Millions Still Months Behind on Rent After Eviction Moratorium Ends
cbpp.org
cbpp.org
This is like saying "Millions of Americans still have credit card debt after law prohibiting cancelling of credit cards due to unpaid debts".
Separately, there are state and local programs doing rent forgiveness, eg. https://www.bcsh.ca.gov/covidrelief/
the moratorium didn't contribute to owing more, because the alternative was to have those people evicted and in the streets (in the middle of a pandemic no less). unless if they could have gone to a lower-rent shelter had they been evicted, they are going to owe just as much.
You could argue that the current state of large accrued rent liabilities is better than the alternative world of smaller liabilities, more homeless, more deaths, etc, but the OP is not making the inverse claim.
Further, IIRC the moratorium relied on self-reported hardship. Is it so hard to imagine that people who could have actually afforded their rent decided to game the system a bit and accrue (rather than pay) their liability? Such behavior would also cause the current liabilities to be higher.
Part of the reason it doesn't happen is that if a tenant is not savvy enough to move to a cheaper unit when their income declines, they are unlikely to be savvy enough to try to negotiate with the landlord for a reduced debt obligation in exchange for quickly vacating.
The responsible tenants move out promptly to a place they can afford (or move in with family) and the irresponsible ones wait to be evicted. Unfortunately there isn't much middle ground.
This idea that if you can't afford a meal in a restaurant then you must immediately go begging for food is just odd. People have agency. They plan out their lives according to what they can afford.
One drawback of trying to keep people who experience an income loss from living within their new (lower) means is that it prevents more rental units from coming online and thus rental prices from falling. A unit occupied by someone not paying rent is one taken out of the market, propping up prices for those that remain, and thus making it more expensive for the household to find a cheaper place to live. Many of the business that shut down during covid aren't coming back. They will be replaced by other businesses, and at some point you have to recognize that life has knocked you down a bit and it might take some time to get back to your previous spending level. When that happens, you don't move to the streets, you move to a place you can afford. The last thing you want to do is tell everyone to keep living in their old place and pretending as if nothing has changed.
If someone lost their job due to this, and gets evicted, there was no guarantee they would be able to find any job, anywhere. So moving to a cheaper place wasn't really an option.
I find it weird that Americans still argue about the eviction moratoriums and the money given to people to avoid mass homelessness and hopefulness. Nobody in France is arguing against the "partial unemployment" scheme that was implemented here that allowed employers to not lay off people and instead the government paid their salary( to an extent of course), or eviction moratoriums.
If anything, the criticism was that many people fell through the cracks.
Yes, there are no guarantees - ever.
> So moving to a cheaper place wasn't really an option.
Woah. How does that follow, now? While it's true that there are no guarantees in life, you always have options. But living in a place that you can't afford is not really one of them. Life is full of all sorts of crazy things that happen to you unexpectedly, and absolutely none of them entitle you to live beyond your means once your savings are exhausted. Now there are safety nets for income like unemployment insurance or SS disability, and with covid additional tax refunds were given, but none of these income insurance programs will be enough to make up for a lost job, so if you are one of those who lost their job due to covid, then your means will be reduced. And whatever those lower means are, you need to be able to pay rent from those means. It doesn't matter whether your means were reduced by covid or foreign competition or rising interest rates or going through a divorce.
Moreover the alternative view, that you don't need to pay your bills because covid happened, is a truly toxic form of entitlement.
Seems highly unlikely and also fine. If you want to introduce moral arguments, you can dig your own hole.
The income for those renting and not able to make rent regardless of what they save, wouldn't match adjusted price hikes regardless.
Maybe we are in two different ball parks.
Only if for those who decided to stop paying rent when they otherwise could have continued paying it. But those people were just really misinformed given their credit is wrecked and getting another apartment will be really hard (doubly so now that landlords scared of future moratoriums will shy away from low or even lower middle income tenants).
Or maybe you meant that the moratorium allowed the normal eviction rate to accumulate?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/09/24/august-e...
As the OP article states over 40 Billion has been obligated but states have not been fast enough to create systems to disburse (or were unwilling)
Bankruptcy is handled in Federal court.
It might be interesting to see what the consequence of a moratorium on bankruptcy proceedings in states failing to distribute rental relief funds might be.
If tenants aren't paying rents, and landlords aren't paying mortgages, banks and real estate trusts have illiquid assets of difficult-to-assess (and likely low) value.
With evictions, failures to assess risk ripple downwards, to tenants. Without evictions or bankruptcy closure, risk ripples upwards to creditors.
If someone lost their job due to covid, then they need to find a new job, and that often means finding a new job somewhere else and quite possibly for different pay. Similarly landlords in areas where jobs have dissapeared need to know what the true demand is for their units so they can be priced appropriately.
Just paying money to pretend nothing has changed in each location is not good for either the rental market, or the job market, or the people who are pretending.
Funding people to get through these rough times is not pretending at all.
Really, it is an investment. These people have agency they would not have otherwise and that counts for a lot!
Maybe they need to build a skill.
Or, they can get another job that pays well enough to keep them on a similar life path with similar expectations.
In the case of families, a forced move, or transition to being homeless has a huge impact on kids amd their development. Development which will have a significant impact on their politics.
"True demamd"
While I get what you mean here, it is also important to recognize a majority of the labor force at this point is underpaid. That same investment has educated people about markets and what they mean for labor better than most anything else has.
In many cases, getting another job is increasingly likely to result in under compensation. Some info out there pegs this at somewhere in the 10's of trillions over the last few decades, since late 70's.
Landlords are increasingly aware of what remote work means. If they are in an undesirable area, yeah rent is likely to have to go down, but given the low wage scenario out there, they could make the case it happens that way more than it should.
Some people are saving that money. Others may catch up on debts and such.
One member of my family basically arranged to be laid off so they can prep their home for sale and go mobile, homeless by choice with enough in their savings to live reasonably for a couple decades taking work where they can get it.
I think this has been great for the lower wage job market. People are balking, asking questions and often figuring out they can ask them in large numbers too.
A primary one being why they need to continue working for a wage that pays less than it costs them to exist and show up for work. Large employers have huge numbers of people on assistance while putting billions in profit in the bank.
They can still put most of those billions in the bank and pay people enough to make it and should.
Why should we be subsidizing labor like that?
Given new and better answers, more equitable from a labor point of view, landlords evaluating "true demand" may well realize they may not have to reduce rent as much as support labor getting paid enough to make it more than happens now.
And that is just for starters. We have all these things intertwined and need to think through higher order effects more than is happening today.
Further, during COVID with schools closed you could not find child care let alone affordable care. During COVID your job may not be available (restaurants / bars / gyms) because the government forced their business to close.
This was meant to be temporary stopgap measure to pay people whose jobs were lost due to the government closing their businesses. This isn’t the hand of the market at work.
Landlords also had relief. Everybody was offered money as a temporary measure. Prices will return.
> that ultimately helps only landlords
or, in the situation like COVID, helps the entire society.
> then they need to find a new job, and that often means finding a new job somewhere else and quite possibly for different pay
What if you are a certified gym instructor and the gyms are closed? Or a great childcare worker with all the daycares closed? Or a travel agent? Should they all just go and start bagging groceries or flipping burgers because those are the only jobs open?
What if you have children who are now stuck at home due to school closures? Who would look after them?
What you can do is give people money to pay rent. But there is no guarantee they will actually use it to pay rent. My guess is that the combination of a moratorium on evictions and giving people rent money would lead to a lot of rental debt accumulating, when what people need to do (if they lost a job due to covid) is reduce their expenses and move to a place they can afford at their new income level, rather than trying to keep staying in an apartment they can no longer afford to live in, waiting for a job to return that is likely to never return.
If everyone did this, rental rates would decline as they would reflect the new levels of income people are actually earning, rather than the levels of income people wish they would still be earning. With the current approach, false price signals are created that make it seem like there is more demand for apartments at a given price point than what people can actually afford, and long term this hurts everyone.
That's a lot of words to just say "there should have been mass homelessless".
From the ruling: “The C.D.C. has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion said. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the C.D.C. the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
The debt ceiling is a great example. The executive cannot spend what congress hasn't authorized.
What you say about spending is correct. And, yeah, the differences between the legislative and executive branches are important and more than technicalities.
I wouldn't say the executive branch is under "stricter rules" than the legislative branch. It just has different rules and different responsibilities.
The legislative branch creates laws. The executive branch enforces/executes laws. The judicial branch makes sure those laws are constitutional and identifies their limits/scope.
Of course there is some gray area as congress likes to give some of its powers to the executive branch so that they can say "that wasn't my idea" to unpopular ideas.
Rather than make a law that says "forget about all that rent from last year" they would more likely make a law that says "someone in the executive branch has the power to say: forget about all that rent"
The other route would be for the judicial branch to say the executive branch already has that power... But they just said it doesn't.
And that's how the wheel of government turns... In the US
> In the United States, "government" is considered to be divided into three branches; the legislature (the House of Representatives and the Senate) which makes law, the Administration (under the President) which runs sections of government within the law, and the Courts, which adjudicate on matters of the law. This is a much wider meaning of "government" than exists in other countries where the term "government" means the ruling political force of the prime minister and his/her cabinet ministers (what Americans would call the Administration).
I believe usually in countries with a parliamentary system, the government refers specifically to the executive branch, and neither the legislature nor the judiciary.
> There are worse things than getting sick.
Disease control codes are as old as law. We live in a society, and part of keeping society running is keeping it healthy.
the eviction moratorium was implemented because the alternative was a good fraction of the population getting evicted on a very short timescale. the legal and police infrastructure to carry it out simply did not exist, and any attempt would have been overwhelmed with refusal and defensive organizing.
any solution would have been problematic and disruptive to property rights. the CDC exceeding their authority just provided some realpolitik deniability for elected officials, and prevented open revolt.
If the "government" wanted something enough, they could get a supermajority together in congress and amend the constitution to make literally anything legal. But they haven't, in this case, done so.
As long as the Tenth is there, it is part of the constitution which all elected officials have sworn an oath to uphold.
That said, the US constitution is an interesting beast, because of the Supreme Court's very very progressive interpretation of the commerce clause.
The Supreme Court has a very large amount of discretion in these things.
"The Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary."
While it's true that the majority wasn't willing to separate the first and second sentences, the decision was along party lines, and it just does not seem reasonable to me that a federal law intended to give the HHS "responsibility for preventing the introduction, transmission and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States" would limit the authority granted in the section "Regulations to control communicable diseases" to nothing more than fumigation and pest control.
Because the list ends with "and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.", and the text forces you believe that either a) the federal government intended to express a belief (in the same bill that officially gives the federal government quarantine authority) that disease could be contained via sanitation and pest control, or that b) they intended to give the Surgeon General a lot of latitude.
The mortgagee in that case applied to the court for relief, and had to make ongoing payments during the period that relief was granted. The relief did not put the creditor at a substantial risk of bankruptcy.
If the regulation was tested, I think it would have survived the constitution. But I don’t think all of the conditions of it would. I’m skeptical that the criteria for qualifying, and the process for applying would have passed, and I think SCOTUS would probably expect more clarity on the obligations of applicants (ie around partial payments).
The constitution still exists during an emergency, and there’s still a bar that must be met when infringing upon the rights it grants. But SCOTUS tends to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of a law in cases where the simpler explanation is that the law was not appropriately applied.
I'm not sure how these are related to due process and the fifth amendment so I don't see how they would distinguish the two cases. Under the CDC moratorium eviction, tenants still needed to show the appropriate degree of financial hardship.
> But SCOTUS tends to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of a law in cases where the simpler explanation is that the law was not appropriately applied.
They're not arguing about that, because to do so would require something resembling a consensus on what the actual law is. They're arguing about statutory interpretation. The main thread of the dissent in Alabama Assn. of Realtors was that "[T]o make and enforce such regulations as in [its] judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, trans-mission, or spread of communicable diseases [inter-state]." means exactly what it says.
They seem to be the most obvious areas to appeal for a judicial review. According to the case law, all of the following have to be considered:
* The impact to the property owner
* Whether the compensation is just
* The level of due process afforded
* The overall rationality of the policy
The fact that the process doesn’t consider the financial impact to the landlords is an obvious point of contention. The fact that it essentially applied to all tenants, regardless of their circumstances, was a very extreme compromise of due process, and could be seen as undermining the rationale of the entire policy. The fact that tenants were not compelled to make the payments that they could afford to make undermines the justness of the compensation, and further undermines due process.
Just because the state has the power to infringe upon your rights in an emergency, doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want. The avenues from which you could approach a judicial review of the policy are perfectly obvious. Even if the moratorium itself is constitutional, there’s plenty of implementation details that are absolutely not obviously constitutional.
The US Congress can't just delete every single authority of the legislative and executive branch to the Surgeon General, a single sentence about "and other measures" cannot allow a Surgeon General to assume complete power.
This is where judicial interpretation comes into play with these laws. Congress writes bad laws sometimes.
I also know landlords who haven't been paid in 18 months. They don't even want rent, they just want them to leave.
Based on what I've seen, I strongly suspect there are people who legitimately couldn't pay. I'm also confident many (perhaps a majority) chose not to pay. The landlords I know aren't trying to recoup their losses (one landlord I know has ~100 families living on his properties and 1/4 haven't been paying him and it's nearly bankrupted his operation).
This is a very complicated situation, but from what I've seen the government should have stayed out of it. The checks could have covered peoples rent to a degree, landlords were / are pretty understanding in many cases, unemployment should have been more than enough... If not, unfortunately, that's life.
Now, we have these sob stories and the cascading issues to landlords. We also have a mass movement all at once, WITHOUT them having unemployment or much support, etc.
I can't believe we as society just laughed and robbed all the landlords. This is truly shameful.
https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-hous...
Note, Blackrock is also getting a ton of FED money
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-hires-blackrock-to-help-cal...
Remember, "by 2030: You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy."
https://rumble.com/vdgi1h-world-economic-forum-by-2030-youll...
I've also noticed a lot of people got 'new' cars (financed I'm sure), and are letting their old ones collect dust rather than selling them.
I'm guessing a lot of stuff is going to wind up being sold here shortly.
You were the one who assumed it was new new cars.
Part of the reason that used cars are in such short supply is that so many bought the used ones up.
We had an epidemic in my city of people with cars who never had one before, accidents everywhere. Paper plates were all you saw for months.
The bus lines speak for themselves.
The used cars didn't increase in value until well into the pandemic.
Blah blah sometimes explaining the real world to people in bubbles gets so old.
That's not even close to a free market. They benefited from that government interference, but now they are annoyed that their tenants are getting that support.
Landlords buy something, and then charge someone else more than it is worth to use it- because it is necessary. They are essentially home scalpers. Don’t feel bad for them.
You’re missing the point of what I am saying entirely though. If you treat housing as an investment and the investment goes sideways for whatever reason, why should anyone feel bad for you? It sucks, but that’s how investing works!
You don’t think other legislation/govt intervention impacts non-housing financial investments? Thems the breaks. They took the risk, let them own it. That’s literally the entire freaking point!
Modern landlords are mostly government subsidized (tax abetements, low financing rates for "business", etc).
There are definitely landlords that provide a valuable service, but there's a reason why profiteering landlords are almost universally disliked.
PS: Remember where we get the term "landlord" - the feudal lord that collected tax(aka rent) while providing a very specific service to the peasants on the land plot that was grated to him by the superior nobleman.
It's nothing like that today... Even the losses in their income get socialized - how do you think Donald paid only $750 in federal taxes? The whole system is setup to protect "landlords".
I don't necessarily have issue with someone renting out their second property, but I am starting to think the societal problems with large scale rental operations and the disappearance of land ownership as an achievable goal for so many, outweighs the right of large scale landlords to exist.
The people who are landlords agree to the risk of owning a property and renting it out to someone. Why should I feel bad when the risk comes to fruition? Why should anyone?
Should you be able to just profit endlessly on housing risk free for no dang reason other than you had money before someone else? I don’t know. I don’t really care. I have a feeling these landlords will be just fine.
The landlord didn't assume the risk that they couldn't remove the resident AND the resident wouldn't have to pay.
This was effectively the state seizing property, forcing the landlord to maintain the property and providing it to someone else.
You also probably don't know who most landlords are, but in way of example, say I rent out a room. Should I be subjected to someone living in my house, then lose my house because they aren't paying and I cannot afford to not rent out that room?
This is a common scenario.
That’s not how risk works.
> You also probably don't know who most landlords are, but in way of example, say I rent out a room. Should I be subjected to someone living in my house, then lose my house because they aren't paying and I cannot afford to not rent out that room?
My parents are landlords, god bless their souls. But they know what they got into. I chose to distance myself from their business because I find it morally revolting.
Also; don’t gamble your house away if you can’t afford to lose! That is how this works!
PS: my parents are making fucking bank as landlords right now! Don’t feel bad for any of them! They literally just made an offer on a third lake house.
Then they assumed wrong. National emergencies happen, in this instance a pandemic (that is still very much ongoing) meant that potentially millions of people stood to lose their livelihoods and their place to live. Millions of people with no jobs and no homes, a catastrophe, to put it mildly. Ordinary rules do not apply the same way in extraordinary situations.
How many landlords lost their homes due to this? How many could sell one of their properties and weather the storm with the profits?
>This was effectively the state seizing property, forcing the landlord to maintain the property and providing it to someone else.
No property was seized. The government did its most important job, namely supporting citizens who are unable to support themselves, those who do not have enough capital to weather a storm.
Someone who rents out a room is not going to lose their home from such a moratorium. It is a deliberately misleading argument to frame it like that, and it is not a common situation.
You don't plan, you get out. Maybe then government can find you some tiny box or tent to live in until you can plan and pay.
The rise in property values alone over the last 10+ years should have been more than plenty to cover any landlord's expenses due to the moratorium. They did not plan for the bad times, too bad for them. They had the means to mitigate by preparing, renters living paycheck to paycheck have no such possibility, so the government did its job for once and helped out the under-privileged.
So the landlords can just sell some of their properties, downsize and scale back until better times. They gambled on stability and lost.
Ok then. People who didn't take on the risk to buy a home in 2009 when homes were cheap should not complain that homes are too expensive now, therefore we should not have tax payer funded affordable housing. Those same people didn't take on the risk to go to school and get a better job. Why should I feel bad when someone wants the fruits of risk, but doesn't want to take on any of the risk?
You can argue that much of what we produce nowadays isn’t a fundamental “need” like shelter, but that’s really beside the point, and a function of our relative prosperity as compared to previous eras.
How do you propose housing be managed if not by voluntary exchanges?
Prospective future landlords should be able to tell this easily when they do a credit check. Good luck ever renting again! And if the landlord sues for the rent owed, and the person was still employed and making the same salary, many tenants will get a judgement against them.
I think in the future, landlords will only deal with two types of tenants -- those who paid rent during the pandemic, and those on Section 8.
> Prospective future landlords should be able to tell this easily when they do a credit check. Good luck ever renting again!
This is illegal in Seattle. Basically impossible to enforce, but illegal all the same. You are supposed to take the first renter that qualifies and passes a standard pre-screen - not with in-depth looks like that.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/want-to-ra...
This was proposed by Sawant, an economics professor.
Obviously this is fraud and maybe this person could be prosecuted for it, maybe, but it seems like the kind of thing that just slips through the yawning cracks.
Think what you will about the eviction moratorium, but why is it in the purview of the CDC to pass a rule that prevents evictions and under what authority? What does this have to do with disease control or prevention? I read through their charter [0] and it's weird that they have the authority to do this and no one questions it.
On top of society benefits, once someone becomes homeless, it’s a lot harder for them to get a job and re-integrate society / working world.
I know hotel owners that have people staying in the rooms for free for over a year causing damage and they cannot get rid of them.
Right now, what has happened is politicians found a way to dump the costs homeless/poor people onto select businesses/land owners rather than all taxpayers.
I'm fine with landlords having zero risk to their business model, if the profits that they could collect were strictly limited by the government.
Since it's not, tough luck. Sometimes, your business suffers because of no fault of your own. You're not entitled to guaranteed profits.
There are certain situations where otherwise important aspects like "individual freedom" and "individual are not really useful. Pandemic is one of them. War is another.
> The Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.
There is also 42 CFR 70.2 [2]
> Whenever the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines that the measures taken by health authorities of any State or possession (including political subdivisions thereof) are insufficient to prevent the spread of any of the communicable diseases from such State or possession to any other State or possession, he/she may take such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.
The main legal arguement is weather the second sentence of 264(a) should be read as expanding or restricting the authority granted by the first one. Even without that question, it is not clear that the first sentence on its own should be interpreted so broadly as to allow an eviction moratorium.
It is also weird to say that no one challanged it. It has been a controversial action from the start. And has been succesfully challenged in the courts.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/21a23_ap6c.pdf
Public health laws predate not just the constitution but the bible...the Romans had sanitary building codes, quarantine authority, etc. Protecting public welfare and safety, i.e., public health, is one of the duties of the state and until this pandemic very few actions taken in support of that have been questioned...especially by the courts. Historically, the first actions the US took related to public health came in the yellow fever epidemic in the late 1700s. That include banning trade between New York and Philadelphia, moving the seat of federal government, quarantining whole cities.
To your point, this power to quarantine isn't strictly part of the CDC charter but it is a power of the CDC workforce...specifically the Public Health Commissioned Corps (c.f. the Surgeon General). However, those actions occur through the CDC or the US public health service or the Department of Health and Human Services. Why the Trump administration chose to have the CDC issue the moratorium I'm not entirely clear. However, what you linked to is not the charter of the CDC, it is the charter of an advisory committee. Historically, for process reasons related to statutory authority and management of the Public Health Commissioned Corps, quarantine orders have come from the CDC when done for people at borders, the USDA for animals, and HHS for inside of the US.
But really what you want to know is about statutory authority...the Surgeon General, typically acting through the CDC, has clear authority at the border, and would seem to be reasonably assumed to have authority in the US. Quoting from USC 42.6A.II.G.264
>The Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.
Does that mean that because it was done by the CDC rather than the surgeon general it is invalid? Maybe...but clearly congress sought to give reasonably broad authority. Does restrictions on commerce via eviction moratoriums specifically fall under 'such regulations as in his judgement are necessary to prevent ...spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries? Maybe...I would say it does and traditionally courts say it does.
Quoting a source here "The only successful attacks on such exercises of state police power have been based on federal preemption of state laws that restricted interstate commerce or on laws that were mere shams for racial discrimination. Yet even interference with interstate commerce is not always fatal to health regulations. *If a state regulation is substantially related to health and safety, the Supreme Court will uphold it. This is true even if the regulation interferes with interstate commerce, such as would result from a cordon sanitaria in which all travel is forbidden. From vaccinations to quarantines, laws enacted to protect society have been upheld even when they force individuals to sacrifice liberty and privacy.*
Rent is a form of commerce, it is insanity that this was meaningfully challenged by the SCOTUS. It has never, in history of this country's, been meaningfully challenged. The government's responsibility is to the public health...not landlord's profits.
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/yourab...
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/yourab...
https://www.usphs.gov/about-us
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title42/html...
All of that said, I think you overestimate the number of homes held by struggling landlords, if even such a thing exists. Corps own a -lot- of rental homes.
That said, I don't know. I only know 75% of all rental houses in my market are owned by Blackrock.
I didn't address that part, mainly because I don't know specifics, only observations. In my area, they move in with family when they can. It's not uncommon to see 3 generation houses here. I have no idea what happens to those who don't have such a luxury.
The corps are the most cautious with rental background checks, and are probably suffering less from non-payment than less cautious individual landlords.
Let’s focus on Invitation Homes, a $21 billion publicly traded company that was spun off from Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity company, in 2017. Invitation Homes operates in 16 cities, with the biggest concentration in Atlanta, where it owns 12,556 houses. (Though that’s not much compared with the 80,000 homes sold in Atlanta each year, Invitation Homes bought 90 percent of the homes for sale in some ZIP codes in Atlanta in the early 2010s.) While normal people typically pay a mortgage interest rate between 2 percent and 4 percent these days, Invitation Homes can borrow money for far less: It’s getting billion-dollar loans at interest rates around 1.4 percent. In practice, this means that Invitation Homes can afford to tack on an extra $5,000 to $20,000 to the purchase price of every home, while getting the house at the same actual cost as a typical homeowner. While Invitation Homes uses a mixture of debt and cash from renters to buy houses, its offers are almost always all cash, which is a big leg up in a competitive market....
https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-hous...
I'm assuming the renters.
Many will find another rental.
What scares me is the homeless clusters I see popping up in my county.
It seems like many just gave up--for good reasons.
I have noticed towns, like Sausalito CA, are doing everything they can to get the homeless to move on.
I have a feeling a lot of towns, seemingly Liberal towns, are are using that Broken Window Pane theory to get the down, and out, out of their lily white upperclass lives.
They vote Democratic, but don't want those people near them.
(In all fairness Sausalito created their own problem before Covid. For years, we had Anchorouts. Sausalito decided to get tough with the Anchorouts. Sausalito claims the numbers were rising, but I feel they pulled those numbers out of their bungholes. I have watched the Anchorouts for years from my office, and if anything it looked like the numbers diminished. They decided to demolish boats they deemed unworthy.
They gave that power to a angry, drunkard, otherwise known as the Harbor Master. (Just a citizen who decided who's going to stay, and who's going to go. No rhyme or reason to his decisions, and wealthy yacht owners could moor in the same spot for months. As to the Drunkard charge, ask anyone at The No Name Bar. (If ever in Sausalito, visit the No Name Bar. You will see some funny very personal pictures of Clint Eastwood scattered about.)
These people's boats were demolished. They had nowhere to go, so they set if camp on the shore. Of course, Liberal Loaded Larry didn't like seeing the free loafers, and complained.
The end result is a bunch of homeless land bound campers are being harassed by local law enforcment, like $500 citations for petty violations. The Cops told the IJ, these people will never pay, so who cares how much the citation is? Cops don't realize citations eventually turn into warrants?
I'm sorry about my rant. I live in Marin County, CA, and my neighbors are unbelievable hippocrates, and this issue has been bothering me for awhile. Marin is home to our Governor, and his spoiled wife. Leave her Gavin. You know you want to.)
Also this part struck me as odd:
> The Supreme Court’s ruling creates a particular risk of eviction for families still recovering from the pandemic’s economic fallout.
In my understanding the court didn't say that a moratorium was unconstitutional, they only said that the CDC lacked that authority. So if Congress wanted to have that moratorium, they could have acted, but they didn't.
Remember: no forgiveness means eviction and bankruptcy, which disqualify you from renting practically anywhere.
But isn't it the case that we're about to hit a massive supply of new homes for sale and places to rent once the evictions get processed? And wouldn't such premiums be already embedded in new rents?
You could evict a ton of people in say Seattle, be extra strict about who you rent to next and still have no problem finding tenants.
And that’s what’s happening. In the past, landlord’s knew they had a formal eviction process to rely on if rent wasn’t paid. Now they are assuming that’s either unavailable or severely delayed, so they adjust who they rent to. Marginal tenant? Leave the place empty for a month and wait for someone better.
So not necessarily rents going up, but much more strict criteria for renting in the first place, which reduces supply (at least for certain demographics).
But now, you may have some losses to recoup and this whole thing is akin to theft/shrinkage of goods. It has to get factored into the price. Also, the biggest thing pushing rental prices IMO, housing prices. Since buying is the alternative to renting, they are strongly correlated.
So yes, you can be more picky to avoid an eviction, but what if an eviction is not an option next year? What do you do then? From what I've heard some landlords are moving the bar from the top 30% of tenants to the top 10% and would prefer to keep a unit empty just to get them.
I’d agree and in my mind it’s the risk factor I alluded to with this above quote. In my experience, increasing prices substantially automatically moves the bar for you since only people willing to pay the new price are actually highly qualified tenants.
FWIW, I had a $2700/month house that’s now at $4000/month. I did Essentially what you mentioned. In past, I’d list it and have it rented in a week or two. But had to sort through a bunch of under qualified applications. The new price only got a few applicants but they were all highly qualified. The tenant I accepted pre-paid for 12 months lease. The tight housing market and cash rich buys are the driving force though. My tenants probably would have bought a house but couldn’t find one and got pushed to renting until they do. This didn’t exist before, at least not to current levels, and without it I don’t think I’d be able to charge a premium.
I don’t know what I’d do if I was a landlord of low rent units. You cannot “go up market” like I did. I would certainly have to find a way to be more picky. Definitely not renting to someone who has a past due debt to their previous landlord. Being more diligent about checking landlord references, etc.
The "boom" in housing sales is more like that decade-old canard about the "shortage" of software engineers. Many of those sales aren't to the average joe moving to bottom-of-the-barrel low cost areas. Rather the to urban professionals (and a small but increasing part to financial firms) who wish to reside in an area cheaper than those in major metropolitan areas without being too distant from them. In other words it's a new suburban exodus and white it had begun a few years ago, it's been catapulted forward by state quarantining policies and WFH. In addition, greater individual access to market data has allowed for deals to be made across state (and even international) lines. The housing stock hasn't increased, just the options of where to live.
With regards to landlords, many don't have any guarantee that they'll have any new paying tenants, leave alone one that would subsidize the contractual violations of the previous tenants. As rent isn't infinitely elastic, landlords will likely have to sell their property to a financial holding company or a luxury property developer in order to recoup the losses sustained under the moratorium.
I heard form a realtor that they had 30% applied for rent hold but the number dropped (maybe 18%) when asked to fill forms provide documentation… etc
Re-reading, I’m so cynical Edit: sometime between posting other people have chimed in with speculation on how rent money was spent !
Deferred rent payments by tenant, and deferred mortgage payments by debtors means if tenants and owners get liquidated we'll see a flood of properties hit the market, driving down prices. Thusfar the bottom has fallen out due to covid, and the whole system has been propped along by the eviction moratorium, leading to the final hobbling days of the bubble....?
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
Most homes in my area have gained over 4 years of rent in value with the reduced interest rates.