If they have been sitting on empty buildings for years, why would they want renters now? I expect they would just continue to keep their buildings empty and continue to be unaffected by this pandemic.

Not enough cash to keep up the stupid speculation game without some paying renters.

I know a few property-owning/landlord families. They own multiple properties, both residential and commercial.

Some of those properties are profitable to rent out. Some are not. You rent out the profitable ones. You don't rent out the ones that are not profitable, you just wait until they're worth significantly more than what you paid for them. When they are, you sell them, and you buy more property. Each property leverages the subsequent properties, in terms of both the mortgage credit you have access to, and actual money gained accumulated from rent and sales.

Thats not how any of this works. The problem with a market is you have a rate that if something is below it its not profitable for people to live in a place. Idk why people blame the building owners.

And people who do this are always people with perfectly good couches in their living rooms but would never let a homeless person sleep there, but want others to give up a entire building.

The problem is that what is actually going on in NY - and many other markets - doesn't remotely resemble a properly functioning market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdfmMB1E_qk

thanks that was interesting.

tl;dr: 2 years free rent with the condition that the tenant doesn't ask for a lower price. due to language in the contract the rent can not go beyond a specific (low) value. the loan isn't held by the bank but immediately restructured and sold as a CMBS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_mortgage-backed_sec...)

here is the reddit post that he recaps: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothird...

That would work in a normal market but the realestate market hasn't been allowed to correct because we keep bailing it out by having the fed buy up all the debt. This raises rent because it decreases the supply (people can just hold onto buildings as investments and not bother renting them out or wait for someone willing to pay something that should be above market value) and also raises inflation.

Let me explain it to you simply: The landlords made a bad investment, bailing them out forces everyone else to pay for it. In the "it's my property" sense it's identical to forcing someone to house homeless people (although the comparison still isn't the same because the landlords generally don't live in the buildings they're renting out.)

I always found it curious how large employers in Manhattan would be moving out because the rent was too high.

Simultaneously buildings would be converting into condos because they were unable to fill vacant commercial space. As an example, two buildings where I worked had this happen: 70 Pine Street (AIG) and 75 Wall Street(JPMorgan.)

Doesnt the market meet somewhere in the middle?

I am not sure about NYC, but commercial property taxes are usually very high, and borne by the tenants; this may be a factor in the employers moving out.

The way you think markets work don't always apply to land. Land (distinct from buildings) is one of the few resources for which ownership without utilization or improvement is not only profitable but sometimes optimal.

And then you want to give them my money, taken from me by force by the government.