Is there a data source for this claim?

There’s many examples of exactly this happening. Here’s one: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1046154251/they-refused-to-pa...

The tenants no doubt received direct stimulus payments and never paid a dime of it in rent. There’s a reason why section 8 et al are paid directly to the landlords.

One anecdote from one website is not a data set that generalizes onto a population.

I never said it’s a dataset. It’s one of many examples of people receiving stimulus checks and not paying their landlords.

Hell, it’s the rationale thing to do anyway. If there’s a rent moratorium, you’re getting checks from the government, and you don’t have a particular large security deposit, why wouldn’t you skimp on the rent?

The landlord cannot evict you. Cannot call the police. Cannot really do anything. In fact, the landlords only chance of getting paid is to cajole you into signing up for rent forbearance.

Every newspaper for the past 2 years. The government was THROWING money at people.

And most of those stories were business owners who used the money on themselves, let the business fold, and walked away. Not what's being argued here.

The population received a significant sum of money but I haven’t seen a data set or statistic indicating people buying discretionary goods rather than paying rent.

I suspect that the real issue for landlords was the eviction moratorium which made it possible for some tenants to fall 4-5 months behind and forced landlords to live with it.

I suspect the rent moratorium spooked most small time owners from rentingtheir properties, so they sold and cashed out. Ideally those homes would have been sold to new owners, but it turns out big property management companies were waiting, flush with new COVID cash, and bought up those properties and increased rent. So we saw the markets percentage of home ownership go down, and rent go up.