US states brace for ‘avalanche’ of evictions as federal moratorium ends
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Restrictive zoning and bespoke, political hurdles against development do far more to restrict supply. I'm not understanding how housing that is in use can be considered supply available for others. Say we make it easier to evict and change nothing else: one family is evicted so another can take the unit. I don't see how that improves anything if the goal is to get both families housed. All it seems to do is enable landlords to play arbitrage and charge the highest possible price.
Well, look at what's happening in Vancouver (and a few other places, but Vancouver is just the most obvious example), and it will easily explain your confusion.
When it becomes too costly and problematic to deal with renting out your property to someone else, people who bought it as an investment will just hold onto it and let it sit empty[0]. It got bad enough, Vancouver ended up introducing a vacant property tax.
0. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/number-of-em...
Exactly. We are starting to recognize that, as a society, buying a house as an investment and letting it sit empty is anti-social, violent behavior that should be shunned, discouraged and punished to the fullest extent.
Strangely enough, the locals are voting for the same parties that enabled the situation in the first place.
> Vancouver ended up introducing a vacant property tax.
So you end up with a "tenant" that's a family member but not living there.
Have you been to the US?
From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street.
The poor do not deserve a roof.
---
Kind of sarcasm, but kind of true.
Is exactly the implication of market-based housing.
I was hoping that my explanation would help to illustrate how facilitating eviction won't help with rising homelessness. How it alone can actually foster the growth of homelessness. "Supply" created by evicting tenants is only supply for the people that can afford the new price.
The government won't build you a home, at least not the kind you'd want to live in.
The government needs to get out of the way of people trying to build homes, and it needs to protect the people that are currently housed.
Eviction enforcement is orthogonal to these concerns.
My understanding is that many do not consider homless shelters a dignifying place to live in: no private space, no private room, etc.
They'd rather live in their care or their tent where they have some "me" space, than in a shelter.
In Germany, for example, the government would pay for your rent before letting you sleep on the street, car, or tent. They don't consider shelters a dignifying place to live either, and having a sane place to live is pretty much a pre-requisite for being able to turn your life around.
Refugees were initially moved into refugee camps, so you didn't see them in cities, and then they were and still are being slowly integrated.
Refugee camps are no place to for people to live, but if you are escaping from a war zone, they are better than staying in the war zone.
Germany does provide (1) housing and (2) a living way to unemployed inhabitants without unemployment benefits, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept#Hartz_IV
Requesting it isn't hard. I know many highly educated people that suddenly had no income or were evicted, e.g., due to loosing all "student benefits" right the same day they finished university, including housing, being evicted a couple of days later. They got Hartz IV benefits in a matter of hours, which paid for an apartment and gave them 400 EUR or so per month for food and basic stuff (you can live an ok-ish life with that if housing is covered).
But most homeless I saw in the streets in Germany, which you can actually just go and talk to, didn't want to receive any help from the state, had psychological problems, didn't want to receive medical attention, etc.
Due to how the German system for this works, it is actually super hard to help these people. Still, in a sense, the people that are homeless in Germany, is because at least in some way, they want to. Since not being homeless - with the exception of refugees - is as easy as going by an office, signing a sheet of paper, and the government pays for your rent, heating, water, electricity, internet, clothes, work training, healthcare and on top gives you 400 EUR that you can spend however you want (food, or just booze, etc.).
For the refugees... Germany is tight on housing, and new developments are slow, so being 1 million houses short (for 1% of the population), and then taking 1 million refugees on top, their access to housing is improving very slowly. I'd say they are free to apply for asylum somewhere else, but pretty much everywhere else the conditions are much worse for them.
---
For context, relative to Germany's population, the 1 million of refugees Germany took per capita would be similar to the US taking 4-5 million refugees, in a very short period of time. IIRC, the US took less than 20k refugees from a war-zone they are very responsible for. At least they are consistent: they don't care about their homeless, and they don't care about the homeless they create everywhere else in the world. Then they are surprised when the homeless that end up growing up in ISIS camps end up flying planes into their skyscrapers.
But well over half of homeless people are addicts, and a lot of these folks will bail out of much nicer arrangements simply because they're not allowed to drink or do drugs.
Does that mean addicts should live in misery?
Addiction is a disease, it requires resources to treat.
I know there are folks who say out loud that addicts "deserve" their fate, and by that they mean society has a prerogative to ignore or punish them.
I'm certainly not one of those, and I appreciate that you're not either, but I also wouldn't say that society is obligated to expend unlimited resources to accommodate people that refuse to take care of themselves.
1. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-housing-homeless-cheaper-socie...
I've seen a lot of this first hand. I can see you have strong opinions, but I would encourage you to actually learn a bit about it, maybe volunteer at a shelter or with a treatment and placement organization.
1. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418546/study-finds-permane...
In your apparent lack of experience, you're strawmanning any argument that doesn't align with your opinions.
And you also apparently forgot to read the study you cited, because it supports exactly what I've been saying: fourteen percent of their participants could not be kept in their intensive housing+treatment program. Fourteen percent is a hell of a lot better than the usual two-thirds, but that's still a whole lot of people that we don't know how to help, no matter how many resources we throw at them. I know people just like that, even if you refuse to acknowledge their existence, and I don't pretend to have the answers. It's a hard, hard problem.
How about this: since you seem to have this figured out, write up your proposal for a permanent, humane solution for that fourteen percent. I'm sure the folks who've spent careers trying to figure it out would love to know what you think they're doing wrong. Go get em tiger!
You can and should avoid personal attacks and assumptions about my experience. You have failed to provide evidence to support your ancedotes.
>I know people just like that, even if you refuse to acknowledge their existence, and I don't pretend to have the answers.
I am not refusing to acknowledge the existence of that cohort. You are moving the goalposts: saying that if we can not find a solution for those people specifically, then we can not address the structural deficiencies that lead to the movement of more people into homelessness. The data shows "the streets (or prison)" is not "the endgame" for the 86% that actually benefit from supportive housing.
There is also a shortage, in some areas, of low income housing. I am not sure what it is like in Germany but developers don't want to create low income housing since it tends to be treated poorly and increases crime in the area. How does Germany deal with that or are the German homeless better stewards of the place they live?
It does not have to be an special "low income housing".
Also, in the US it is my understanding you don't have to go to low income housing, but non low income housing can reject you. Since people receiving money for housing do not tend to treat the housing well most landlords reject them. Why rent to somebody who is at an increased likelihood of damaging your place and won't have enough money to cover the damage?
In Germany the government gives you the money, and you to the landlord. The landlord doesn't need to know where you got the money.
Having said that, many landlords will reject based on looks, which can be tough.
> Wait so I could go to Germany, find an apartment that costs €10000 a month and the government would pay for it? Surely there is some kind of limit?
The government collects the rent prices of the last 4 years on each area, and uses them to create tables per region / city, of the upper limits.
Depending on the city, that might allow you to live downtown, or force you into the suburbs.
You can see one of these tables, e.g., for Munich, here: https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Sozialrefera...
There are single rooms < 50m2 for less than 680 EUR/month in munich. Not downtown, but not too far in the suburbs either. The prices there look ok for somebody without any assets nor income. Its not going to be luxurious, but it won't be crappy either. A university student might be living in worse conditions, which isn't bad for someone without income nor assets.
Berlin models homelessness efforts on US program: https://www.german-times.com/with-the-us-as-a-role-model-ber...
Berlin opens hostel for homeless (NOT "me" space): https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/berlin-hostel-help...
Half a decade ago, at least where I was there wasn't many homeless there, but the rents in Berlin have exploded since, so the situation might have changed there.
Homeless people don't "live" in shelters, they temporarily occupy them. Every morning the shelter kicks out the people that slept there and every evening people must queue to re-enter the shelter. Night-to-night, no one is guaranteed a bed.
This is not an "option" that enables meaningful participation in our economy and society nor does it facilitate the health and growth that is necessary for escaping poverty.
For example, it appears California is maintaining around 20% capacity utilization in shelters statewide on average.
Talk to the workers, and they'll tell you the main struggle is not running out of space, but getting homeless people in the door, because as you point out, shelter life sucks. You're absolutely right, one doesn't "live" in a shelter in any meaningful sense. They're not a permanent solution, and hardly even a temporary one.
>From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street.
Have you ever been to the US other than the west coast?
There's the occasional tent in a discreet spot in a vacant lot or under a bridge and the occasional car being lived out of at a truck stop. Maybe if you got every person living on the streets (vs a shelter) in a city to pick the same spot you'd have enough to be described as a "camp". It's nothing like you see on the west coast where the homeless are practically everywhere.
Been to Florida, Boston, NYC, Washington DC, etc.
Homeless people everywhere.
People living on the streets are not apparently more numerous in NYC, Boston, DC and the litany of other east coast and Midwest cities I have lived in or gone to for business than they are in London, Belfast and Antwerp (my limited first hand experience with western europe). You'll get the occasional tent somewhere, a car being lived out of in a parking lot, but it is by no means rampant. Heck, places that are known for being dumps, Chicago, Gary, Baltimore, Newark, etc. have far, far less homeless people on the streets than Seattle does.
Now, if you has said "Seattle, LA, San Fransisco" I would agree with you. Other than a few wealthy suburbs that actively kick out the homeless you'd have a hard time finding a park without a tent in it. But to frame rampant homelessness as a US problem or a liberal cities problem when it is almost purely a west coast problem is pure falsehood.
Just stop lying!
A group of 5 homeless people in each of the cities i've lived there would have been a huge group.
I've continuously encountered groups of 20-50 homeless people living in Boston, NYC, Miami, etc.
That's an order of magnitude more than what I consider "normal".
The west coast is another order of magnitude higher, with groups of 100s of homeless people around seattle, san francisco, san diego, LA, etc.
But that not makes the situation in the east coast cities i've visited "good". I consider the situation in the east coast "horrible", and in the west coast "war-zone like", when compared with the cities where I've lived in europe (madrid, barcelona, milan, munich, stuttgart, etc.).
>I've continuously encountered groups of 20-50 homeless people living in Boston, NYC, Miami, etc.
This just just not true.
About the only way to get 5+ homeless people in one spot in any of those cities is to do something that specifically encourages them to show up, like a church giving out free lunches on a Sunday.
I can't speak to Miami but I've commuted into (like train and walking, not just the highway) NYC and Boston, the latter more recently, and the most I've ever encountered with any regularity is groups of two (usually a pair of dudes who seem to look after each other's stuff). There are some panhandling points on the subways but any one point won't be occupied every day. The density of homeless is low enough that doesn't happen.
Your description of Germany fits with my observation of NYC, Boston, Newark, New Haven, Baltimore, basically the Boston-DC corridor.
https://wjla.com/news/local/shelter-dc-homelessness-pandemic
https://wamu.org/story/20/01/16/dozens-displaced-after-d-c-p...
1. Family members aren't "rich" by conventional standards, they worked for the government in mid-level jobs their whole lives and are retired.
2. They bought a house they planned to retire to, but then moved when they had issues with it. They planned to sell the house but due to timing issues (construction in the neighborhood) they wanted to wait, so temporarily rented it out.
3. They had bad timing: rented in early 2020, the renter paid 1 month of rent, and never after that. And I looked this guy up, he is a total freeloader, part of the blame is on my family for not better vetting him.
4. But the takeaway for small landlords is the government can basically appropriate your property whenever they want. So we're just left with giant landlords who can manage this risk, and which again leads to less available affordable housing and a further concentration of wealth.
The Supreme Court refused to weigh in because “it was soon to expire”
I never considered the 3rd amendment to be a protection against that but I can see how soldiers randomly living in your home could be seen as government appropriation
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/23/thoughts-on-the-sixth-c...
Feel the pain of 2A advocates. Or 14A (P&I) advocates. Or 10A advocates. Or..
The nature of government/authority is they will always creatively push the boundaries of what they can permissibly do. There are amendments that are considered "second-class" and even worse. If nobody defends it, it will not enforce itself.
For the above reasons. I struggle to be sympathetic to landlords. They were taken care of. And quite frankly, I think they are the least deserving of the assistance. Rent seekers and speculators should be last in line for help. When you buy an expensive house or a hot stock, things like pandemics, wars, and financial shocks are part of the risk profile.
After 6 months she agreed she was going to start paying (September 2020). She had a job, she had stimulus and she was buying nice TVs and stuff.
She never started paying again. The “government said she didn’t need to”.
My friends parents owe taxes, had to make repairs, have to pay insurance. They are out at least ten thousand dollars. At the same time, they are out of work.
What are they supposed to do? Sell to black rock, who are getting free funds from the FED (ie their taxes)?
https://strangesounds.org/2021/07/blackrock-is-buying-up-us-...
Landowners are typically nice, small time people who are renting out an old home. They take care of everything the renter doesn’t want to and in return receive a fee. The landlord takes all the risk.
You’re basically saying “bankrupt the grandma and grandpa, because young people would rather buy meme stocks or TVs than pay rent” that’s not all cases, but the government did give out thousands in free money for the unemployed. The dominos by me in a rural community is offering $25/hr + tips and can’t find people to work. There are job openings everywhere and I think people can make it work.
There’s not a great solution, but saying the landlord is on the hook when the government is supposed to represent everyone is not reasonable.
And the eviction moratorium does not remove the financial responsibility for past due rent. They can use threat of eviction after the the moratorium expires to force the tenant to pay past due rent. And if that doesn't work they can take the tenant to court. And as mentioned in my original comment, there will likely be financial assistance.
And to reiterate, I have zero sympathy for landlords who are essentially engaging in rent seeking and speculation (whether they realize it or not). If grandma and grandpa loose all of their money speculating on bitcoin, I will have zero sympathy for them. It is no different if they loose it all speculating on real estate. If they can't handle they downsides they should have put their money in a safer investment.
If you feel that way, you should also be opposed to the moratorium. Those people were speculating they’d still have jobs (according to the fed, people’s greatest single asset). And they lost it. There should be no sympathy?
I’m in agreement there. Let’s just let individuals figure it out and I think all would be better off. At least better than the law not being applied evenly.
So, why aren't these people investing in such an obvious gold rush as you are making it to be.
The devil is in details. There is a some underlying theme in your comments that people just wake up one day and realize they're magically owning home, which they can rent. Wisdom is in understanding that this is just another business, you pay for what you use. The provider takes a profit.
If you don't want things this way there are other systems to try(communism), your country doesn't seem to like them. In fact you guys have fought wars over the last century against it.
You got what you asked for. What are you complaining about now?
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/15/many-states-have-given-out-u...
Source? The clause in NY's ERAP says you can't evict them without a good reason, which is really no change to a normal eviction. What's protected against is a landlord collecting the money and then evicting the tenant anyway. Going forward, if the tenant fails to pay, comply with the lease, or anything else that would normally incur an eviction, the landlord is free to start the eviction process.
I don't think 'most landlords' would refuse that deal. Additionally, again, based off of NY's program, this isn't really something the landlords sign up for. It's tenant initiated. A landlord can fill out the application on behalf of the tenant, but the tenant still needs to make attestations and provide information the landlord most likely doesn't have.
I thought there was federal relief coming for landlords.
(sincerely curious)
That said, I don’t think that’s typically allowed on a second home.
If the rent being charged is in excess of market value, there is indisputably a surplus profit being pocketed by the owner, which thereby cancels any contribution back to society (quite the opposite, in fact, since the profit is directly off of the backs of tenants, who are typically not land / property owners).
However - even if the landlord is charging market rate, rent-seeking is still going on when the value of the property has appreciated (say, the whole neighborhood’s property values have gone up) and the owner is charging tenants in excess of what the owner is actually paying (which was negotiated at the time of purchase, when the value was lower) in order to make a profit where the owner has not contributed at least the same amount of value.
Since both of these tend to be the typical case in the landlord-tenant relationship - property value goes up, landlord accordingly raises rent in order to profit off of unearned income (which it is, at least according to US tax law), landlords are absolutely rent-seeking rent-seekers.
And while I sympathize with the plight of the retired granny and grampa landlords whose fatal flaw was trusting their no good, criminal-minded tenants too much - that does not hold a candle to the plight of the millions of working class Americans who will be sleeping in their cars because they didn’t have the foresight to become homeowners.
What happened here is that the government changed the rules (i.e. risk / reward profile) of a well-established market overnight with very little recourse for the players involved. It would be like the government removing FDIC insurance on savings accounts during a bank crisis.
Maybe necessary, but hard to argue it was fair.
My whole point is the government changed the rules in the middle of the game. Certainly bad tenants are always a risk, but not bad tenants that the government forces you to house for over a year.
What you're doing is like telling businesses that get nationalized by corrupt regimes "hey, business comes with risk". But my whole point is, eventually, nobody can accept those risks, so people choose not do to business, which actually makes things worse for everyone.
When it's harder to evict people start making judgement calls based on their perceptions. Some of those will be will be good judgment calls, but most won't be based on real data and good tenants will get passed up for bad reasons.
To be slightly more specific in my criticism, there are plenty of economies with far more protections for tenants, even non-paying ones, and they tend to have similar or lower rates of homelessness.
The effect on tenant selection would also not manifest in the current situation, where it’s a measure used once for a rather rare situation. And even if landlords were to try to avoid such risks, it isn’t clear how that would differ from the status quo? Presumably, they have always chosen the more financially secure tenant when given a choice.
# of properties for sale went way up, # of properties for rent is way down, and to get approved for a rent you more or less have to agree to give out your first born son.
Laying the burden on landlords for more than a few weeks is unconscionable and inequitable. I wonder how many small landlords sold or lost previously profitable properties due to their cash flow being decimated.
The long term rental market is damaged; landlords will now be hesitant to rent long term without significant protection like larger deposit requirements or even rent for less time to avoid being susceptible to some of these government actions.
I agree, government transferring the wealth indirectly would be better, but it's politically infeasible. Barring that, I'd rather help renters and hurt landlords than the other way around, since the latter are generally more stable.
Also, I don't think the effort to distribute money was really a failure, I think some states squandered it because they didn't want to give handouts, but it was likely one of the largest disburtions of direct aid in the history of the United States and coupled with other programs avoided an economic disaster that would have dwarfed 2008.
They did. The houses they were in.
> or build them housing,
This takes time and wouldn’t be done in time for the pandemic
> or distribute compensation to landlords temporarily.
Millions of people lost income during the pandemic. Including the tenants were talking about who are at risk of eviction. Why should landlord income be any more sacred than any other income?
Pensions are either from taxes(Now who is going to pay that on properties where people stay for free?), or from profits made in investments in larger economy. Where do the profits come from? People who borrow money to run businesses(which now have no profits, and are running on losses because people stay for free).
Read that all in reverse. The effects will be felt all over the economy.
Most other nations had much stronger safety nets than a few one-time payments of a few hundred dollars.
Quite a set of priorities are on display here.
Here's the breakout of the 2020 budget in picture form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
Alas, this argument is as old as the Constitution itself. "Madison asserted it amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section; that, as the United States is a government of limited and enumerated powers, the grant of power to tax and spend for the general national welfare must be confined to the enumerated legislative fields committed to the Congress. In this view the phrase is mere tautology, for taxation and appropriation are or may be necessary incidents of the exercise of any of the enumerated legislative powers. Hamilton, on the other hand, maintained the clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated, is not restricted in meaning by the grant of them, and Congress consequently has a substantive power to tax and to appropriate, limited only by the requirement that it shall be exercised to provide for the general welfare of the United States."[1]
Congress has the power to spend federal revenue. The responsibilities of Congress are explicitly defined in Section 8 of the Constitution. The first clause of Section 8 does include "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". That is for the welfare of the Union, not the individual residents of states. None of the powers of Congress are to distribute funds to individuals with charity programs. In fact, for much of the nations history using public funds for charity was an abhorrent idea.
[1]https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI_S8_C1_2/...
It hasn't impaired them? Owning an obligation is much worse than owning the cash. If someone didn't pay rent for 9 months, landlords might never see that money. When they could evict, they might only eat 3 months of losses, now they will have 9-12 months of losses. The owners are basically paying "rent" (debt service), so freeloaders can live there.
If anything, a chunk of relief money to renters should have been debt vouchers to their landlords that can redeem them for cash from the gov't. The gov't can then get repaid through federal tax returns. (or forgive them as a benefit)
The supreme court said the CDC exceeded their statutory authority [0]:
> As he often does, Kavanaugh wrote to explain why he voted to allow the moratorium to remain in place. On the one hand, he said he agreed with the District Court that the CDC exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a nationwide moratorium.
> But, he said, because the CDC has said it will end the moratorium in a few weeks he would allow it to remain in place. He said the extra weeks will "allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds."
> Kavanaugh made clear however, that if the government were to extend the moratorium past July 31, it would need "specific congressional authorization."
So it sounds like the eviction moratorium was illegal.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/eviction-moratorium-expiring...
The poor aren't stupid. They can figure out schemes and strategies just as well as Wall Street, they just have less opportunity in most circumstances.
I'm all for people being happy and especially for people being more successful while working less, as long as the "less work" means higher effective productivity per hour, or a choice to be happy by some other means.
The problem is when policy transfers wealth from people who do work to people who don't. Then the person isn't happy because of their own choices or more effective or better chosen efforts, it's just a transfer of happiness from a responsible person to someone who may or may not be.
Why is it that this line is brought up when it might be a poor person getting a hand out but never when it is a rich person being given a hand out? You'd think the focus would be on stopping the ultra-wealthy from draining the rest of society with their out-sized influence, not weighing the hearts of the poor against a feather.
Both have the effect of harming the professional, responsible, hard working, broader middle class.
And even hurting the professional, responsible, hard working, working poor. Because if you're working really hard for $10/hr and someone else is getting a handout, that means you have nothing extra to show for your efforts except exhaustion at the end of your day.
To be less acrimonious and more specific, when the people that Jimmy Johns employs require public assistance to make ends meet, who do you accuse of accepting hand outs? If it is the people in poverty I think you've gotten tricked into forgetting the people with the power to change things.
For one you have a certain number of actors who haven't paid their rent or mortgage simply because they haven't had to. This doesn't erase previous obligations but such people may be willing to walk away for other reasons or may attempt to negotiate with the owner or bank for a lower overall payment because that's better than the alternative.
For another, people still have to live somewhere. If anything you'll see the effect of this as a lowering of rents, which have otherwise soared. Residential landlords are generally less willing than commercial property owners to keep property vacant for extended periods to maintain the illusion of "market rate".
Lastly, unemployment is low and there's a lot of upward pressure on wages. This is not the environment where lots of people suddenly go homeless. This isn't the Great Depression. This isn't even 2008.
There are a lot of people who missed out on the spike in housing prices who are now rationalizing that result as this being a bubble about to burst.
Also, people who haven't been through this before have unrealistic views of the likelihood of actual doom and gloom scenarios. It happens less often than you think. If nothing else, governments have shown themselves more willing to intervene (for better or for worse) to stave off negative outcomes.
This just isn't a big deal.
The right way to deal with this issue is via the lawmaking process. If they want to extend the moratorium, they can do it at anytime, they just have to go through the process.
Others as well, including the sixth circuit. From https://reason.com/2021/07/26/federal-appeals-court-sneaks-i...:
> "The Sixth Circuit's ruling represents the sixth time a lower court has struck down the CDC's moratorium, with most decisions similarly criticizing the near-limitless powers the agency was trying to claim for itself."
It’s less clear cut than your suggesting. The Supreme Court left the memorandum in place 5-4 while saying they would reject continuing it without congressional involvement. So, it looks like the CDC could do this on the next pandemic, just not for this one.
It’s a tough balancing act because retroactively judging their response to COVID is one thing, but nobody wants to tie their hands of a vastly worse disease shows up. Biologically a disease could be airborne and more infectious with a 20+% case fatality rate and a 1 month incubation period. At which point just about anything is on the table.
It's not like the CDC uses these rules all the time.
> On Thursday, the White House confirmed it would let the moratorium expire because the supreme court said it would block additional extensions unless they were authorized by Congress.
The Supreme Court did vote 5-4 to leave the moratorium in place, but this NPR article provides more context:
> Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who cast the fifth and deciding vote, wrote in a concurring opinion that he voted not to end the eviction program only because it is set to expire on July 31, "and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution" of the funds that Congress appropriated to provide rental assistance to those in need due to the pandemic. He added, however, that in his view Congress would have to pass new and clearer legislation to extend the moratorium past July 31
(https://www.npr.org/2021/06/29/1003268497/the-supreme-court-...)
It sounds like the Supreme Court would block any renewed attempt to ban evictions, unless Congress was behind the attempt.
I'm threading the needle here, but that's what SCOTUS does.
However, the Supreme Court decided to punt and leave the moratorium in place since it is set to expire at the end of the month (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/29/1003268497/the-supreme-court-...) but warned that further extensions would need to go through Congress.
This is not rocket science. The question is not, "Did the CDC do the right thing?" or "Did the CDC have the right to do this thing?" but rather, "How long should the CDC be able to impose an emergency mandate like this before we insist on a more democratic approach?"
The CDC should not have the authority to appropriate property, not for a month, not for a minute.
The CDC does not have the ability to pay everyone's rent. If we could have relied on state governments or Congress to bail out rent for people who were unable to make rent otherwise, maybe the moratorium would not have been necessary. Unfortunately, that is not even remotely something we can rely on -- we have spent over a year arguing about whether the "relief" checks, which would not even cover rent in many cities, are too generous.
Emergency powers are not a problem -- in an emergency there is no time for political parties to work out some kind of deal or for judges to review facts / legal arguments, and we allow certain government agencies to take emergency actions in such situations. Look at how long it took for the courts to overrule the CDC; if that is how long it took to react to emergencies we would be at the mercy of every fire, disease outbreak, hurricane, etc. The only relevant question to protecting democracy is, "How long should an emergency order remain in effect before the legislature or judiciary gets involved?"
For every time there is a functioning court override, there are ten post-9/11 border zone 4a exclusions that never get restored.
Anyone who lived through September 11th in the USA and isn't scared of emergency powers isn't paying attention. The CIA's torture prisons are still operating, for example.
We have boundaries in law for a reason, even in emergencies.
We literally watched state and local government scale back their own application of emergency powers (in response to COVID) over the past few weeks.
I lived through 9/11 -- in fact I was in Lower Manhattan that very morning. I know all about the abuses of power that followed, but the fact is that many of those abuses were voted on by Congress and some have been renewed with one vote after another. It is a complete red herring.
The level of distrust in the government these days goes well beyond what the founders had in mind -- as evidenced by the fact that they created a government with an Executive, and gave the Executive powers that can clearly be executed without first consulting Congress or the Courts.
I am pretty sure that the maximum level of distrust of government the founders had in mind included powder and musket ball.
We're nowhere there yet.
See how the ICC has been stretched beyond all reason to grant federal powers.
Keep in mind, the Bill of Rights was written during the tail end of the smallpox pandemic which had a 30% mortality rate.
The clear separation and limits on government powers were considered to be a higher priority.
In the early days of the country we had plenty of exercises of emergency powers. It was common for large numbers of buildings to be demolished in an attempt to prevent fires from spreading across cities, and nobody waited for a judge to rule on the acceptability and compensation requirements of such actions. There was never any doubt that if a foreign army was invading the President could immediately order the US army and state militias to respond, without waiting for Congress to vote on a declaration of war.
It is also worth remembering that when the constitution was drafted the prevailing theory of disease was the "miasma theory," and only a rudimentary understanding of disease containment that included some vague concepts of quarantine. Disease outbreaks would routinely create ghost towns all over the country. I have no doubt that the framers of constitution, had they understood disease as we understand it today, would have had no problem whatsoever with the CDC's emergency powers and would have focused on how Congress could regulate those emergency actions (as they did with the military).
They've created this giant eviction logjam that's making a mess of a lot of things.
Don't want folks evicted? Give poor folks money so they can pay their rent or move to a cheaper place and pay rent etc etc. As it is, folks are trapped in their one location, can't look for work elsewhere etc. Landlords are screwed etc. Courts are going to be jammed up. And now there is going to be a huge and complicated bureaucracy, filled with fraud to try to get money to landlords etc.
A common counter argument is that people should simply make more but I’d like to see the amounts of those opportunities relative to the people who need them. Also, given today’s rental background checking, I’d claim that the landlords would simply charge more.
It's seen as better than getting stuck with someone not paying who you can't evict.
What happened is landords renting to well off people did fine - white collar workers actually did OK during COVID, and folks with money by and large kept paying. Landlords on lower end got screwed by and large (this includes more immigrant / minority landords). Then if you had some property managers etc on payroll you got all sorts of bailout money - so rich got richer.
One group that actually I think was happy was section 8 landlords because section 8 kept paying - so good on them.
So "what is minimum wage and how many people make it?" is an annoyingly complex question. One interesting stat is that about 28% of the US workforce makes under $15 an hour.
*EDIT: I meant this as some states have a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage, so they don't show up in stats like "how many Americans make the federal minimum wage". Sorry for the poor original phrasing.
However, the vast majority of workers will be paid at least federal minimum wage as I understand it.
Additionally, Wyoming and Georgia have a lower state minimum wage. Employers in the state that are subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act must pay the federal minimum wage. Here's who that covers: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/compliance-assistance/handy...
It's not.
[1] William Jennings Bryan described the concept using the metaphor of a "leak" in his Cross of Gold speech
They are literally doing that: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/coronavirus/assistan...
Want people to have healthcare? Make employers pay for it!
Want people to stay housed during a pandemic? Make landlords pay for it!
Want affordable housing? Make residential developers pay for it!
Turns out it's a lot easier to spend other people's money than it is to spend your own.
Budget surpluses are extremely harmful -- they shrink the money supply, forcing industry into deficit.
Are you OK with you and your descendants being made more poor by government dilution?
How much of your earnings are you comfortable forking over to government under threat of force?
To say that Federal Reserve (a private entity) actions are politically uncontested is dishonest. There have been plenty of voices against the Fed in the minority. Kennedy tried to end the Fed and there have been numerous congressional proposals to audit the Fed. None have ever achieved a majority.
The Federal Reserve (whether you mean the Board of Governors, the system, or any of the individual federal reserve banks) isn't a private entity.
(The Board of Governors is a federal agency; the rest are weird hybrids.)
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve):
It is governed by the presidentially appointed board of governors or Federal Reserve Board (FRB). Twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, located in cities throughout the nation, regulate and oversee privately owned commercial banks.
The federal government sets the salaries of the board's seven governors, and it receives all the system's annual profits, after dividends on member banks' capital investments are paid, and an account surplus is maintained. In 2015, the Federal Reserve earned a net income of $100.2 billion and transferred $97.7 billion to the U.S. Treasury.[24] Although an instrument of the US Government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the board of governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."
The USPS is an independent agency of the federal government receiving no taxpayer funding (except for services like postage purchased by other government agencies) that is funded by its own operational revenues.
The parts of the Fed that aren't the Board of Governors aren't really like that, either, though.
> an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the board of governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.
The first and third are the typical things that define “independent” federal agencies, the second is true of some of them (e.g., USPS).
The structure and composition of the Fed is special though, even in that context, but “private” seems to be misleading behind a false dichotomy.
It is kind of (though this term is charged because of the role corporatism played in the fascist public ideology, though the term is much older and not generally associated with authoritarianism), something of a corporatist institution in and by which state and private power are aligned.
What is dishonest is framing congressional spending in terms like "within its means" while also ignoring the Federal Reserve's ongoing dilution. Rather, monetary creation by the Fed and the Federal Government needs to be judged by the same standard. The pro-spending crowd calls this MMT, and the anti-dilution crowd calls this Austrian economics.
I personally would prefer the libertarian philosophy of more sound money, less (centralized) spending, and growing distributed wealth. But since that seems to be off the table, MMT is the remaining consistent approach. It makes more sense than profligate welfare to banks while turning the screws on everyone else. And with the way the Fed's feedback cycle is set up, it will actually cause less inflation than what we're currently getting.
A relevant example is that the last big tax cuts package in 2017 created lots of 'opportunity zones' which exempted people from paying capital gains on many real estate transactions. This was ostensibly to encourage investment in poor neighborhoods, but I live on the edge of one such opportunity zone and I can assure you it was already a red hot real estate market before that tax cut.
Everyone in this area gets junk mail from real estate agents on an almost daily basis because property prices have risen stratospherically and those agents get a 3% cut of any transaction they handle.
Simply letting developers build housing would do wonders for affordability.
That's all on top of 'the usual' government assistance, HUD, HEAP, etc.
Some tenants leveraged these programs and they won't be evicted. The ones who saw this as 'free money' and an opportunity to 'fuck those evil landlords' will be.
Reminds me a little of 2003. The big defense companies had posters in the metro touting their patriotism while taking in record profits, paying 30 million dollar CEO paychecks and receiving big tax cuts. And that while in Iraq low paid soldiers were injured and dying for an ill conceived war.
I guess the old saying to never let a good crisis go to waste is very true.
Once the place is vacant sell the property or re-rent with short term rentals.
Say I'm renting out some units and folks are many months behind... but they can pay for this month, and they are working and so on? Is it worth my time to evict them and get 0? or work something out?
I'm sure plenty of places would go for eviction but we'll see.
Not saying this is a great thing for a society, but without some form of tenant protection that is probably what landlords will do.
If they are paying now, I'd try to work out that they pay something extra towards the delinquency. If they can't, they can't. If you evict, that's probably another few months of process time minimum and they'll probably stop paying again once you serve notice.
Owning rental property is an investment, not a guaranteed income. There is investment risk. This is one of the times that the risk became reality.
Bottom line (I say this as a small-time landlord) if they are back to making payments I'd let them finish their lease. At renewal time both parties can decide if they want to continue. Write off any losses; it was a bad year and nobody is really at fault.
Renting is often risky even in good years, one bad tenant can't lose years of profit simply by not paying rent and leaving. If they don't trash the place, it'll need emptied before the next tenant moves in (cost). Then it's possible they do trash the place. And then it's possible they get mad and truly destroy the place (run the pipes). Generally people in these situations don't have money, so good luck getting it back in court. And there's countless stories before covid of people who knew how to play the game in certain areas and delay evictions for months.
Now on top of all those normal risks, you have to worry about the government handing out a year of free rent and not allowing you to evict someone.
Unless I find a renter who is literally a family friend, I don't believe I'd ever rent out a property I own.
On the other hand, I own my house and I’m very hesitant to rent out any space in it due to forfeiting control. I haven’t done much reading, but I think there may be some exceptions that make it easier to evict if someone is sharing your space vs renting an entire unit. That’s a different story but I don’t imagine this type of case having a significant impact on the market
Hope this helps.