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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.