A source familiar with the effort said the announcement would cover 80% of US counties and 90% of the US population.
Very poor decision. Biden has been President for six months and had plenty of time to deliver financial assistance to renters. While a short-term eviction ban was reasonable this long term moratorium is basically theft from landlords. This decision will antagonize Supreme Court members especially Brett Kavanaugh, who will never give Biden the benefit of the doubt again.
So if you only steal a little bit it is not so bad? The idea that the CDC (or even Congress) can pass a law to prevent the spread of disease encompasses such things as mandating the transfer of private property, one to another is an astounding one. Could they demand that grocery stores hand out food free of charge under the guise that proper nutrition helps stave off disease? What about mandating free resort vacations? Vacations reduce stress which causes disease.
The government has now taken ownership of people’s property using (continue to use) the CDC which has no authority.
I get that lots of people will be affected no matter what, but the more time it takes the more debt/unpaid rent people will accure and the you’re simply kicking the problem a bit further down the road. The CDC does not have that power, even remotely. It was bad when Trump did it (although at the peak of lockdowns you could see a point), and now Biden continues it (good intentions…hell, you know the drill).
The CDC now owns your house until they decide you can have it back and there is no way you will make (force) the renters pay back what they owe. The landlords have been mightly screwed.
I generally support Biden, but I think he got bad advice. Let a few Congressional lefties do their performance art.
This doesn’t help anyone. If someone is seriously behind on rent, the alarm bells needed to be going off a long time ago just in case they thought it was a rent free zone. No federal rent bail out is going to get through Congress. As mentioned above, there’s likely some relief in blue states, but a huge red chunk of the USA is going to be in a whole lot of pain.
This is similar to what I figured the best solution was. Have the government declare that all contracted-to payments required as a passage of time are not required as a matter of law for a certain duration. Individuals would have the ability to request aid to be able to get by economically without a source of income, whether directly from the effects of the pandemic or from the government mandate, but there would be no other need for federal aid beyond that. If you were in the position of making money based on the fact that you owned property or debt, you are exactly the kind of person who does not need help when the rest of the world shuts down, particularly if you’re not required to pay your mortgage. In the small edge case where you actually were getting by on that interest/rent, then the government will help you out.
Combined with an eviction moratorium on tenants who existed at the time the law was being considered, and you’d have the ability for life to go on as normal, aid to those who only seriously need the aid to survive, and a big middle finger to those who make excess profits on their capital for doing nothing but having time pass. Given that most leases are triple-net, building owners don’t need to make anything but a mortgage payment, which is not required during the time affected. Banks wouldn’t get their interest (or principal) coming in, but they wouldn’t have to pay for the service on their own debt, and their money is generally made by being able to take out debt at a lower rate than they can lend it out.
In no way would the government be taking any actual property from people - they would only be taking income generated by that property. That property would likely go down in value if the moratorium drags on, and people would be getting free benefit from using that property which they would normally have to pay for, but if it happened to absolutely everyone at the same time, the vast majority of those affected would just be the shareholders of banks and REITs. Those depending on the dividends from those or interest on bank deposits would be the targets of the only needed federal aid due to this program (though others out of a job would need some aid as well for food and other necessaries beyond rent).
There’s probably something I’m missing here about why this wasn’t done, other than the fact it benefits poor people and hurts rich people, which is most likely the real reason it wasn’t considered.
My first thought is that employers could then force their employees to work for free. They aren’t required to pay the to portion but they are still entitled to receive the from portion.
Even if you just tailored the law so it only applied to real estate contracts there would be a ton of unemployed people suddenly. All of the property managers, grounds keepers, front desk people. Basically every person working for companies that owned property would get furloughed immediately.
Question: have we some good solid source on the scope and scale of an imminent eviction/homelessness crisis as a result of the sunsetting of this benefit?
These are both (theoretically) primary sources, so I can only imagine what the differences are in their methodology. I suspect (but cannot prove) that people are less likely to be as open or forthright with someone from an official government agency in some parts of the country, which might account somewhat for the lower figure. But a private study giving ten times the number of a government study puts my teeth on edge.
This paper from the federal reserve critiques the survey conducted by the US Census Bureau: The Fed - Improving Housing Payment Projections during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Basically, it states that the questions it asked were flawed and don’t align with payments that actually occur. People who say that they’re at risk might not actually have any problems making rent, and people who say they aren’t at risk might not be good at predicting the future.
In summary: no. We do not have a good, solid source on the scope and scale of an imminent eviction crisis. Somewhere between 2 - 40 million people, which is far too fuzzy of a number to actually plan anything.
I think that the difference between the two numbers might be that the Census results was listing number of people who were behind on their rent or mortgage, and were “likely or somewhat likely” to be evicted/foreclosed in the next two months.
The other set seems to be the number of people who with no, slight or moderate confidence in being able to make rent.
So for purposes of counting people being out on the street, I think the Census number is probably better.
Thanks, all, after some point one gets to wonder “how really bad would it be” and that seems to be clear as mud… One tenth to one eight of the whole population at risk is hard to wrap your head around, as opposed to 1.5 or 2 percent.
(But yeah, be that as it may it was NOT that millions of people were going to be thrown on the sidewalk Monday morning. Some politicos need to get a grip.)
I bet there’s a lot of people out there though thinking: “Things as they are, I may lose my job again, and this time it seems I won’t have the extra $300/week in unemployment pay. So no, I’m not sure about making rent in the near future” even though right now they are employed and making it. This all may have spooked a large part of the population.
I must agree with others that a simple straight eviction ban, with no other adjustment measure for either landlord or tenant, had from Day One the twofold problem, for the tenant of what happens when it runs out, and for the landlord of what happens with their expenses.
There have been Emergency Rental Assistance programs in place, for those who lost employment or income due to the emergency, covering up to 12 months of rent or of rent and/or utilities arrears. So it’s not as if everyone with problems has been “paying nothing” during this year and a half. But that, itself,only delays the problem: if the month after this benefit runs out the persons still aren’t in a position to pay, then the clock starts ticking again – but at least it is not a full 12 months behind…
After the last economic shock back in 2007-9, a lot of people recovered. If they had education and skills, they eventually found work again though probably never got the kinds of income they were getting before. But a lot of people at the bottom rungs of the wage scale just got flushed down the toilet. It’s almost certain to happen again. American capitalism now ensures that the rich will get richer, the poor will become really poor, and the middle class will shrink.
And that brings to mind another thing – in the 2007-09 contraction, the different types of losses happened as the crisis progressed. You lost your job when your company announced layoffs, not when everyone else did. Not everyone’s mortgage was declared bad in the very first quarter of the recession and then not every one of them waited to be foreclosed in the last quarter. Something that seems to magnify the sense of “are people doomed” now seems to be an apparent idea (justified or not) that all the people who normally could have been evicted over 14 months of a bad economic downturn, would be evicted now in one fell swoop.
Biden knew for a fact what he was doing was unconstitutional. He was told explicitly that. But he wanted to get the political benefits of a few more weeks/months of the status quo. It’s not an uncommon tactic and there ought to be a larger penalty for knowingly violating constitutional rights.