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They aren’t supposed to be able to appropriate your property. We literally have an amendment against that 3rd, 4th and 9th amendments

The Supreme Court refused to weigh in because “it was soon to expire”

10th amendment too?

5th amendment bars expropriation except without compensation

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

"[Recent 6th circuit decision against moratorium] deepens the circuit split with the badly flawed DC Circuit decision in favor of the moratorium, and thereby increases the likelihood that the issue will eventually reach the Supreme Court, if the moratorium is extended beyond its current July 31 expiration date. He is also right that the Supreme Court recently signaled that at least five of nine justices believe the moratorium is illegal, even as a narrow 5-4 majority also—for now—refused to block enforcement of the moratorium."

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/23/thoughts-on-the-sixth-c...

> We literally have an amendment

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.

I'm sympathetic to the bad timing, but that's just part of business. If I decided to do a start-up in 2001, right when the market crashed and funding dried up, well, bad timing--that's unfortunately how it goes. Your family members started a business, and running a business comes with risk. COVID (and the resulting rent moratoriums) was a black-swan event as far as risks go, but black-swan events exist. I'm very risk-averse, which is why I don't hang my shingle out there and start a business. I was once a landlord too, and got kind of screwed so I definitely will steer clear of that risky business in the future.

Black-swan events aren't just 'part of business' - they are generational events that upend the established norms of a market.

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.

This seems to be countering the grandparent comment ("yes, but ..."), but I'm not seeing where you address the core point --- real estate has a known risk profile which the government has shown a willingness to upend without any stopgaps to help struggling landlords, and a natural consequence of that increased risk is that smaller landlords will be priced out.

> Your family members started a business, and running a business comes with risk.

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.

The government also allowed for penalty free mortgage forbearance and has allotted significant amounts of money for rental assistance. They may even allow landlords to apply for that assistance on the behalf of their tenants.

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.

My friends parents had a house they fixed up, lived in, then moved. They then rented the house out and at the start of the pandemic gave the tenant a few months without having to pay (after she lost her job).

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.

The housing market is BOOMING!!! They are probably sitting on a ton of equity. If they don't want to deal with the tenant, they can sell and put a nice chunk of cash in their pocket.

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.

> 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.

You can't sell if you can't evict the squatter. I know someone looking to buy a house in our area and they've had to pass on a number of the houses for this reason - a renter squatting in the house rent free with no end in sight. The sellers were desparate for almost any offer, but who would buy under those circumstances?

>>The housing market is BOOMING!!!

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?

Blame your local state government[1] for not allocating the billions in rental assistance funds they received from the federal government. In many cases they aren't allocating these funds (and once available, landlords refuse to sign up for them) because they come with a "just cause" eviction policy if they are used.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/15/many-states-have-given-out-u...

> In many cases they aren't allocating these funds (and once available, landlords refuse to sign up for them) because they come with a "just cause" eviction policy if they are used.

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.

The house has probably appreciated in the past year so at least there’s that hedge.

I thought there was federal relief coming for landlords.

Was mortgage forbearance allowed on rental properties?

(sincerely curious)

Even mortgage forbearance wouldn’t help with taxes and the like.

That said, I don’t think that’s typically allowed on a second home.

Rent seeking is something totally different than collecting rent on a leased house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent

Rent-seeking is nevertheless what landlords are doing via the collection of rent on a leased house, in the cast majority of cases.

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.