Are there big numbers of people who haven’t paid rent for an entire year? I know many lost jobs due to the economic shutdown. However, between many regaining jobs and the extended unemployment/stimulus payments, aren’t the majority able to pay their rent now?
I haven’t followed this subject too closely. But are we perhaps going to see rent forgiveness happen, in which case, the landlords lose out?
When people think of landlords, they may think of big real estate companies with big apartment complexes, and deep pockets to pay all the bills even if tenants don’t pay rent. But many rental housing units are owned by investors with just a handful of properties, who depend on tenants paying rent so they in turn can pay all of the property taxes and other operating expenses on the property.
This could get ugly.
There are big numbers of people who are behind on their rent or mortgage by several months. At one point it was estimated that 36 percent of all households in the country were behind on rent or mortgage payments. Many of these people will never catch up.
They are going to have to move eventually. There had better be some place for them to go and some way for them to make a living when they get there.
COVID lock-downs do not help.
Yes, I agree.
Don’t get me wrong-I am not looking at this monolithically from the Landlord side. I recognize the large number of people who, through no actions or choice of their own, were denied by our own damned government the ability to work for a living and pay rent.
For me, it all boils down to that...again.
I am re-reading Thomas Sowell’s remarkable book “A Conflict of Visions” where he discusses the “constrained” (conservative) views versus the “unconstrained” (Leftist) views on things, and it impacts squarely and directly to the root of the core problem here.
In the constrained view (which is the same view that a free and open competitive market can make far better choices through the individual actions of large numbers of people than could ever be made by a group of “intelligent” people sitting in a room deciding how much should be paid for products could ever do) this COVID BS could have resulted in a more just approach if people had been allowed to make their own decisions.
Fewer or more people might have been afflicted or died with a more egalitarian and commonsense approach at a more individual level to whose business got to stay open and who got to go to work, and like water seeking its own level, when people saw the effects approach a real and deadly pandemic where 5-10% of the afflicted died (not even like the Bubonic Plague with a mortality rate of 30-50%) you would not have the government forcing people to shut businesses, denying people the right to work, forcing them to quarantine or even making them wear masks. People would do all that on their own, and more.
But instead, we got a relatively small cabal of “intelligent” people who made those choices for us, because in their views, we are incapable of making them on our own. To them, we are “children” requiring the “adults” to make decisions for us.
And in this, we get a government now largely populated by people bent on “social justice” and class warfare making deliberate politically or selfishly related choices for their own well being and financial gain or grift, and the casualties suffered by landlords who cannot pay their rent are, in their disgusting view, “collateral damage”.
You don’t even have to give them the truth serum to hear them say aloud “Too bad. You must die for the greater good. Your livelihood or opinion counts for naught.” though they might well couch it in different phrases.
And honestly-with all the graft and corruption that tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of printed cash being thrown around by profligate governmental holders of purse strings, how many of those dollars for rent relief go to clothes, cars, electronic equipment, vacations, or drugs and alcohol?
I certainly don’t feel a warm and fuzzy that the landlords will get their payments due.