Well, well, it looks like it’s one thing for the feds to allow six-month mortgage deferrals, but quite another thing for the oligopoly of the Big Five banks to actually do it.
Welcome to America. We can’t provide any sort of help to sober, hard-working, deserving poor if there’s even the slightest chance that a no-good layabout might benefit from it as well. Once you see the pattern, it applies to damn near everything wrong with this country.
Have you been a landlord, or looked into it? There’s not a book or guru that doesn’t tell you to budget for some empty units.
God forbid that we should require anything of them, even though we saved their asses in the last crash.
All too true, unfortunately.
Unless the no-good layabout is a big corporation. That’s different. :mad:
When I lived in a 100-unit complex, I used to turn the numbers over in my head. If the owner offered to give me the building, I wouldn’t have taken. I couldn’t see any way he could make any money, even in normal times.
X100
unoccupied units often require much more attention be paid to them and easily as much maintenance.
This is why if my uncle could get 75% of the rent, and a promise to eventually pay the rest, he was happy. It was actually cheaper than eviction procedures would have been. He was a landlord in Chicago in the 80s. I really have no idea what the housing situations was, other than, like any bid city, it was probably mostly NOT a tenant’s market, and I have no idea what the laws were regarding tenants’ rights regarding squatting, eviction, and so forth.
One note-- I don’t think he really just accepted an oral promise to pay the balance. I think he made them sign something that said he was NOT accepting it as payment in full, just a good-faith attempt to pay the debt, and the balance was still due.
He did evict people for breaking rules, though, like having pets they didn’t tell him about-- he wanted documentation on all pets, because he required proof that all of them had had their vaccinations, and he had a limit on the total weight of all dogs, and the number of cats. IIRC, you couldn’t have more than 100lbs of dog, whether it was one Malamute, a smallish Lab and a Beagle, or two Chihuahua and a Basset Hound. You could have three cat, or two cats and one dog. I think he charged a lot in pet rent too. But back them, he was one of few landlords who even allowed pets.
He also had a “No Smoking” in the buildings. He wasn’t progressive. He didn’t want fires. He got some kind of discount on his insurance with this policy.
He loved to sit and go over documents and leases. He would sit me down and explain them to me. I was a teenager.
I’ve always wondered if he wasn’t on the very edge of the autism spectrum. I mentioned it to my mother once, and you’d have though she was hearing bells. After that, she was telling people he was “slightly autistic.” She had self-diagnosed OCD of which she was oddly proud, so whatever.
I think we are talking past each other. Nobody, landlord or tenant, anticipated a pandemic. Everyone, landlord or tenant, took risks by renting.
The landlord took risks that a property might be vacant or that a renter might not pay, but the landlord had the eviction courts to move that tenant out and get a paying tenant in.
The tenant took the risk that a job loss could get them thrown out of their home on very short notice.
So what do you do when the unexpected happens? “No eviction” rules allocate all of the harm to the unexpected situation to the landlord. In this thread, we keep going back and forth: you highlight the risks that the landlord took, I highlight the risks that the tenant took, and you respond that this was unexpected and not part of the risk the tenant took. It’s was unexpected for the landlord as well.
It should not all be allocated to the landlord, which it currently is.
Further, to some others. I don’t dispute that especially in these times, it is desirable both from a moral and from a business perspective to take 50% or 75% instead of evicting and probably having the property vacant and getting 0%. But if you announce a “no eviction” rule, why would the tenant pay anything? The tenant can call you on the phone and tell you and your whole family to go get fucked and taunt you with a check for $0 and there is nothing you can do.
Also, repairs. If the central heat goes out, what happens when the landlord says, “Sorry pal, you are behind on the rent so I don’t have to make repairs”? Who pays for that when the landlord is out of money?
It’s not a free ride for tenants either. When the suspension of evictions is over, they will still be out on the street and with a big black mark on their credit report. (I think there are also agencies that specifically track bad tenants, and being on such lists will make it hard to get another rental.)
Listening to you, one might conclude that tenants are permanently immune from eviction. Seems to me that a tenant can still be evicted after the state of emergency is over. Am I wrong?
What a laughable assertion.
Tenants take the risk that their landlord will enter their home and steal their stuff.
Tenants take the risk that their landlord did not re-key the locks and a previous tenant or associate will enter their home and steal their stuff.
Tenants take the risk that the landlord will actually do necessary maintenance.
Tenants take the risk that their landlord will sell the place ad they’ll be kicked out by the new owner.
Tenants are not taking the risk that they’ll lose their job and be kicked out; they are removing the risks associated with being homeless.
Landlors, on the other hand, charge more than they are paying for the mortgage so that they build equity on someone else’s money.
Landlords normally hold all the power in the relationship; tenants have little or none.
Or they will have to pay what they owe. It’s an interest free loan, not a free place to live. Banks can borrow money for free right now, so this seems fair.
We jjust had the guy who was going to buy our property in Connecticut tell us that he was not going to be able to buy it after all - he is a lone electrician running his own business, and his jobs just dried up. mrAru and I discussed the issue, and we are going to let him rent it from us at a seriously cheap rent so it will not be standing empty [people local had been breaking in to steak copper and fixtures] We own both the CT place, and my family home here in western NY outright, all we need to pay is taxes and utilities, so we are doing OK … the land in Nevada I bought last summer only has taxes. Right now we have the money to cover everything for about a year or so … but if we had a mortgage on one or both properties, we would be fucked …
All we want to do is take a year to flip this house, and put something up on the new property and move west … I want some sunshine, dammit!
I do understand that landlords have debts to service and that they still have overhead costs (maintenance, debt, and insurance among others). A friend suggested a 3-3-3 split. Tenant pays a third, landlord eats a third, banks eat a third. Also he meant deferred rent not freebies. Tenant is still ultimately responsible for it, just maybe not by April 1. State of CA is recommending eviction moratoriums enacted by local counties and municipalities.
I’d support eviction protections for both residential and even small businesses. Vacant storefronts and empty rentals, empty homes, thousands of street people during a pandemic, just won’t do anyone any good. All that “wealth” will just evaporate into thin air. But, large conglomerates and big banks don’t necessarily think that way. And if the property owners themselves are overseas (conglomerates, real estate investment trusts, or foreign investors), they probably couldn’t care less about kicking everyone out. They do all that through property management companies, also non-local, who also aren’t known for compassion or even common sense.
My own building is a hybrid. Live/work, industrial, legal residences in same building with what is now commercial cannabis. Residents been here since late 70s, new owners are carpetbaggers from out of state, who originally thought to evict us but tipped their hand too soon and the tenants got organized. Now there’s seething hatred. I’m deeply concerned that my own landlord will just stop all services and abdicate, abandon their investment, let it foreclose, and stiff their own investors. That our power and water will just be shut off, trash pickup too.
I am still trying to figure out this “no eviction thing”. So I can’t evict my tenant for something such as non-payment of rent, I understand that, but does my tenant realize that when the 3 months or whatever is up when the policy is removed he/she now owes 3 or more months worth of back rent? If they can’t afford 1 months rent right now how can they afford 3 or 4 months worth 3 months from now?
So if a tenant gets to live rent-free for a few months that’s great for the tenant, but not for the landlord who still needs to make his mortgage payment.
But what if he didn’t? What if mortgages were also placed on hold?
Basically, what would go wrong if we jut hit “Pause” on the whole real estate market? Basically, mortgage holders (ie, banks) would be without income. But … so what? Are they living paycheck to paycheck?
Whereupon the farmer took the shotgun he happened to have with him and shot the hobo dead.
Yeah, in addition to direct-to-the-public stimulus checks and bailouts for stricken businesses, I see massive debt forgiveness as one of the measures that will be necessary to cope with a long-term economic shutdown. The trick will be balancing it so that no one’s left holding the bag.
Bailing out a bank in a major recession is just something I cannot ever seeing this country doing. With millions of people in financial distress, the idea of putting a profit-making institution before regular people who may be struggling to put bread on the table is just a incomprehensible.
Americans are a generous people, are we not? We look out after each other in this classless society, and as a Christian nation, we know that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Yea, verily, in this republic of the common man, we shall always put the wretched and the poor before the monied and the privileged.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha…
You’re not serious, are you?
I mean, really, the people currently in charge in Washington clearly value dollars over the lives, much less the well-being, of average citizens.
As someone who was born and raised here but is not a Christian I’m stick and tired of hearing how “Christian” the US is, especially with how our society criminalizes the poor, sick, disabled, and downtrodden. The US is, at best, only Christian in name because if this country was really acting according to the New Testament we wouldn’t have thousands sleeping in the streets every night. That line about the camel and the needle? It’s forgotten - it’s prosperity gospel for the win! But beyond that - saying that “America is a Christian country” sure sounds to me like I’m relegated to second-class or non-citizen status because I don’t believe in your god. I used to believe that we were all equal here but over the last few years I’ve come to realize that even if that used to be true it’s not anymore.
I get it - you have an idealized notion of what the US is. But we’re not that. We haven’t been that for a long while now. It’s time to face reality and admit we really aren’t great at this point, we aren’t number 1, and we really do need to get our house in order.
Complete bullshit. The rich run this country and they want to keep sucking the money out of everyone below them. As far as they’re concerned you exist only to serve them and when you’re no longer useful you can just sleep on a sewer grate and eat out of a dumpster.