents or "acts of god" (e.g. losing your rental property to a wildfire or flood), and the risk that some powerful third party will step in and prevent you from evicting someone squatting on your property. The first two cases are either your own fault or no-fault; the third case is a direct result of deliberate action by someone else, which means that they, not you, should be liable to repair the harm which they caused.
Is there? Your one example js weaker than you seem to think. For emergency room services, the law requires that for Medicare-participating hospitals. That's practically equivalent to a general requirement, but its legally distinct, and landlords don’t have a practical necessity to sell their services to the government as well as other customers.
And it's (generally) only mandatory when the patients condition is emergent, and the hospital is only required to stabilize them before discharging them. Not treat them indefinitely, or even treat/test for every presenting symptom they might have at the time.
Most states have similar eviction laws, giving renters 7-14 days to move out. After that, it's no longer an emergent condition.
In this case, however, the law was changed retroactively to an open-ended, tenant-gets-to-live-in-your-house-for-free. Hard to see how landlords should have factored the likelihood of that in.
If small investors were basing their calculations that the only risk is up to 90 days without rent... then yeah, they miscalculated the risks.
Succeeding in the real estate game is all about numbers. Lots of properties in a variety of locales spread the risk of one individual tenant bankrupting you.
Note: I'm not saying I agree with the mindset above, but this is a how a good chunk of people think.
I think "government bailout", while technically true, is a bit loaded, however. Landlord's hands were forced by the eviction moratorium - so it's a bailout for a problem the government caused.
Now, that "problem" is probably better then the alternative (a bunch of people suddenly becoming homeless in the middle of the pandemic), but the state did force landlords to not evict even if rent wasn't getting paid (not allowing them to find new renters who could try to).
It's money that's either contractually owed by the renter, or constitutionally owed by the government, as a private taking.
The landlords are being made whole, not getting "free" government bailout money.
Well, no, its not; its saying that if the government declares an eviction moratorium (which is extremely rare) without a rent moratorium, it might also, later, if finances ard convenient and it otherwise feels it expedient, retroactively decide to pay off unpaid rents before the end of that moratorium gets you evicted for unpaid rent.
(OTOH, the Fifth Amendment litigation already happening around the eviction moratorium itself might make that non-optional, anyway, and mooting that by providing full compensation now potentially saves the additional costs associated with litigation.)
I totally agree that the government screwed over landlords with the moratorium. Everyone with an IQ above room temperature at the time agreed a better solution was better unemployment insurance for those who lost their jobs.
It is created de novo within a computer system.
It is conceptualized, according to intellectual paradigms, as originating as a 'debt' and being "paid back" by taxes. But this accounting is fallacious. There is a movement in economics called MMT which is going to challenge these paradigms.
I suspect these sorts of political actions are a large part of the reason. It is just one more kick to a person who worked hard to cover their responsibilities. One more thing to make them wonder why they even try.
One can argue how much or in what way. One persons result doesn't translate to another's result.
Take your example, If you stopped going to work, I expect your success would probably go down. If you tried harder, your success would probably go up.
If there is no correlation between work and outcomes, why ever get a job, why ever get an education, or do anything remotely challenging?
I think it is crazy that people are propagating the idea that there is no advantage to self improvement, education, and trying anything.
You work on challenging things because it’s interesting to you, not because you’ll necessarily get paid more for it. If you work for JJ as a researcher you’re probably paid well, if your a postdoc you’re paid like shit. Same work. Being an ICU nurse is extremely challenging, but the paper pusher administrator above them will make more.
Education and self-improvement on average will increase your success. Toiling away at your job 80 hours a week, working two jobs, gigging on the weekends on average won’t.
One could argue (I would disagree) that taxpayers are hurt by this, but taxpayers and people who paid rent are not the same group.
How would you argue that they are not hurt by it?
Also, seems like this is largely being paid for with pandemic-related federal aid money, which I think had restrictions on how it can be used, unlike tax revenue.
The mass evictions have already been prevented, spending the money now will not retroactively change history. are you saying this will prevent future evictions?
>Also, seems like this is largely being paid for with pandemic-related federal aid money, which I think had restrictions on how it can be used, unlike tax revenue.
I don't see how the money coming from federal aid changes the cost to the tax payers? The money is either spent at the taxpayers expense or not.
No, they have not, because the eviction moratoriums were expiring, which allows landlords to start evicting now. You don't think the rent was just forgiven, do you? The law only stopped evictions, it didn't go and change all the rental contracts and force anything to be forgiven. It's still owed, and landlords can pursue tenants for the balance, they can add liens and garnish income whether an eviction happens or not. So there is a big overhang of unpaid rent that is going to be burning through people's credit histories, their future income, and their future ability to not be evicted or find housing elsewhere. The existence of that debt has nothing to do with whether the tenant is evicted -- it is owed even after eviction -- it can't just be ignored because there was a temporary moratorium on evictions.
The people who haven't paid their rent have done so by and large because they couldn't afford it, not because they just chose not to. Paying off their rent helps those people, the people who couldn't afford to pay it themselves, and ensures they don't lose their housing as a result.
It certainly is true that landlords benefit from this package as they get their money, as opposed to an alternative like forcing all rent debts to be forgiven. But "landlords benefit" isn't a harm.
Perhaps a more equitable solution would have been to determine the median rent across the state and then give that amount of money to all renters. But that has a lot of difficulties, such as how do you handle folks who rented only for part of this time (including those who had to stop renting due to job loss). And what about folks who own their homes and are dealing with mortgages; paying off rent is likely to be more accepted by non-renters than a plan where non-renters get money and renters don't. Of course, the plan could be extended to people with mortgages too. Or heck, just give this money to every person over 18 (or 21?) in the state. This would presumably significantly expand the costs involved in the plan though, but it would certainly be the most equitable.
opportunity cost?
I wasn't really objecting to the initiative necessarily, just lamenting the fact that the people who decided to sacrifice more to keep their rent paid up during a tough time instead of just letting it slide hoping they can figure something out later are the ones that aren't really gaining anything here. I don't know what the best solution would be here.
Something like a 0% interest loan from the government seems more fair here, but much harder to implement.
This specific way (and all the other bailouts the US does) wrecks people who are responsible and save. But it should be clear to everyone by now that holding USD and playing it safe are the losing positions, as all risk will be socialized and profit will be privatized.
Not playing the game means losing.
No, the middle class family benefits because there isn’t an army of homeless people in their city.
If landlords find their speculation doesn’t pay off, I’m not harmed. If millions of people are evicted, we are all harmed.
"I had known I was going to get a bailout I would have purposely not met my contractual obligations" isn't really the best argument.
No so hard to understand.
If you would have stopped paying then you're just mad that you didn't get out of your obligations and sacrificed when you didn't have to and feel like because of that you deserve it more, not that meeting one's obligations is something holy.
I understand the anger. But we're supposed to take a step back and not be jealous about good things happening to others.
Good for the people that didn't sacrifice and had a better quality life during COVID as a result. How could I ever wish anything else on them?
A tech worker could basically stop paying rent, stating they've been effected by COVID, even if they weren't, or if it was short-term, and then basically collect their tech salary check's while not paying rent.
They _could_ pay, chose not to, and reaped the benefits.
Plenty of rich people shoplift. It doesn't mean you should too.
A percentage of people park in handicap spaces when they legally shouldn't. Some people feel entitled and will take advantage of any situation.
You had to be that person above and still have the foresight to see this coming to pull off this scam.
Back to your example of shoplifting: If it’s a riot and looting is happening, then even people who normally wouldn’t steal or commit often join in. It’s mob mentality. “If everyone is doing it, why can’t I?”
By your logic if everyone but you get a $10,000 check you haven’t been punished? That’s ridiculous.
The reason to forgive any kind of debt is because the economic benefit of doing so it better than the alternative. Not because it's a reward for people who deserve it.
Idk if that changes anything but I think it’s worth pointing out.
There are plenty of ways for the state to use this money to benefit everyone instead of only landlords.
every time the government alters the fair-market price for things, a transfer of wealth is created. sometimes for the better. but yeah, in every case, someone is getting boned.
at least this is only addressing the past and not creating upside-down incentives going forward. if the state said they were paying off any delinquent rent going forward, then only a fool would pay their rent. although, I'm sure a lot of people are making a mental note for themselves to stop paying rent the next time there is a state of emergency.
Well, then this program should be welcome news. Instead of wrecking the lives of millions of people and turning them all out on the street, they instead get to keep their lives and careers and continue to pay taxes. Even if you ignored the incalculable misery a mass-eviction scenario would create, it wouldn't surprise me if paying off everyone's unpaid rent is actually cheaper than mass evictions, when the total cost of handling the resulting mass homelessness is taken into consideration.
That is how it harms people. Even worse, it harms only the most responsible people.
Whether you view it as an ethical win or a practical one, reducing homelessness helps all of us.
Like, if you're worried about the inflation shock that would create, then the same people who have the power to give a million dollars to everyone but me would certainly have the power to raise interest rates and take other measures to prevent the sudden mass availability of wealth from wrecking havoc on the economy. But that's a separate topic, and if I'm affected negatively by this, I'd be upset at the powers that be for failing to mitigate the negative consequences of their actions. I wouldn't be upset at all at the hundreds of millions of people who are suddenly wealthy.
Your company gives bonus to everyone except you.
Or if I live in a people-that-didn't-just-get-a-million-dollars-go-instantly-homeless-with-their-entire-family community, this is another big win for me. What a boon to the economy, and man we all just dodged a massive bullet.
Yeah, somebody is harmed. First, it's unfair. Second, you are competing for the same resources (house and etc.). Now you are at disadvantage.
You are correct in the sense that programs like this incentivize being irresponsible, on the surface. I went through all of college working extra-hard to make sure I came out debt-free, while other people racked up debt partying - and now they maybe get to get these loans completely forgiven?
It feels similar. But one thing I came to realize is overall, the people who are actually being benefited here are typically not people who wanted to not pay rent. They are people who wish their livelihoods weren't necessarily uprooted due to an unforeseen pandemic.
It punishes the "responsible" in the same vein that a libertarian might view taxes as punishment. But this is overwhelmingly helping those who got affected the hardest in society - so I think "punishment" is the wrong mindset, and it could really be viewed as just "helping" those who need the help the most.
You can raise the baseline without excessively penalizing those who were more responsible.
Honest question- do they in fact end up OK? What about their credit? I imagine most credit agencies, future landlords, lenders, etc. would consider it material information to know whether a borrower / prospective tenant had declined to / been unable to pay their rent for over a year.
Sorry California this is simply unacceptable.
The 2021 playbook: move to SF, defer your rent payments to the state to spend $0 on rent, steal all your necessities (up to $949/day) to reduce overhead
We believe the pandemic to be an emergency, and we believe college education to be noble, so people that take on this type of credit are more … noble? We don’t question that maybe some of these people took on an apartment that takes way too much of their budget monthly, or a degree that costs way too much for room and board and poor upside in the economy. But, we are totally willing to say ‘hey you know what credit cards are, you deserve what you get’.
Any of these people taking a bailout willing to take a hit on their credit report or the impact bankruptcy can have on you forever? Are they willing to move to public housing in exchange for the relief? Probably not, right?
No, sorry, this is the sins of the upper class spilling into the upper lower class, where there is a ‘noble’ group, your too big too fails, your white collared too good for jail, or in our lower ranks - ‘too good and decent to fail’.
We are expanding the pattern of the wealthy, and two wrongs don’t make a right.
"people... would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?"
Loss Aversion in action - people who were generally gainfully employed and able to make rent despise people who generally were not reliably employed and unable to make rent.
My last two industries (corporate events and travel respectively) got demolished by the pandemic. I'm much happier being consistently employed, staying off the dole, and being able to make rent but I should be thinking the poors can shove it, I guess.
They continue to live in the same world they did prior to the rent being paid for the others. It's simply, in my view, that someone else received an advantage and they did not.
My brother's gain is also my gain. Is the viewpoint I'm choosing to take on it.
Same reason why we are upset if our colleague has higher salary for the same job.
Only a year ago they declared a budget crisis with a $54 billion deficit. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-budget-crisis-gavin-...
Now they have a $75 billion budget surplus, 1/3 of which came from emergency federal funds: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/california-budget-su...
I suppose paying off past-due rent is fair to landlords who were required to house tenants rent-free and it could be argued that it’s coming from the federal COVID funds, but that’s still a huge chunk of budget to spend.
Not necessarily a problem if the State spent like that but they tend to spend like every year will be a fat year. Go figure.
Most of them are doing much better now since the pandemic-related economic downturn turned out to be much milder than originally anticipated.
- Federal funds is really just debt sold to investors and passed on to the states.
- Newsom is up for recall and most of the anger towards him is how much he fumbled stimulus and the pandemic.
Pretty easy to see that he probably called in some favors at the federal level to save himself.
You couldn't predict what happened this time; don't expect to fair any better next time. Much like everyone who was expecting a repeat of housing prices from 2008 sat around for a decade watching the opposite happen.
Why would land owners get a bailout? Because they were mandated by the government to provide their services without payment.
I agree that this policy punishes the responsible - the ones who made other sacrifices in order to not get behind on rent, because they were told they'd eventually owe back rent and didn't want to be in that hole.
Yes, but you don't expect to be forced to house people for free for over a year.
Nobody is forcing anybody to house people for free. Sure, you can’t evict, but you can sell your property and let that be someone else’s problem. The fact is, the price of rental properties didn’t crash, which means the majority of landlords didn’t mind the situation they were in all that much. I don’t know whether that’s because most people paid rent, most landlords didn’t mind not getting rent, or that there’s lots of money sloshing around looking for investment opportunities; I suspect it’s a mix of the first and third.
This seems pretty disingenuous. On the surface level it's obviously true, but that same logic applies to anything that people are obligated to do.
Like, I'm not forced to wear a seatbelt, but if I commute an hour-and-a-half from the boonies to my business each day, there's no reasonable alternative for the average person that doesn't completely uproot their life. I could definitely move to a new house or start up a new business closer to home, but I imagine most reasonable folks would say "Yeah, you kind of have to just wear your seatbelt now".
There are other issues like zoning laws which causes increases in housing pricing which wouldn't be solved by getting rid of landlords.
Instead we taxpayers have to.
CA is already the biggest landlord/homeowner friendly state by far with Prop 13 screwing everyone else. Not sure why landlords charging $4000 a month for a 100 year house gets off scot free when we have business shutting down permanently from COVID.
And the landlords were the only ones that were required to continue providing service without being paid.
These are also programs that landlords would have already directly and indirectly benefited from.
Most landlords are individuals with 1 or 2 properties and would not qualify for PPP, EIDL, Restaurant Revitalization Fund, or the Shuttered Venues Grant.
And even if there weren't programs focused on helping other industries, the way landlords were affected is unique since they had to continue providing service for free.
Were restaurants required to continue feeding people throughout the pandemic with no pay?
And they certainly didn't make them continue to pay workers who refused to work (from home or otherwise).
Or force them to provide their services/products for free to non-payers.
The additional cost of housing the renters is incremental.
I never really understand this. Let's say I own a 4 unit building on a decent sized lot in a big city. I make housing available to 3 other families in a place they could not afford to own. What is your alternative? I should tear down the apartments and opt to live in a single family home? How does that help anyone?
2. I make housing available to 3 other families
This is the point - the second sentence does not actually follow from the first. The person who built the building, either the actual builders or the investors, make it available. At this point, it is a normal service-provision kind of relationship you see across the economy.
Except, with landlords, it isn't that they provide the building. It's that they provide the land. The land is parcelled out in a manner which, at best could be compared to if we just gave rights to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to whichever radio stations started pumping waves into it first. Of course, in reality, land ownership is usually rooted in much more brutal and sordid stories in America.
So you essentially end up with a class of people who take no risks, provide no service, and add no value, employ nobody, and often literally do nothing.
The person who owns the land makes it available by deciding to rent to people. The person who owns the land can decide to tear it down or not rent to people.
>take no risks
Real estate is not a risk free investment. It would be much more popular than bonds (when interest rates aren't near zero) if it was.
>provide no service
Maintaining the property in a habitable condition is a service. Maintenance expenses are why a large number of people choose to rent instead of buy when staying somewhere short term.
>add no value
Making housing available in desirable locations for less than the cost of a SFH is adding value. It can reduce people's commute or put them in neighborhoods they want to live in. If that land was instead covered in SFHs (which seems to be the implied ideal for the "landlords should not exist" crowd) the number of people who could live there would be significantly reduced.
>employ nobody
Landscapers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, property managers, cleaners, inspectors. In the case of new construction, a lot more people.
>often literally do nothing
Ha. I wish.
No, the state makes it possible for the landlord to charge money for the land, by preventing squatting. The land is already available. It is the ownership that renders it unavailable.
As for the factual side of your argument (maintenance expenses as a motivator, etc), I can't comment. It's starkly different from my experience. I imagine it's actually starkly different from yours - you're just using it to rationalise the inequity.
Obviously, there can be incidental work in the maintenance of a monopoly. If somebody tomorrow gave me exclusive right to the fishing in the north sea, then I rented that out to fishing companies, there would be work involved. But fundamentally, renting out exclusive rights is not primarily about exchanging services for money. When you own land, you have just such an exclusive right, and it is just as predicated on the willingness of the state to back it, and is therefore an entirely political decision whether or not this is actually a good idea.
In the case of California, the state with a crazy unemployment problem, and sky-high property values, it's unarguable that the current system is not working. So questions of what is and is not a legitimate or useful monopoly over resources (land, in this case) should be totally on the table.
Is your main argument that because of the limited quantity of land it deserves special reconsideration, or do you think all or a vast number of property rights should be abolished?
Land should be regulated this way, but it isn't, because of the hangover (in europe) of medieval norms where landlords were essentially gangsters extracting protection money, or (in america) the essential abundance of land available for the taking[0].
If you have an expanding frontier, a fixed quantity (land) behaves like a growing quantity, so there isn't the intense pressure for land reform you got in europe. Except now, the land is all taken, so the regulatory regime which worked for a growing supply of land becomes increasingly dysfunctional, leading to problems with homelessness and tenant impoverishment, where people are paying increasing quantities of their income (50% +) to landlords, not because those landlords provide them with a good service, or because the landlords have high costs, but because it's their only choice.
[0] Obviously, the first nations population massively lost out in this.
I see all of these as problems with zoning. I could also rant about rent control but it has a much smaller effect compared to the prevention of construction and density.
My hesitation is that would be a total rewrite, and we have a system that works pretty well where we could remove some market distortions and have it working really well. Remove residential zoning restrictions and landlords will build, there is incentive for it. So much of LA is zoned for SFH+ADU, and your neighbors will sue you if you get creative. There is no room in the zoning code for low end housing. I read about these men's hotels [1] and I don't think you can build something like that anymore, something that addresses a need at a price point people can afford. It sounds crass but we need tenements, so someone who is barely scraping by has a bed, an address, and a shower.
There is nothing besides legacy rent control units at the $500/mo price point in LA. There should be. We shouldn't rely on rent control, where we privatize the costs of a social problem and give landlords a huge incentive to get people out. We should just build some livable shit.
1. https://newrepublic.com/article/161808/ewing-annex-hotel-hou...
Ultimately, commodity price is driven down by the fact there's always some industrialist who can flood the market with cheaper crap, until there's basically no profit in it. You can't flood the market with 'living in walking distance from work', and a large part of the cost of any building project is simply buying the plot to build on, because each landowner has no direct competition.
If making it available is such a no brainer, why did they sell the building?
If there was no value in selling the land and building to a new owner, developers would just cut out the middleman. The reality is that developers want to build and take profits today, not over 30 years and then build again with no risk of the previous property turning a loss.
Rent is incidental to the real profit that you make from owning a building - asset value appreciation. Often developers do cut out the middleman. It's also sometimes a simple matter of where your credit is coming from and what interest you're paying - obviously, high interest rates push you towards a quick sale, etc.
I honestly don't think it should be controversial that rent is a form of rent, that is, a type of income that derives from simple ownership of something, not from any service or product. But you know, here we are.
The argument is often as you say, that Land Lords add value by giving housing where people couldn't otherwise afford to live. And this is undercut by two points:
1. The landlord isn't the essential part there. If the point is to provide housing without having to buy, that's easily done with land trusts and co-ops. The only downside is that there isn't a Landlord to make a profit, but it's better for society as a whole.
2. If landlords didn't buy up properties for the purposes of turning around and renting them, the property values would be lower because there wouldn't be as much demand on the market. Then a decent portion of the people you're talking about not being able to afford to live there ... would be able to afford to live there.
My initial reaction is how does this address the issue of developing more units in dense urban environments? For example, if we convert all multi family dwellings in LA to CLTs. Housing is more affordable and no residents are being displaced. Now more people want to move to LA. Who builds housing for them?
They would be required for compete over an extremely limited number of SFHs. Unless the CLTs had a provision that every Nth year, they would be torn down and redeveloped for greater density, this sounds like it would cause a city to completely stagnate. That Nth year clause would really go against the non-displacement goal. It could be sustainable if a city had zero growth, but for desirable metro areas that are mostly developed, that is not the case.
Market rents cause healthy turn over. There are other ways to address affordability, such as addressing wage growth, removing density restrictions, or expanding Section 8. Non-profit landlords would just further distort the system by not addressing systemic needs that require capital.
The hardest part with this - as with many other similarly noble undertakings - is to find a person who's willing to do all the job of setting things up and then step aside.
As we empirically see, there are not many people like that, otherwise this country would be full of land trusts.
Why would there be less demand on the market? What you are saying is that without landlords there is an absence of properties that people want to live in. How else does the land lord increase demand? By buying units that he never intends to rent out? That type of owner is no longer a landlord, merely an investor.
>Then a decent portion of the people you're talking about not being able to afford to live there ... would be able to afford to live there.
They would be able to afford to live there because nobody else wants to live there? What? How is that supposed to be a good thing?
I honestly can't grasp the hate of landlords. It literally makes zero sense. Rent seeking is bad but all land owners engage in it. Landlords have at least some incentive to make scarce land available to as much people as possible. All the other types of owners would rather make as little land available to as few people as possible. That is truly perverse and should be punished with a land value tax (the landlord would have to pay it as well but he doesn't care, as he would still make money off of the improvement of the land, not the land itself).
An active problem in the US' form of capitalism is we don't let businesses die naturally. I think landlords fall under this - if they can't find renters for the prices they are charging, then their business is functionally failing, and it should be allowed to simply die. This is economically healthy at a more macro-level and invites better management practices and reduces people over-leveraging.
In this case, people were still renting, however, and functionally for free. Landlords got screwed due to government intervention - the moratorium on evictions forced landlord's hands - it was the state saying "your business structure must be forced to fail" here, which is pretty ridiculously unfair of the state.
Making the landlords whole seems entirely correct given their over-stepping measures earlier last year.
Government intervention constantly creates winners and losers. New laws are passed, businesses lose licenses, or maybe some other government action causes the business to lose money. At what point do we say “ok you get money because the government destroyed your business” and “too bad for you”?
I think I read somewhere that this specific issue is a legal one, but generally speaking I’m not sure why government action here is so different than other actions. Restaurants for example that we’re doing just fine went under. Why isn’t the government making them whole?
This probably was an easier one to solve too. You could have just said something like “everyone freeze”. No mortgage for the landlord or interest for one year. Tenants don’t have to pay rent for one year. And then you resume payments. You could argue the bank loses out but I’d say you’re just extending the loan a year so they’re not really taking a loss in the long term either. At least this would have been a better and more just solution.
Nothing wrong with being a landlord. The least productive and most predatory sector of the economy is the money lender (with interest of course).
The constant bailing out of only those who take risks is just socialization of risk and privatization of profit, I.e. corruption.
Also, do you really think that the average American who has been saddled with the average amount of student loan debt would really be in a superior financial position if their debts were lifted tomorrow? The debt itself was preventing them from doing other economically productive things (like buying more goods and services, investing money, buying a house) that generate tax revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if forgiving all student debts turns out to be the economically favorable thing to do in the long run.
If it causes the currency to lose value, then it is a loss for everyone. Go ahead and help the average American, just do it by giving everyone the same amount of money.
This program is about compensating landlords who were forced to provide housing for free, much like how hospitals get compensated to provide medical care to people who can't pay. I see no complaints about the latter, even though it's the same mechanism as the former.
Un, that’s an uncompensated condition of Medicare participation, and there are lots of complaints from hospitals about the lack of compensation, and from small government types about the mandate and its affect on costs for those who can pay, and even the existence of “socialist” Medicare in the first place.
Do you think hospitals should not be compensated for giving care to people who can't afford to pay?
[1] https://www.aha.org/system/files/2018-01/factsheet-hospital-...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
You, personally, as someone who paid rent isn't owed anything by the government?
By rewarding only those who made risky decisions (whether or not they could have done otherwise), the system incentivizes that behavior. The effects of which can be seen in numerous events in history.
Note that I am all for redistribution of wealth if need be, but the mechanism must be fair. If the concern is why the government is spending excessively in comparison to tax receipts, then that is a different problem with the solution of “marginal income/sales taxes”.
No one is being punished here. If you managed to pay rent, your pay-out was not having to deal with sudden mass homelessness from mass evictions, and all the downstream problems that would create for you.
The government forced landlords to house people who couldn't pay. This is about making the landlords whole, not renters.
There's also all kinds of opportunity costs. That money could have been used for tons of things, or they could have reduced their tax rate.
It may still be that this is the most prudent course of action. There is likely to be massive fallout when the eviction moratoriums end, and this seems likely to solve that. Pretending that there is no harm to people who paid their rent is disingenuous though.
Like, are you upset that the government compensates hospitals for caring for people who aren't able to pay? If not, then you understand that this concept is not harmful, and there is no disingenuousness.
But, we don't have either of these things right now, and the act of implementing them as a way to solve the immediate problem at hand -- compensating landlords for a service they were forced to provide as a means of staving off mass evictions once the moratorium expires -- is off the table, given the constraints of the pandemic relief funding that California was granted.
I can deal with slaps in the face. It's mostly an emotional feeling of being wronged. That's different than homelessness.
I feel a little torn: renters who may have lost their jobs, being able to get their heads above water seems to be a good thing. Bailing out the landlords seems to me to be less of a good thing.
In a world that seems increasingly to tilt in favor of the fortunate (those owning the land) and offers little to the unfortunate (the renters) my desire for justice wants the scale to tip the other direction at least once in a while.
Am I a bad person?
You’re not proving housing, you’re preventing people from having housing unless they pay you. When housing wasn’t a speculative investment it was far cheaper and far fewer people were forced to rent to make someone else money for no labour.
Why should tenants pay for the greed of landlords? They get paid for doing nothing, the least they could do is bear their own risks.
Building social housing, removing incentives for buy-to-rent, taxing second homes and capping rents to a fraction of minimum wage are all measures that can be introduced gradually on the way to de-commodifying housing.
You just sit on your computer programming or whatever you do. That is just getting paid for typing which is not real work. Maybe you should stop being greedy and just type for free.
And don’t be disingenuous, I get paid for labour while landlords get paid for ownership.
So many people have this juvenile notion of what a landlord is, too. They seem to think the only type of landlord is a mega-tycoon that owns hundreds of properties. Don't get me wrong, I am against all forms of theft so it's still wrong to steal from them, but it makes it a lot more apparent how wrong it is when you're stealing from the old Grandma that has 1 or 2 extra properties that she rents out.
The government doesn't owe you a particular market price, but when they interfere with your perfectly voluntary private business dealings (or just outright take your stuff for public use without just compensation, which is basically what happened here) that is a clear-cut example of theft.
That's not a service. The government requires you to do so by law, because they don't want landlords doing it themselves. They didn't take away some notary service you could get done by AAA -- they took away a fundamental means of doing business.
It's like claiming that the government took away a service (police) that you were expecting to have around. The police literally exist, and are required to be used, because they've already removed the option of self-policing.
Exactly. The issue is not merely that the government is no longer carrying out evictions for landlords. Leaving landlords to hire their own security teams and evict squatters at their own expense would be fine. What the government is doing, though, is employing force to actively prevent landlords from evicting squatters, which makes the government an accessory to the crime.
A renter and a landlord voluntary sign a contract. The renter says "I will give you $XXXX a month for 12 months", and the landlord says "I will provide a livable home for you for the period of 12 months." Both agree: voluntary business dealing.
Now the government comes in and says "Hey renter, you no longer have to fulfill your half of that agreement, but the landlord still does". The government has directly interfered with the voluntary business dealing between the renter and the landlord.
Consider the counterexample: the government comes in and says "Hey landlord, you no longer have to keep the home livable or do repairs, but the renter still needs to pay rent." This would be just as much an interference with voluntary business dealings as what really happened, and everyone seems to agree on this point.
2) You call this notion of a landlord as a mega-tycoon juvenile but then present the equally juvenile (in my opinion) idea that land lords are just old Grandma with 1 or 2 extra properties she rents out.
1 or 2 extra properties? Wow, grandma. Must be nice.
And I think the data will show that the trend in landlords is in fact toward mega-tycoons. (Sort of like the trend in farming that used to be old Grandpa with 1 or 2 acres.)
Imagine your neighbor sneezes. So the bank sends thugs to take steak your rent money. Then sending police to take your house for non payment.
All the while blaming you as the problem.
At some point the absurdity has to be dealt with.
Yes this argument is flawed. But so is the whole shutting down the economy thing.
The risk could not legally be mitigated. Otherwise, landlords would have evicted en masse everyone who couldn't pay after some period of time. I am friends with a few people who own houses. They were happy to help as long as their tenants could provide at least some payment. It's better in the long run to keep good tenants than to evict them even if it costs money in the short term. This isn't true in general however, and several places have toxic tenants who have refused to pay and are taking advantage of the moratorium.
This is the literal definition of theft by decree. Making landlords whole should be top priority if their intention is to save the housing market. Imagine if they didn't - what would happen? Landlords would require stellar credit, several months payment up front, and regular financial checks. This all assuming they just don't pack up and sell their property (which has gone up significantly in value) thereby reducing the available places to rent.
So the nightmare scenario here is more people own their homes?
I’m not sure I see why that’s bad, but it seems just as likely that they’re selling to other landlords more able to handle the vicissitudes of the market.
Businesses refuse to invest in those countries, and they have poor economies that people try to escape from and move to the US.
There's a general exodus of landlords from Seattle going on due to a series of punitive laws passed against them by the Seattle City Council.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/stop-new-ren...
What this means for renters is less places available for rent, at much higher prices.
Well, maybe not if fucking Caitlyn Jenner was governor.
"The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, BlackRock -- largely through its investment in the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes -- owns about 80,000...
"Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market."
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/blackrock-...
Also, this is looking at only 80/140 million units which are singly family.
I expect if you look at the other 60 million multi family units, the results would be the exact opposite. How many high rise apartment buildings in SF and NY are owned by individuals?
It looks as though that my kids will be unable to buy a home and may be renters-for-life — as with an increasingly larger percentage of the upcoming generations.
No doubt, like in every other pursuit of Capitalism, there will be mergers, buyouts, and consolidation of the entire "rental industry".
It is the government which has inflated the cost of housing and assets out of the reach of many people. For example, in 2020, there were 10 trillion dollars in US covid packages and federal reserve actions, which mostly went to corporation to buy assets out from under individuals. Thats > $60,000 per federal taxpayer.
A closer analogy is that the government seized your apartment for a year while still keeping you on the hook for mortgage payments and is now giving it back.
Right as in "morally right" or right as in "consistent with established precedent"? Because the answer is different depending on which one you pick. There is tons of precedent for people having negligible recourse when it's the government doing the screwing.
Maybe landlords losing their rental properties would allow more people to become homeowners. Earning money by charging rent (at a profit) is pure capitalism.
I’d happily pay everything besides the mortgage, it’d be far cheaper than my rent. Most months it’d even be zero. I could absolutely afford all maintenance costs, while I can’t afford the speculation-inflated price of the home I live in.
Collective ownership would be even better, sure. Before 89 my parents paid to the state ~5% of one wage for a good sized flat. That covered amortised construction costs and maintenance. Housing doesn’t have to be expensive.
Of everyone involved, the renters are the only one who received something in exchange of nothing.
On the other hand, it would make rental properties more risky without really impacting the risk to primary residences. It may decrease the price to outright buy properties if the market won't bear the increase in rent, making rental properties less profitable.
Also, there have been a lot of offers to the unfortunate. Stimulus checks were substantial, as were increases in unemployment benefits. The removal of a year and a half of rent payments is also a significant benefit. Removing a liability is almost as good as income.
I personally don’t like either solution: landlords should have taken a haircut. But it’s really hard to force landlords to take haircuts because the housing market is so incredibly illiquid; selling a house is a difficult transaction, once you’ve found a buyer you then need surveyors, who can delay the process long enough to cause the deal to fall through and the cycle to start over (and in LA the whole grandfathered housing tax creates even more perverse incentives). This way housing ends up being a bit of a unique asset class because selling up when faced with cash flow issues almost never makes economic sense. This ends up being a bit of a viscous cycle because it makes individual housing transactions extremely volatile.
It’s somewhat perverse that there aren’t real market makers in the domestic housing market.
It would be fantastic if there was some state market maker providing a buyer of last resort, that would have the economies of scale to make it work. It would allow the housing market to actually function as a market. In this case, if a landlord was having cash flow problems, they would be able to immediately liquidate. They’d take their haircut at a fair price that way. Right now, distressed property is a microeconomic quagmire.
Zillow and OpenDoor are making headways into this. See "iBuyers"
Forgive me if I ask - on what basis do you know this?
The quantity theory of money and the theory of Ricardian equivalence are most likely wrong[0]. What else remains to be said?
https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_money-and-banking-v2.0/s...
There is no reason for individuals who were employed throughout covid to receive this. Same for multinational rental companies who operated in the green throughout the pandemic.
I don't think my sliver of hope in public policy could handle it otherwise.
Meanwhile, most of the fully employed people I know with student debt are skipping payments in anticipation of federal loan forgiveness
It is not hard to show a 2020 tax filing and demonstrate income, or lack theof, and should be a reasonable request before giving someone 10s of thousands of taxpayer dollars.
What do you think would be an appropriate level of scrutiny? Should anyone be able to apply with no fact checking whatsoever?
If you follow this line of thinking to its conclusion, you'll come to the same conclusion that politicians of all stable countries realized a long time ago: society is a lot more stable, and a lot less violent-class-revolution-y, when everyone has affordable housing and basic needs met. By seeing to it they everyone is housed, dear resentful renter, you are saving yourself.
(I don't have a dog in this fight, I don't live in California, don't rent, don't own rental property.)
That sounds like a pretty privileged take on their parts. If they were wealthy enough to survive a global pandemic that upended the global economy without anyone's help, that speaks pretty well for them. But not everyone was so fortunate, and that's what this program addresses.
I see no cause for resentment here, anymore than I see cause for resentment against poor people on Medicaid while the more-fortunate pay for health insurance. Like, sure -- we could do something "radical" (by US standards) and make Medicaid available to everyone, but if the choice is between having health insurance only for those who can afford it (and sucks to be you if you can't), and having a Medicaid tax to pay for health coverage for those who can't afford insurance, I'd much rather take the latter.
If you read any of the comments you'll see that people who are against this are against this because it benefits the irresponsible more than the responsible. eg. "Initiatives like these always tend to hurt the most responsible people more than the rest" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27594862
EDIT: Sure, there are probably some people who were irresponsible. I'm not denying that. I'm asking whether or not we should we forgo helping the many people who were victims of this circumstance because some undeserving people might get something out of it? Sounds inhumane not to.
Unless you’re wealthy, the enemy is very clearly the rich and not those at or below you on the socioeconomic ladder.
> See also the discussion of student debt repayment
My brother and I went to the same university. His social life in high school was better than mine, but grades were worse for it, and he had to take on a lot of student debt. Meanwhile, I studied my ass off and earned a full-ride scholarship. And yet, if his loans got forgiven, I'd be ecstatic for him.
Homeless isn’t just something that impacts the person without the home, it effects everyone.
How Dickensian. Nothing is being done to you, so I fail to see how this could be seen as "punishing." It's not like living at the mercy of a state program is a good outcome -- before this program was announced, the life situations of many of these people and their dependents who "contribute less" was far, far more precarious. Why not just see this as an act of overdue mercy -- an act of your greater community pulling together to overcome a devastating plague that profoundly affected us all?
Also, how do you know that this is giving the recipients any advantage? If they're behind on their rent, they're already in shitty financial circumstances and probably already received credit score decreases.
There are example of landlords who no longer received rent, despite tenants still working from home. Tenants then used the savings to buy a house, leaving the landlord to try and recover lost rent.
Does that sound like the right people got the benefit?
If the answer to either of these is "no," then the question is fundamentally between helping everyone who's struggling (even those who don't deserve it), and helping no one. The former option might piss off a few fortunate people who could maintain rent (with sacrifices) during the pandemic, but the latter option would put many, many people and their dependents out on the street. The latter clearly creates far, far more pain and suffering than the former. Moreover, the former form of suffering is self-inflicted -- these fortunate people choose to feel resentment.
And your straw man is just that - a straw man. It’s not a choice between “forgive rent” or not. The current approach is shit. Find a better one.
Is that fair? Nothing has been taken from you.
Now think about it in terms of income inequality. If someone makes $1M per year, why do you care? It doesn't hurt you. You choose to feel resentment because someone else is better off.
> Now think about it in terms of income inequality. If someone makes $1M per year, why do you care? It doesn't hurt you.
I don't care, because by itself, someone else earning $1M per year doesn't affect me.
What I do care about is when people turn their wealth into power, because that does affect me (and many others). Like, income inequality wouldn't be a problem if the high-income people didn't keep using their wealth to exert undue influence (to put it politely) in politics, religion, media, and other shared aspects of our society.
See the difference? I don't resent people for being wealthy. My feelings towards them depend on the things they do with it.
Then we agree. I don't resent people for having their rent debt forgiven, I resent them for having it forgiven when they had the ability to pay it all along.
See where we’re going?
However, as US governments are prone to do, the decision is made to punish those who were prudent and made sacrifices, and to assist those who took risks. Which might be okay if the government was giving the cash to everyone, as that would not punish those who made sacrifices.
I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated we shut down the economy for so long. I’m frustrated we knew the infection and death rates were exaggerated by faulty PCR testing and financial perks for hospitals impacted by cases they could attribute to COVID.
I want to help the less fortunate. Plenty need it, including friends of mine. But somehow I feel slighted by this. Some of my neighbors in my building were posting rent strike signs on the walls. I never supported that.
I don’t like this, and I don’t like that I don’t like it. A 0% loan for the renters would make me happier, but that wouldn’t solve all the issues.
I’m already looking to leave the state. I don’t like where my tax money has been going or the regulations that have been pushed here. I was born and raised in California and it saddens me how it’s changed recently.
You can be frustrated without making up claims. Infection and death rates were not exaggerated. Death rates were higher initially due to the ramp up in proper treatment. Infection rates were subject to selection bias which skewed the denominator early on in the pandemic.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I'm not sure what you're trying to say about the false positive PCR tests in asymptomatic patients, but false positives in PCR tests are rare and would barely impact the numerator.
What's "specifically Covid related"? If a cancer patient catches Covid and takes a turn for the worse, it's fair to call Covid the cause of death. Did a sudden surge of people with asymptomatic Covid die in car crashes and cause LA to run out of crematoria capacity in January and February?
The unbiased way to look at it is excess deaths, since Covid was the only new major cause of death last year. Going by that, about 40k people died of Covid in California in 2020, or about 0.1% of the state's population.[1] The actual number is probably higher than that because flu deaths are way down in 2020 due to Covid countermeasures. And California had about 5k flu deaths in 2019.[2]
1. https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/27/40000-excess-deaths-i...
2. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/flu_pneumonia_mort...
Of course in some cases deaths were misreported as being due to COVID. And there may have been a financial incentive in some cases. But the impact of that is orders of magnitude less than the number of deaths and infections that were missed due to low testing.
Just look at the number of excess deaths. The picture is pretty clear.
It's not so simple so as to attribute all excess mortality to covid.
But when you have the count of COVID deaths, and they more or less match up with the number of excess deaths, I think it's a reasonable conclusion. Sure, there are excess deaths not accounted for and we can dig into those, but overall, the numbers match up.
There's a bit of Occam's Razor here, too. We have an explanation with numbers that match up quite nicely. Yet, due to the politicization of the pandemic, you have claims that "we don't know for sure" or worse yet, alternate theories with absolutely zero evidence to back it up. I'm open to hear theories, just as long as there is data to support them. I haven't seen any.
Or, they could not pay anyone's rent and see if anyone really gets evicted. It's not like there were a ton of people waiting to rent those apartments
Also, would you rather deal with the large amount of homelessness that would result in landlords having to mass-evict everyone who couldn't pay?
And while I am generally anti-rent-seeking, if we do not bail out landlords (whether or not they should be in their position not withstanding) then those homes will bought up by corporations and investment firms which absolutely should not own them.
Corporations foreclose at a much higher rate than individual landlords (look up "cash for keys") because they have the resources to do so. If we don't bail out landlords then we're looking at an acceleration of Corporate Feudalism.
Therefore, and it is tough for me to say, bailout landlords, then use tax credits to reward those who paid their rent on time, even if they were employed throughout the pandemic. Why? It is infinitely better to allow citizens to build their bank accounts rather than corporations and/or a generally ineffective government.
Everyone else who was able to continue paying rent gets $1250 * {however many months the government is covering}. Landlords included.
The landlord also has to agree to waive 20%.
All housing is very inflated right now so it is highly unlikely that their equity is under water.
The result of this action is to prop up asset prices and continue to make housing unaffordable for everyone in CA. The only way housing becomes more affordable in CA is to reduce the price of housing - aka reduce asset prices. This doesn't help.