The outrage over the end of the CDC's eviction moratorium seems odd to me. We've known it was going to expire on July 31 for a long time, so why is everyone acting so shocked that it happened on schedule? And if it's really as big a deal as some people are making out, why weren't they yelling about it in May or June rather than July 29th? Did they not care enough? Or were they ignorant of how the moratorium worked?
In any case, if the CDC is truly following the best legal advice about the Supreme Court's ruling on the moratorium, then good for them. That's what we should expect them to do.
But I do have a question for moratorium supporters: When do you think it should expire? Should it depend on some set of economic parameters? Some kind of COVID goal? Something to do with payouts of rental assistance? It can't just be left in place forever, after all. To my eyes, the economy is finally doing pretty well; jobs are returning at higher pay than before the pandemic; and CTC payments have started going out. It seems like this is not such a bad time to let it go.
Also: given the large amount of general assistance provided during the pandemic—big checks, expanded UI, and now CTC—do we even know how many people are in danger of being evicted above normal rates? I haven't seen a credible estimate, and I'd like to.
POSTSCRIPT: Please note the modifier above normal rates in my penultimate sentence. It's important!
Isn't this why the government gave money to the banks and other mortgage holders? So they could give a few months of grace or even forgiveness of loans? Everyone talks about the tenants or the landlords, but no one mentions those who hold the mortgages.
The huge issue right now is that the funds appropriated to the states for rent relief aren't reaching tenants and landlords in large part due to the red tape required to receive the funds. The Biden admin is very irked about that and had hoped that the funds would have been executed by now to provide relief and eliminate the need for the eviction moratorium.
Just guessing, but ”later” of course.
I wouod guess 'when we're ready to have a million more homeless'
Simply Lefties hate landlords, and therefore it is never emotionally the right moment.
Ain't that the truth. The only way I could afford a home is being a landlord. Now I am apparently part of the money elite. Yeah, so rich that I enjoy the pleasures of plunging out a tenant's toilet at 3AM. And deferring repairs to my apartment so I can make sure the tenant's is up to par.
I have a friend who owns a couple small businesses. She also owns the building that one of them is in, and rents out the other rooms. Those businesses are a dance studio and a massage studio--COVID came at them like a freight train.
The original eviction moratorium came with the small business aid package, which were a lifeline for her; so, fair enough. The government helped her with direct aid and her tenants with the moratorium. But the aid spigot shut off months ago. How long is she supposed to keep carrying tenants while trying to rebuild her businesses?
(Should be "*was* a lifeline," not "were." I wish Kevin's commenting software would allow us to edit comments.)
The eviction moratorium never included businesses.
So... how long should your friend be an asshole?
I don't hate landlords, but I also don't worship them either. Yes, you're not "rich" if you're having to plunge a tenant's toilet at 3am... but you're also not poor either... nor are you in the business of being a landlord as an act of charity. You said it yourself: you use landlording as a way to subsidize your own living situation, because presumably you can't otherwise afford the mortgage you took out without getting a second or better job. That's perfectly valid, and at the end of your home ownership, you're going to walk away with (probably) a bigger fortune than you had at the start, setting you up for the next home buy and/or retirement. Good for you! But the renter class isn't obligated to feel warm fuzzy feelings about the landlord class, especially when the landlord class does things like voting for politicians who make it harder for the renter class to ever join the ranks of the landlord class.
Meanwhile, renters have historically gotten basically nothing from the federal government, aside from Section 8 which almost nobody new can sign up for anymore. Renters don't get to deduct a portion of their housing costs from their income tax nor do they get to shield their income windfalls from taxation, like landlords do through the mortgage interest deduction and capital gains homeownership exclusion when they live in the property they're also renting out and then selling. This one time with covid happening, the Feds actually set out to help non-Section 8 recipient renters... and almost no actual renters got any of the funding anyway. Honestly, landlords should be thankful that renters aren't more cognizant and subsequently pissed about how much the federal government ignores their needs in favor of those who own property.
It is true that if you are a landlord, you do not fall into the *very lowest* economic tier; but it does not put you into some elite stratum either. There is no "landlord class."
Plenty of working-class folks are homeowners, particularly in rural areas--and it is precisely those homeowners who turn to renting out part of their house in order to make ends meet. Well-off suburban homeowners don't generally need to rent out their property or deal with the hassles of being a landlord.
Funny thing, though... nobody is talking about making those well-off suburbanites cough up anything. Speaking as a Democrat (and a renter), our party has one hell of a blind spot when it comes to its own upscale members.
It puts you in the 'don't need to work' and 'don't need to struggle for cash' tiers, so yes, it does.
Eddie Murphy sure hates his landlord...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCbK3ooekU
Give me a C! Give me an I! Give me L! Give me another L!
What's that spell...?
According to the WashPost, the states have disbursed only $3B of the $47B that Congress allocated to rent relief.
The notion that the states are more efficient at managing resources than the federal government is more rightwing hogwash.
It's been a mess. Heck, states are still trying to clean up the expanded unemployment mess they were not able to handle. State IT infrastructure leaves a lot to be desired.
In our discussions on the topic, my wife has been asserting that of course the states have been unable to disburse the funds -because the funds did not include funding to hire people to do it, so it is simply more work fir the existing staff.
I have to wonder if at least part of it is (also) a reaction to having bee so thoroughly scammed when following the principle of waste anything but time disbursing PPP/EnhancedUI funds.
Very true--but aid was also given directly to the states in other parts of the funding that they could of used to help administer funds.
I came across a write up (that I can't find right now) where they described the IT used for un-employment. The system could only do one thing at a time--either cut checks or look up data--not both. The state wanted to set up a 24 hr hot line to help people--but if they did that, they'd never be able to send out checks. There are other choke points in the system, people are only one of them.
I think the crucial problem here is that at the time of the SCOTUS decision, not many people foresaw Delta hitting the US with a wave of infections. People were hopeful as the country opened up -- the result of a decent amount of people having been conferred immunity. As a result, most people did not see the need to extend the eviction moratorium.
As for how long it should be extended, don't you think it should be more of a wait and see?
For all the predictions of the extent of Delta, we really don't know what'll happen. We don't know how long it'll take for C.37 Lambda to arrive here and spread, either. Part of the mutations in Lambda make it better at defeating at least Sinovac's Coronavac. Another part of the mutations make it even more infectious than Delta.
Maybe we should wait to understand how much more evasive Lambda is of the mRNA vaccines and whether or not our Delta wave spawns a subvariant that is worse. That is to say that I would tie the end of the eviction moratorium to the point where we're not seeing subsequent waves of infections that end up tying up ICUs -- the turning of SARS-CoV-2 into an endemic virus that we can live with.
The time of the SCOTUS decision was roughly five weeks ago now. Delta was already well entrenched in the US by then. I don’t think a “no one could have foreseen” defense applies here. Particularly after the last eighteen-odd months and the various waves.
Good tenants are golden. You do what is necessary to keep them. We would have forgiven rent if necessary to keep a good tenant. Had a couple of bad ones that caused about 4 years worth of rent to repair.
And I've had some psycho landlords. I'll never rent again, even though owning a home has its own hassles.
And more often than not, they think they're good guys. I'll put it down to kids, which is mostly my experience with bad tenants.
And hey, weren't we all first-time renters at some point in our lives 😉
We likely were. Sadly not all of us have left those properties in better shape than when we moved in.
Four years of rent in repairs?
$144,000 in damages? (Median local rent times 48 months...)
Can someone please remind me what CTC is again, a quick Google search doesn't provide anything useful.
CDC, Center for Disease Control
Eviction moratorium was put in place to help contain spread of virus.
Which it didn't
It was dumb when it was created.
That sounds like your statement is unsupported.
Child Tax Credit
A dumb idea. Plenty of Federal aid, many are too stupid to know how to get????
Whiny libtards who are on the losing side of the argument.
What else is new.
A significant number of people do believe the right answer is never.
Maybe I'm too cynical by half, but I suspect one reason the White House (and frankly, many Democrats in Congress) hasn't worked harder on this is that it believes the situation isn't tenable indefinitely, and, if there is going to be an evictions crisis, better negative headlines in the fall of 2021 than the fall of 2022.
The squawks of anger from House Democrats against the White House are ridiculous, and the stunts by members like Bush are infuriating. Are they so lacking in comprehension skills they need the president to explain to them what Supreme Court decisions mean?
Suspending evictions was always the crudest of blunt instruments to respond to the pandemic. The very strong suspicion has to be that it was a welfare measure justified by a transparently dodgy public health argument. Why the Trump Administration ordered it is a mystery, but Trump Republicans must be delighted that it's caused such grief for Democrats. They've handled the issue with atrocious ineptness.
...Because kicking people out of their homes while they're sheltering from a pandemic is a flimsy method of spread?
What?l they don't have homes, they rent fool.
Kevin's "good for them" for following the supreme court ruling got outmoded pretty quick.
Looks like biden wants the cdc to try to extend the eviction moratorium at least for some areas, while it seems he accepts that this will be temporary as clearly unconstitutional. Basically just taking a knowingly unconstitutional act to be able to get it for a short period until the court knocks it down.
Just a terrible precedent of simply ignoring the court. And basically humiliating Roberts who agreed to let it continue for a month even though he agreed it was flatly unconstitutional. I wonder if Roberts will now think twice before being "reasonable " again.
Looks like the ignore button is on Biden for this one. Courts are ignoring him.
Just a terrible precedent of simply ignoring the court.
I don't think the White House is "ignoring" the court at all because:
A) Biden himself publicly acknowledged they've received conflicting opinions from counsel wrt the constitutionality of the extension; White House is clearly indicating they're concerned about their relationship with the judiciary on this one, not contemptuous of it.
B) It's only 60 days. An arrogant White House would have gone for an indefinite or much longer extension.
C) They've tried to add a patina of reasonableness by confining it to areas "experiencing substantial and high levels of community transmission" -- in other words, the extension is using ostensibly narrower criteria than the original CDC moratorium. The sixth circuit court decision in June ruled that the CDC had engaged in overreach via its moratorium. Well, this two month extension arguably has avoided that problem, by its focus on covid hotspots. (Tortured reasoning? Perhaps, but an attempt at providing a good faith constitutional justification strikes me as more deferential and respectful to the rule of law than simply not trying at all; and the thing is, a lot of people apparently feel we're in a legitimate crisis with respect to evictions that will have adverse effects on public health).
I think White House felt it had no choice but to do something, and chose the least confrontational (vis a vis the courts) means possible. And this only takes us to October. Maybe Roberts and the conservatives on the court will be outraged. But I'd hope not.
Except it didn't do anything. In Ohio, evictions are going along. Biden was a moron for the fig leaf.
I have mixed emotions about this.
First there are too many jobs and to few applicants to "justify" NOT working unless handicapped or pondering or actually retiring. Yes, the jobs are sporadic but when you can make $15 - $20/hr at a fast food place willing to train you - or even $15-$18/hr at Target or WalMart and they are willing to pay for college then there is no reason to even have an eviction moratorium.
BUT..........
When you go to sell a raised ranch in Mass for $650K (That you paid $375K for just 7 years ago) and it sells for - not asking price, not asking price MINUS 10% but for asking price PLUS 15% you know that current renters are gonna stay renters and that gives landlords the leverage they need to unilaterally raise rents.
Is a UBI the solution? I doubt it. Alaska, even with the UBI from oil revenues is still ONLY the #4 ranked state for wealth and they have the HIGHEST violent crime and property crime rates in the United States. Connecticut ranks #1 for wealth, Mass ranks #2. They are also two of the states with very high educational levels.
Brains and oil - if your state has either you're OK
Your state may not be setting on oil but all your residents can get educated
If not? Tough...........