[HN Gopher] The Victims of the Eviction Moratorium
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The Victims of the Eviction Moratorium
Author : jseliger
Score : 27 points
Date : 2021-02-23 21:38 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reason.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reason.com)
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Clearly some landlords are getting hurt due to some tenants
| taking unethical advantage of the situation. But I think we need
| to wait to draw broad conclusions until this can be
| systematically analyzed at the macro level, rather than doing so
| from the one-off anecdotes in the article.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Landlords are part of the financial system. Deciding landlords
| must take the loss on rent so that their tenants can be safe is
| sensible health and social policy during the acute uncertain
| phase of the pandemic last year. That uncertainty is now gone.
|
| If the government wants to house people in rental properties
| indefinitely, then the government can pay to do so at the
| prevailing market rates.
| tomg wrote:
| I don't understand how a waiter and a home-care provider can
| afford to buy a rental property that is apparently worth charging
| $80,000/yr in rent. I'm in the wrong business!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| As with much of the US pandemic response, a half measure with
| significant consequences.
| testfoobar wrote:
| The sad part is how politicians and organized groups are
| seemingly afraid to change their direction for fear of voter
| retribution. Comparing datasets across states and regions, it
| is not entirely clear to me which had the most effective
| policies. I would like to see an official CDC report that
| identifies which policies worked and which did not. I don't
| think we're going to see a report - because it would become an
| instant political hot potato.
|
| Eviction moratoriums in 2021 - a full year after the start of
| the crisis are nonsensical. Individual owners such in the
| article will eventually lose their properties to deeper pockets
| - further entrenching wealth disparity.
| jedmeyers wrote:
| > Individual owners such in the article will eventually lose
| their properties to deeper pockets
|
| How do we know that's not the actual goal of those policies?
| testfoobar wrote:
| Sad story. It is time for eviction moratoriums to be lifted. The
| second peak of the pandemic is behind us in nearly all datasets
| in the United States.
| techsupporter wrote:
| But is the second-wave of the economy coming roaring back so
| that people have jobs to go to in order to pay rent behind us
| in nearly all datasets in the United States?
|
| Or would those people still be thrown out onto the street with
| no housing?
|
| Because if there's anything we need to be doing in the United
| States, particularly on the West Coast, it's bringing _more_
| people to homelessness.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I find it hard to be sympathetic with people who chose to
| overleverage themselves with their investments.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| You could make the exact same point towards the renters who
| were banking on their job to pay the rent. One is called a
| mortgage while the other is called rent.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There's a difference between working to eat, and investing.
| Investments have inherent risk, and if you can't bear that
| risk, don't overleverage yourself.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Reading the article, the owners aren't exactly rolling in
| it and are also depicted as mostly working class. If it
| wasn't for a global pandemic, most would have been fine and
| they would have thought to have invested very
| conservatively. In my mind, it's just that it's
| convenient/expedient to make them eat the cost of unpaid
| rent -
| rob74 wrote:
| The difference being that you can choose to take out a loan
| and buy a house, but you can't really choose not to pay rent
| (unless you want to be homeless of course, but that's not an
| option I would recommend to anyone)
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Do you also find it hard to sympathise with people who are
| trying to escape the trap of poverty? If I made assumptions
| about your circumstances, would I be surprised?
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I feel the same way about rent control. It's not fair for society
| at large to make property owners eat the cost or the lost
| potential income alone. I am aggressively pro rent control and
| pro eviction moratorium during the pandemic, but I am for a
| (progressive) tax to fund these programs. It's just unfair to
| make yourself feel good by supporting these programs when you
| don't have any skin in the game. I'm not naive though, I know
| that if you raise taxes to fund these programs as a society as
| opposed to a property owner having to fund it alone, those
| programs will lose their popularity. This is a case where most
| people's support for these programs is literally all talk. And
| yes, some property owners are scum and/or large corporations and
| people will game the system. But then you address that with
| oversight with teeth.
| pasabagi wrote:
| What is the moral basis of rent? Rent is by definition
| differentiated from service provision in that it is simply the
| use of a legal right to extract an income.
|
| I don't see a moral basis, so I don't see how anything that
| impacts the interests of renters can be unfair. Bad on
| pragmatic level, perhaps, but not a moral one.
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