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Comment by dntrkv | Hacker News Reader

Because the government put in place an eviction moratorium. Why do the landlords have to pick up the tab? If there was no moratorium and the landlords had the ability to evict, I would agree with you. But in this case, the government forced them to house people so they should pay up.

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Presumably the eviction moratorium was in place to prevent large-scale homelessness and social unrest. If 10% of the population was suddenly out on the streets, it would be total mayhem; near societal collapse. In a situation like that, how many good, paying tenants are there to go around, to replace the people that got evicted?

The government forced companies to stop work (retail, factories, etc.) but the companies had to pick up the tab. They had people on payroll, leases to pay, depreciating assets to get rid of.

Yes, and there were multiple programs enacted to help business owners (PPP, EIDL, Restaurant Revitalization Fund, etc) and employees (EDD, fed unemployment, etc)

And the landlords already used those.

which one of those helped landlords with mortgage payments?

No, the government didn’t force them to keep people on the payroll. They were free to fire employees.

They didn't force companies to continue employing workers, or continue their office leases, or continue any other expense.

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.

However if the landlords could have evicted non-paying renters they would still have to pay any mortgage payments on the property.

The additional cost of housing the renters is incremental.

If rental demand is anything to go by, they would have fared just fine.

The whole point of evicting non-paying renters is so you can replace them with paying renters. If you're prevented from doing that, you're losing 100% of the rent every month. That's the "cost of housing" the non-paying renters. It's not incremental, it's literally everything.

> Why do the landlords have to pick up the tab

Instead we taxpayers have to.

As we should, since the eviction moratorium was put in place to prevent mayhem during a pandemic that affects everyone.

I don't understand why landlords would be in a class by themselves when the pandemic hurt businesses/ventures across the board. Why are restaurants forced to close not made whole? What about factories that lost productivity? What about people that lost their lives being "essential workers"?

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.

PPP ($1T), EIDL ($300B), Stimulus Checks ($400B), Restaurant Revitalization Fund ($30B), EDD/Unemployment ($300 + $600 = $900/week per person) vs $5B ($45B extrapolated to the whole country) for landlords.

And the landlords were the only ones that were required to continue providing service without being paid.

Why are you including federal loan programs and stimulus checks when we're talking about a CA program that benefits only landlords?

These are also programs that landlords would have already directly and indirectly benefited from.

This program benefits the tenants who owe back rent, they indirectly benefit the landlords. Otherwise, the landlords can sue/evict those tenants with the repercussions associated with doing so. California stepped up to prevent this. Other states that don't do this, will have a lot of pissed off landlords and homeless people.

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?

This is a similar situation to rent control, it privatizes the costs of a social problem.

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