Tenants prepare for unknown as eviction moratorium ends | Hacker News Reader

Tenants prepare for unknown as eviction moratorium ends

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29 pointsthrowkeep9 comments

Biden and the democrats failed to move on this, and we'll have no action during the 6 week recess. Unless this is being used as a political excuse for some sort of emergency session, or executive order.

However, I'm on the side of landlords in this. Many tenants are abusing the situation at the expense of their landlords. We live in a society that ostensibly respects property rights. Not only can they not evict nonpaying freeloaders, but tenants that aren't taking care of the property, or causing damage, or harassing neighbors are protected.

The people exploiting rent assistance and unemployment need to be kicked to the curb.

Some of the insane costs of rent and real estate is a direct result of people freeloading, and I've had to couch surf for 6 weeks and counting. I've had multiple opportunities lost because bad tenants couldn't be evicted. As one of the "homeless" I am glad the moratorium is ending. I look forward to the deals on foreclosures and damaged rental properties that will become available so I can find a place to live.

Maybe we should value human lives over property instead.

Maybe I am not searching for the right things, but there is a very strange lack of news about this.

There was some news about it a long time ago, but now that the time has come, I don't see many people talking about it.

I guess everyone's plan is to wait until there are a million more homeless people and riots on the streets again, and then start talking about it?

Government forces people to start working, gets them highly dependent upon government welfare, forces landlords to house them, Then they say “landlords you can evict them now”, and probably will pull the welfare around the same time because “lots of places are hiring”, but now those places have automated more, and they’re out of practice, so no job, and yep, they’re homeless. Let’s hope they weren’t getting oxy for their back pain they started to get since they could no longer exercise, because big pharma opiates are just primers for the real stuff, and if they go down that path, it will be that much more likely they remain homeless.

There's some mindblowing stuff in this story

>[...] the end of the federal moratorium means evictions could begin Monday, leading to a years' worth of evictions over several weeks

...

> More than 15 million people live in households that owe as much as $20 billion to their landlords, according to the Aspen Institute. As of July 5, roughly 3.6 million people in the U.S. said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

...

> The crisis will only get worse in September when the first foreclosure proceedings are expected to begin. An estimated 1.75 million homeowners — roughly 3.5% of all homes — are in some sort of forbearance plan with their banks, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. By comparison, about 10 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure after the housing bubble burst in 2008.

> The Biden administration had hoped that historic amounts of rental assistance allocated by Congress in December and March would help avert an eviction crisis.

> But so far, only about $3 billion of the first tranche of $25 billion had been distributed through June by states and localities. Another $21.5 billion will go to the states. The speed of disbursement picked up in June, but some states like New York have distributed almost nothing. Several others have only approved a few million dollars.

...

> Studies have shown evicted families face a laundry list of health problems, from higher infant mortality rates to high blood pressure to suicide. And taxpayers often foot the bill, from providing social services, health care and homeless services. One study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and Innovation for Justice Program at the University of Arizona found costs could reach $129 billion from pandemic-related evictions.

The TL;DR appears to be that the moratorium will not be extended long enough to allow states to distribute $25 billion dollars in rental assistance. A whole lot of people could end up homeless, which will be bad for them and society in general, and this could cost taxpayers up to 6x as much as the rental assistance program.

Way to go, government.

“Way to go, government” in placing a moratorium in the first place or letting it expire?

The moratorium is meant to protect good tenants from evil landlords but it doesn’t protect good landlords from evil tenants. So it is another special interest group that gets something, that only ends up hurting them.

The government gave what the people desired. “Way to go government”? Is like saying “government why did you give these children what they asked for?”

I meant “way to go” in ending up a situation where a grant from the government can’t be delivered in time, so a more expensive and damaging alternative becomes likely. It’s just poor organisation or coordination. I didn’t mean anything about the validity or appropriateness of the moratorium, or the ending of it. That wasn’t clear from the way I wrote my comment.

It’s a pity the article doesn’t go into more detail on the distribution. I felt that they kind of hinted that states had been slow to distribute the money to their constituents, but it doesn’t go any further.

You know the eviction moratorium was put in place to “avoid spreading covid”, so if a tenant still hasn’t been vaccinated and haven’t already got covid they can argue they are at a higher risk of spreading covid, so therefore they should not yet be able to get evicted. Maybe that is how you extend the moratorium.

Biden asked both the CDC and Congress to extend the moratorium, neither did. The CDC could have extended it on the same medical basis they used before. I don't know why Congress gave up on it. Maybe Biden can act himself, who knows what is allowed. The real fault seems to lie with the states though who didn't distribute the money they were supposed to, though you could also say that the relief money was delayed too long (this crisis didn't happen overnight, everyone knew it was coming). I wonder what will happen to that money now, does it still go to the landlords? If the tenants are evicted then they no longer have much reason or time to file the paperwork claiming the need (or can cancel any request they already made, though the landlords can file the paperwork themselves in some cases) and hence it seems likely some landlords do not get paid at all and the states keep the money or have to give it back (losing the taxes that would have been paid on it as well). Sounds like everyone involved loses. Tenants get evicted who could have continued paying future rent if they'd gotten the support thus completely disrupting their lives, some landlords don't get payed because tenants don't think they need apply for the support because they've been evicted possibly moving out of state to stay with relatives, the CDC gets more ill will as does Congress, and the president looks bad too, plus it costs society a lot more for a long time to come.

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