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>but now it feels like the government can basically commandeer your property at will.

This is one of the scariest outcomes of the eviction moratorium. It is basically solidified the fact that you own nothing and the government can take and do with "your" property as it pleases when it pleases.

>you are just going to be left with large corporate landlords who are diversified enough that they can take the risk.

Again, so very true. Why do people think that big corporate landlords are going to be better than the small mom and pops they killed off? Soon everyone who rents will be paying to large kafkaesque monolith who makes you wait on the phone for 5 hours every time you have a problem.

> This is one of the scariest outcomes of the eviction moratorium. It is basically solidified the fact that you own nothing and the government can take and do with "your" property as it pleases when it pleases.

Well, but it's property you've rented out to someone else. IMO, once you've done that, it doesn't truly belong to just you, even if the deed is in your name. Someone else has set up their life in your space—and that's why most localities have laws about when you can evict someone and the process you have to go through.

> which is why most localities have laws about when you can evict someone and the process you have to go through.

Never has there been a law that says you cannot evict somebody after 18 months of not paying rent.

I think people who continue to blame business owners are being rather obtuse and dishonest about their stance.

>Never has there been a law that says you cannot evict somebody after 18 months of not paying rent.

I used to work in mortgage default - and yes some foreclosures. There are some really weird state laws that extend eviction protections.

In New York City, if a renter has an agreement with the person with the mortgage - the bank can foreclose on the house, but we must honor the rent agreement. We had someone rent their house to their mom for $500/month, we "got the house", but the mom got to stay as long as she paid us $500/month in rent

In Massachusetts (iirc), after filing the "first notice of default", banks need to wait well over a year before finalizing the foreclosure.

Foreclosures are ultimately handled at the county court house - and the county makes the rules. They county tells the bank "fill out this paperwork". After the 2008 recession, some counties would change the COLOR of the form and then tell banks "sorry, wrong form, start over" and let the tenants stay in their house.

I'm not opposed to any of these situations, I'm merely mentioning them because local governments can and DO place long protections for tenants.

I agree, I just think extrapolating "you own nothing and the government can take and do with 'your' property as it pleases" is going more than a little far!

Honestly, a better example of that would be eminent domain, which existed long before COVID. (I so happen to be in favor of eminent domain too, but now we're getting truly off topic!)

> Honestly, a better example of that would be eminent domain, which existed long before COVID

Eminent domain has a pretty rigorous, well-defined process (or at least I hope it does). Saying "OMG COVID, NOBODY GETS TO EVICT" over the course of 1 week with absolutely fuck-all thought given to how to unwind such a policy.... totally different beast. Especially given it was only supposed to be "two weeks to flatten the curve to protect healthcare".

And yeah, without eminent domain absolutely no large public works project would ever get built. There will always be somebody, somewhere who will block a large project no matter how many concessions to make for them. Society needs ways to route around that kind of stubbornness.

In my country you can ask a non-paying renter to leave after 3 missed monthly payments, but to actually get him out if he does not want to, that requires a court decision, and courts are slow. It may take months or years.

Slow justice is another form of injustice.

> now it feels like the government can basically commandeer your property at will.

I understand it feels more salient now, but the government basically always could.

They will take it over late tax payments amounting to a tiny fraction of the value.

They will take it to sell it to developers, who may not ever build anything there.

Cops will hound you until you leave if you meet some pre-crime criteria.

Or take it outright, if you rent to someone who cultivates illegal vegetation.

Or destroy it, chasing someone who might not even be in it, and you will not be reimbursed for this sort of 'taking'.

I get that the eviction thing seems new, and the goal is actually somewhat novel. But 'property rights' have never been as strong as a lot of people think.

(All of those things have happened fairly recently. I'm not going to spend the time finding a pile of links nearly everyone is just going to skip over.)

For what it's worth it's not like there's absolutely zero recourse. If the person is a grifter, in the sense that he actually does have money and just doesn't feel like paying, he can usually be pursued in civil court for the balance and a judgement can be entered.

Sure if the person has no assets at all or declares bankruptcy then that won't help. But in that case he's in the category of people that don't have any money.

I think a lot of people are unaware that there is a distinction between an eviction proceeding, which is a proceeding seeking the equitable remedy of dispossessing someone from a property, and a proceeding for damages, where you try to recover the money they should have paid you.

Eviction proceedings are typically in a specific housing court and rules are often stricter and have a lot of local subtlety. For example sometimes you can only pay a portion of what you owe to dismiss an eviction proceeding, and so on.

That doesn't necessarily change the amount of money actually owed though, which can still be recovered the normal way with a regular old lawsuit for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and so on.

I don't understand how they expect tenants to be able to backpay all the rent if they weren't able to work due to the pandemic.

If they were prevented from working or lost their jobs due to the Government lockdowns it only seems fair the Government pays their rent.

For the first few months' worth of rent, sure. But for recent rent, when they've been allowed to return to work but chose not to, no way.

How about this: Either the government lets you evict them, or the government pays their rent. But if the government prohibits evictions of non-paying tenants, and doesn't itself pay, how is that not "private property be[ing] taken for public use, without just compensation", and therefore a violation of the Fifth Amendment?

That definitely fixes the problem for the landlords, but I don't really like the idea of my tax dollars subsidizing deadbeats. What if the government paid the rent for now, but then came after the renters for it later with the same force that the IRS does?

It fixes the problem with the Constitution. The rest is "merely" a matter of the normal government functions of deciding who to take money from and what to spend it on, which will get sorted out in the normal political way.

Instead the government orders the landlord to caugh up the money. I think these landlords should sue the government and recover their losses

> now it feels like the government can basically commandeer your property at will

Owning property is basically a contract with a whole different kind of "governments" saying they will progressively use their soldiers to defend your property if it gets invaded by different kind of actors. So yeah.

Your friend is not the only one that got to see the harsher side of what the government is during the pandemic. People basically had their jobs made "illegal" from one week to the other because they were "unhealthy", like prostitution basically but yeah now suddenly selling luxury clothes on a mall was also like that.

I think the counter argument is this is used to discourage residential investment properties to the point where you’re either land banking or you sell it because it doesn’t give you the income you want. Hopefully local taxes will discourage the former.

> I see all these calls for "cancel rent", as if housing grows on trees and landlords are all some kind of Ebenezer stereotype, instead of being a lot of small-time folk just trying to get by.

So letting property should just be risk-free profit? Being a landlord is a business and businesses fail all the time.

I think the idea is that landlords did accept a risk that if tenants did not pay they would have the legal remedy to evict them.

It was the government that took away their legal remedy without any due process.

Comparing it to any other business, imagine the government coming in and saying you will continue having to operate your business but your customers no longer have to pay.

Businesses fail all the time, even though other kinds of businesses aren't required to keep providing products/services to people who stopped paying for them.

Where did you get that from?

why would he renew the lease for someone that isn't paying?

What do you think an eviction moratorium means? If tenants don't want to leave, landlords are powerless to make them, no matter what's in the lease.

are you a landlord?

How is that question relevant?

I see it too, and the answer seems to be that if we just socialism hard enough, everything will work out alright. This time, this time it will work.

This is reductive and the reality is the system typically fights hard against socialistic policy so we end up with half solutions like a moratorium instead of the government paying the rents on behalf of the tenants. Now you claim "Socialism. Bad." because of it.

Hey, speaking of reductive ... your interpretation of what I said is a great example of that.

As the parent poster said, most landlords are small-timers, but they get caricatured as New York slumlords scarfing down caviar while their tenants flinch over continually sparking bare wires flicker from a partially torn down kitchen wall. We have seen how the legislation passed for relief got warped to pay out to the big timers (just think of those hotel chains) instead of focusing on the smaller folks.

But when I bring up points like this, I just get the "well, if we abolished private property and everyone had a government-issued home ..." And the parent poster has had experience with that kind of comeback.

Can you be more specific about what you mean by this? There's something like 1 to 4 socialists in congress, which makes them a powerless fringe minority, so it's confusing that you would talk about them as if they were in charge.

I think a good (or at least simple) solution for this problem is to increase taxes on non-primary residences, as a simple case the tax rate could be:

20% + 10%/extra house

So if you own 9 houses you're paying 100% in taxes, making it untenable to be a large-scale landlord. This should cause a bunch of housing to go on the market with people wanting to avoid that tax risk, also driving housing costs down

How do you suppose this would work with, e.g., high-rise apartment buildings?

Yeah that's definitely one of the holes, I think it would have to be as condos that are for sale - and not solely as units to rent. Not a foolproof plan, but we could at least make it a law for normal single-family housing as a start and then figure out what makes sense elsewhere. Housing definitely seems complicated enough that you can't have one simple solution and we'll need a bunch of things that each help out a little bit

Surely if this guy is a known grifter it would've come up in a background check or credit check when he applied for the apartment. There is always a large risk that a tenant fails to pay rent, even before covid. If anything, your family member benefitted from the government offering rental assistance. It sounds like he wasn't fully aware of those risks when he decided to become a landlord. Being a landlord has never been a risk-free investment, but landlords love to pretend they are the victim anytime that risk doesn't pay off.

> Being a landlord has never been a risk-free investment

Never in a million years would any reasonable person think the government would come in and say "I don't care if they don't pay you for 18 months, you have to keep a roof over their head and play landlord to a complete deadbeat".

That is a contingency so far out of the norm it is a bit ridiculous to blame business owners for not preparing.

Blaming businesses for "not being prepared" for massive, completely unexpected government overreach is pretty lame.

No landlord has been receiving $0 in rent for the last 18 months. Either they accepted rental assistance from the government (covering the full amount of missing rent) or they have declined rental assistance from the government, and have evicted the tenant. The most strict eviction moratorium is in California, which bars "evictions if renters file a declaration about their financial hardships, and if they pay at least 25% of their debt by the end of January 2021."

Also, unless the landlord entered a 2 year lease with a tenant in February 2020, why would a landlord choose to renew a lease with a tenant who is paying $0? These eviction moratoriums do not just let any tenant stay and pay $0, there are very strict guidelines for what kind of tenants are not allowed to be evicted and for how long.

Additionally, during the Great Recession, the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act was passed which required 3 month notice to tenants before beginning the eviction process, so I do think it's fair to blame landlords if they are not able to afford their investment properties when a few months of rent is not paid on time.

> No landlord has been receiving $0 in rent for the last 18 months. Either they accepted rental assistance from the government (covering the full amount of missing rent) or they have declined rental assistance from the government, and have evicted the tenant.

Nice words, but bullshit.

I know multiple people (landlords and tenants) who have been attempting to get rental assistance. After 6 months of waiting, not one of them have gotten a dime. Has anyone here (landlord or tenant) applied for and received rental assistance from California? If so, I know some folks who would love to hear how you did it.

And the landlords still cannot evict. Despite the the moratorium not being absolute (for example, you can allegedly get evicted for lease violations other than non-payment), the courts simply will not accept eviction cases at all, making it effectively absolute.

It's convenient that we skip over the fact that the landlord did receive money from the feds