A closer analogy is that the government seized your apartment for a year while still keeping you on the hook for mortgage payments and is now giving it back.
Right as in "morally right" or right as in "consistent with established precedent"? Because the answer is different depending on which one you pick. There is tons of precedent for people having negligible recourse when it's the government doing the screwing.
Maybe landlords losing their rental properties would allow more people to become homeowners. Earning money by charging rent (at a profit) is pure capitalism.
I’d happily pay everything besides the mortgage, it’d be far cheaper than my rent. Most months it’d even be zero. I could absolutely afford all maintenance costs, while I can’t afford the speculation-inflated price of the home I live in.
Collective ownership would be even better, sure. Before 89 my parents paid to the state ~5% of one wage for a good sized flat. That covered amortised construction costs and maintenance. Housing doesn’t have to be expensive.
Of everyone involved, the renters are the only one who received something in exchange of nothing.
On the other hand, it would make rental properties more risky without really impacting the risk to primary residences. It may decrease the price to outright buy properties if the market won't bear the increase in rent, making rental properties less profitable.
Also, there have been a lot of offers to the unfortunate. Stimulus checks were substantial, as were increases in unemployment benefits. The removal of a year and a half of rent payments is also a significant benefit. Removing a liability is almost as good as income.
So many people have this juvenile notion of what a landlord is, too. They seem to think the only type of landlord is a mega-tycoon that owns hundreds of properties. Don't get me wrong, I am against all forms of theft so it's still wrong to steal from them, but it makes it a lot more apparent how wrong it is when you're stealing from the old Grandma that has 1 or 2 extra properties that she rents out.
2) You call this notion of a landlord as a mega-tycoon juvenile but then present the equally juvenile (in my opinion) idea that land lords are just old Grandma with 1 or 2 extra properties she rents out.
1 or 2 extra properties? Wow, grandma. Must be nice.
And I think the data will show that the trend in landlords is in fact toward mega-tycoons. (Sort of like the trend in farming that used to be old Grandpa with 1 or 2 acres.)
The government doesn't owe you a particular market price, but when they interfere with your perfectly voluntary private business dealings (or just outright take your stuff for public use without just compensation, which is basically what happened here) that is a clear-cut example of theft.
That's not a service. The government requires you to do so by law, because they don't want landlords doing it themselves. They didn't take away some notary service you could get done by AAA -- they took away a fundamental means of doing business.
It's like claiming that the government took away a service (police) that you were expecting to have around. The police literally exist, and are required to be used, because they've already removed the option of self-policing.
Exactly. The issue is not merely that the government is no longer carrying out evictions for landlords. Leaving landlords to hire their own security teams and evict squatters at their own expense would be fine. What the government is doing, though, is employing force to actively prevent landlords from evicting squatters, which makes the government an accessory to the crime.
A renter and a landlord voluntary sign a contract. The renter says "I will give you $XXXX a month for 12 months", and the landlord says "I will provide a livable home for you for the period of 12 months." Both agree: voluntary business dealing.
Now the government comes in and says "Hey renter, you no longer have to fulfill your half of that agreement, but the landlord still does". The government has directly interfered with the voluntary business dealing between the renter and the landlord.
Consider the counterexample: the government comes in and says "Hey landlord, you no longer have to keep the home livable or do repairs, but the renter still needs to pay rent." This would be just as much an interference with voluntary business dealings as what really happened, and everyone seems to agree on this point.
Businesses refuse to invest in those countries, and they have poor economies that people try to escape from and move to the US.
There's a general exodus of landlords from Seattle going on due to a series of punitive laws passed against them by the Seattle City Council.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/stop-new-ren...
What this means for renters is less places available for rent, at much higher prices.
You’re not proving housing, you’re preventing people from having housing unless they pay you. When housing wasn’t a speculative investment it was far cheaper and far fewer people were forced to rent to make someone else money for no labour.
Why should tenants pay for the greed of landlords? They get paid for doing nothing, the least they could do is bear their own risks.
Building social housing, removing incentives for buy-to-rent, taxing second homes and capping rents to a fraction of minimum wage are all measures that can be introduced gradually on the way to de-commodifying housing.
You just sit on your computer programming or whatever you do. That is just getting paid for typing which is not real work. Maybe you should stop being greedy and just type for free.
And don’t be disingenuous, I get paid for labour while landlords get paid for ownership.
The risk could not legally be mitigated. Otherwise, landlords would have evicted en masse everyone who couldn't pay after some period of time. I am friends with a few people who own houses. They were happy to help as long as their tenants could provide at least some payment. It's better in the long run to keep good tenants than to evict them even if it costs money in the short term. This isn't true in general however, and several places have toxic tenants who have refused to pay and are taking advantage of the moratorium.
This is the literal definition of theft by decree. Making landlords whole should be top priority if their intention is to save the housing market. Imagine if they didn't - what would happen? Landlords would require stellar credit, several months payment up front, and regular financial checks. This all assuming they just don't pack up and sell their property (which has gone up significantly in value) thereby reducing the available places to rent.
So the nightmare scenario here is more people own their homes?
I’m not sure I see why that’s bad, but it seems just as likely that they’re selling to other landlords more able to handle the vicissitudes of the market.
Imagine your neighbor sneezes. So the bank sends thugs to take steak your rent money. Then sending police to take your house for non payment.
All the while blaming you as the problem.
At some point the absurdity has to be dealt with.
Yes this argument is flawed. But so is the whole shutting down the economy thing.
"The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, BlackRock -- largely through its investment in the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes -- owns about 80,000...
"Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market."
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/blackrock-...
Also, this is looking at only 80/140 million units which are singly family.
I expect if you look at the other 60 million multi family units, the results would be the exact opposite. How many high rise apartment buildings in SF and NY are owned by individuals?
It looks as though that my kids will be unable to buy a home and may be renters-for-life — as with an increasingly larger percentage of the upcoming generations.
No doubt, like in every other pursuit of Capitalism, there will be mergers, buyouts, and consolidation of the entire "rental industry".
It is the government which has inflated the cost of housing and assets out of the reach of many people. For example, in 2020, there were 10 trillion dollars in US covid packages and federal reserve actions, which mostly went to corporation to buy assets out from under individuals. Thats > $60,000 per federal taxpayer.
I feel a little torn: renters who may have lost their jobs, being able to get their heads above water seems to be a good thing. Bailing out the landlords seems to me to be less of a good thing.
In a world that seems increasingly to tilt in favor of the fortunate (those owning the land) and offers little to the unfortunate (the renters) my desire for justice wants the scale to tip the other direction at least once in a while.
Am I a bad person?