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/
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?
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?
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".