> If federal CDC has authority over state evictions
The authority for this order is somewhat dubious; the statute can be read that way, but it requires almost the maximal possible reading of the law.
And that's without considering the Constitutional parameters of the issue, though Commerce Clause jurisprudence may be broad enough to make this nonproblematic as far as federal authority, but there are also nondelegation concerns with unbounded delegation to the executive.
> does federal also have authority over state lockdowns, reopening and choice of essential business?
Probably, and a lot more (and not just during a global pandemic, either), again, if the eviction rule is valud. There's probably some limits even so (you have to be able to at least spin a tenable protection against communicable disease angle.)
The Commerce Clause I think is problematic. Rents are not interstate commerce - they're local. (That's not to say that the Commerce Clause hasn't been stretched to cover some pretty ridiculous things...)
> Rents are not interstate commerce - they're local.
Existing Commerce Clause jurisprudence gives the feds authority to act to control things which indirectly touch on interstate commerce, which pretty expressly includes the interstate movement of humans and the impacts therefrom.
Its not a big stretch to get acting to control communicable disease from that. It is well-established that if it is acting to manage something it is authorized to manage, the feds don't separately need independent positive authority for the mechanism (in this case, the eviction moratorium), just the absence of a negative regulation. So, I don't think (other than the risk of current courts seeing the Commerce Clause more narrowly than existing precedent, a real risk given the rightward movement of the courts) the Commerce Clause is insufficient for federal authority.
I do think that the nondelegation doctrine may be a problem for the broad interpretation of the statute necessary to read it as putting this federal legislative authority in the hands of the CDC through the existing statute (whether that would mean the statute itself is read more narrowly or facially invalid is another question.)
Ah, I was thinking of using the Commerce Clause to justify controlling rental property, not to justify controlling disease prevention. Yes, that might pass muster - depending on which side of the bed the Supreme Court woke up on that morning...
The surgeon general and the secretary of HHS, acting together, not the CDC, have broad powers to do pretty much anything under 46 USC 264.
The idea that you seem to entertain, that these powers would extend to forcing states to _not_ take anti-disease measures, seems like it would fail in court.
If they can force them to take the measures, they could just as easily argue that the measures (say, lockdown) actually worsen the problem and thus use the same logic to force people not to lockdown.
I’d rather live in a society where we can’t be forced to submit to any health mandates. But I’m definitely in the minority.
You're welcome to go live in rural areas where no one is going to bother what you do there.
But when you live in a society then there are certain rules on how to interact with said society. Individualism doesn't work when the pandemic is communal. Your freedom ends when your threat to my life begins.
Scale matters. 200,000 deaths and counting in 9 months is a different scale than we in the US have seen from other viral infections in the past century.
COVID is also much deadlier than usual seasonal flu. It has already killed far more people in the US than a typical flu season, despite having infected far fewer people.
YMMV depending on the US State you live in. According to State reported fatality rates, for the 4 month period from 3/27 to 7/27 (a typical flu season length according to the CDC) per capita death rates ranged over two orders of magnitude, from 1 Death in 562 for New Jersey to 1 Death in 54457 in Hawaii.
Considering one death in 5000 to be the definition of a bad flu season, again according to the CDC website for the 17-18 US flu season, you can partition the 50 States into five categories:
1. OMG, IT’S the PLAGUE! (1 in 400 to 1 in 1000): New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
2. That was WAY worse than a flu. (1 in 1000 to 1 in 2500): Louisiana, Rhode Island, Mississippi, Arizona, Michigan (mostly Detroit), Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania (mostly NJ-adjacent counties and Philadelphia), Indiana.
3. That was the worst flu in a long time. (1 in 2500 to 1 in 5000): Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico (mostly Navajo-adjacent counties), California (Southern more than Northern), Ohio, Virginia, Minnesota (mostly Twin Cities), Colorado, New Hampshire.
4. That definitely was a flu. (1 in 5000 to 1 in 10000): Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri (mostly St Louis), North Carolina, Washington State, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Kansas, North Dakota.
5. What’s everybody bothered about? (less than 1 in 10000): Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, Utah, Oregon, Maine, Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii.
When I say “mostly in a region”, the fatality per capita rates are > 3 times the rate in the rest of the State, sometimes 10 times higher as in Michigan and New Mexico.
Over the last couple months, Louisiana and Rhode Island has joined the plague category and the Southern tier has moved up a notch, but it also has been over four months.
Check the numbers for yourself. There was and is a peculiar avoidance in the media of reporting per capita deaths rates. Government sites are much better about providing usefully formatted data.
“Fun” fact: as late as early May, over 50% of the US fatalities were just in the Boston to DC corridor.
I feel like this ignores that the death rate is the result of three things interacting: the deadliness of the disease, the density of the population, and the preventative measures taken.
1. The places that are the least hit are the least urbanized. I would guess that the regular flu also hits them less.
2. These number are including a massive shutdown, and preventative measures, that don't usually occur during the flu season.
3. I'm not sure your numbers are accurate. For example, I just spot checked texas, which has 15,421 deaths: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/texas-coronaviru... That is a rate of 1 in 1880, which would put them in the "WAY worse than the flue" category, not "That was definitely a flu".
Historically, influenza/pneumonia is a little under 10% of all deaths in Hawaii.
The CDC and the Hawaii state department of health combine the causes. "Studies have suggested that P&I [pneumonia and influenza] is a good indicator of influenza-related deaths and therefore P&I is one method for influenza surveillance." This combination makes it difficult to determine how many deaths were due to the "flu" specifically.
Not mandatory everywhere, but it is in many places, especially for school-aged kids.
And if health-centred rules are too much to comprehend, then I suppose it's also your right to choose to drink and drive and you should be allowed to?
I mean, it's the same right to individualism that you are exercising. It's your right to not protect yourself and take risks in the process, but it's not your right to become a danger to others. We're not talking about opinions here, we're talking about the fact that viral infections do spread and kill and that without some measures, they will kill more, not less.
We can argue about what measures are effective for what population and up to what point we should enforce them, but there is -to me- no argument that there are some basic health measures that should be enforced, especially because some will make a point of not doing it and will endanger everyone else in the process.
Also, you can see that the current measures do have a pretty pronounced effect on lowering the flu[1]. So, protecting yourself lowers the transmission rate of viruses in general. Two birds with one stone!
> have broad powers to do pretty much anything under 46 USC 264.
If it really is "do pretty much anything", its probably also an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional lawmaking power, since one of the three required pieces of a Constitutional delegation ïs that the law must clearly specify "the boundaries of this delegated authority." Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361 (1989), and the rightward turn of the courst since Mistretta may work against the Administration here, because it is the conservative wing of the court that has historically had the most negative view of delegations (In Mistretta itself, which found the challenged act a valid delegation, Scalia was the lone dissenter and would have found it an unconstitutional delegation.)
They can't stop the nearly 200K mostly unnecessary deaths due Covid-19 and the shambolic response which is their actual job but now want to regulate the rental market ???.
> I further understand that fees, penalties, or interest for not paying rent or making a housing payment on time as required by my tenancy, lease agreement, or similar contract may still be charged or collected.
This part seems like an odd choice, if we're already amending the rental contract in terms of timeliness, it seems odd to double-down on late-payment fees.
Even without fees, very few people stand any chance of paying back late rent and avoiding eviction. All this will do is trigger a bunch of evictions once the election is over and it’ll have less of a political impact.
As is, this order only delays the pain, it doesn’t alleviate it.
It seems like a right measure, but it also seem like something a federal agency should not be able to do. At most it should be a recommendation to states.
The court cannot do anything that contradicts the law. I didn't say whether the US is or not a democracy, I have only stated what I think it should be.
> No. The CDC should be given full permissions to do what it needs to do to prevent a public health crisis.
So if the director of the CDC decided that, in order to protect the public health from an epidemic, everyone of, say, Chinese descent in the US needed to be herded into incinerators and burned, that would be okay?
We have a court system to decide if these decisions fall into the public health crisis prevention.
Would this pass the bar? Certainly. We have historical evidence that homelessness during a pandemic significantly increases death and spread of disease.
> We have a court system to decide if these decisions fall into the public health crisis prevention.
Wait, is that the argument that the CDC should be given full authority to decide what needs to be done to protect against the disease, or that the courts should supervise not just on whether the action is authorized, but also effective at the stated goal?
Even if the CDC has authority to do what needs to be done to protect against the disease, it doesn't have the authority to do everything that it can stick an anti-Covid label on. It can't, for example, ban the eating of corn on the cob as part of the fight against Covid. Why? Because eating corn on the cob is not a known (or even suspected) to increase Covid transmission.
A court has to care at least a little bit about effectiveness of the measure... doesn't it?
Your confidence in the court system to properly constrain the reach of what is supposed to be a limited government is not well-founded.
> We have historical evidence that homelessness during a pandemic significantly increases death and spread of disease.
Again: The remedy isn't what's primarily in dispute here. It's the systemic repercussions of allowing such reckless overreach. These repercussions will almost certainly fall more on the poor and poorly-connected.
Our system of civil justice and liberty isn't meant to withstand such centralized decision-making.
Okay I'll let people getting evicted during this time know that at least we didn't have "authoritarianism."
What a ridiculous sentiment. This is literally one of the worst pandemics in a century with nearly a million dead officially and we're arguing in semantics.
If you think the court system can't stop authoritarianism then what's the point of our system? We literally have the president being able to do EO, how is this any different?
>Okay I'll let people getting evicted during this time know that at least we didn't have "authoritarianism."
So you assume that states wouldn't follow CDC recommendations? It seems to be for you it is not an issue of laws. It is just there is your tribe that you support and CDC is a part of it, and a tribe you don't support (those evil red states). And of course you would like CDC to take power away from them no matter how much people support their own state government.
>If you think the court system can't stop authoritarianism then what's the point of our system? We literally have the president being able to do EO, how is this any different?
It is not that different. The federal encroachment and the power creep of the executive branch are real issues.
Can you be more creative than having one single entity make the decision for every single person? How about we leverage multiple brains from many walks of life come up with ideas, you know, like in this forum
I'd be more than worried if the CDC was operating on just one brain. I'm confused about the uproar(should've known we have prop owners here), when the virus landed here, we all expected some Hollwood treatment from the CDC, having everything in working order, taking charge/leadership. Well these guys wake up with a deicision, now let's bash them because we are NOT being allowed to evict possible disease carriers/spreaders onto rest of society.
The CDC is OUR Center for Disease control, what does that mean to you? Shouldn't we listen to the guys specialising in disease control while trying to control the disease from spreading?
Clearly Twitter and reddit should be consulted for the armchair experts to tell them how much money they're going to lose and how some extra people dying is worth it.
CDC isn't a single entity. CDC is made up by the world's best scientists who have an understanding of past pandemics and how homelessness significantly increased the deaths and infectivity. Someone commented with links about this as well.
How does the CDC have any authority over real estate law? This is way beyond its legal statute and not a good thing regardless of your feelings on the matter. This should be unconstitutional if it's not already.
The claim is that it derives from public health emergency powers. Arguing that evicting people increases the infection risk, therefore falling within CDCs powers. But that indeed seems to be stretching things to somewhere around the breaking point.
If this is allowed to happen, I think we're seeing the new face of government overreach. Last time it was terrorism, ans that saw a whole wave of government powers used in the name of fighting terror. And back then, very few batted an eye. Now, it's fighting disease (corona) being used to justify these things. And, like last time, suggesting this might be too far gets you shouted down for not caring about other people or not taking corona seriously. I wish history would stop repeating itself but I don't think it ever will stop.
With all due respect, perhaps you haven’t been paying attention. We are heading down a very scary path. And here in America everyone is so desperate to “prove Trump wrong” or whatever their motivation is that they’re ignoring giving any thought to:
What if the government shouldn’t have this power?
What I find interesting about Sweden is that Tegnell (correctly imo) thought lockdown would make things worse, but that wasn’t how he justified not locking down. He said that Sweden, being a free society, did not have the authority to perform a China-style lockdown.
The rest of the “free” world ignored that point. They gave NO thought to whether they had the power to impose these measures. They just succumbed to their fear.
Yes, I am desperate trying to prove Trump wrong by not putting a temporary ~3 month Trump administration regulation on the same level as all the post 9/11 measures. Absolutely.
I don't think this is particularly likely to hold up (except by court cases becoming moot before the judicial process concludes); I think it's unlikely to have enough of an effect to make a meaningful measure; I think there should have been another relief bill quite a while ago.
> The rest of the “free” world ignored that point. They gave NO thought to whether they had the power to impose these measures. They just succumbed to their fear.
There was a lot of adjusting the strictness over time in a lot of places. Including repealing measures that were though to have gone to far outside of a very short time period.
The places that haven't locked down aren't looking good.
> The places that haven't locked down aren't looking good.
Really? Sweden looks great. South Dakota looks great. Not sure what data you're looking at.
> Yes, I am desperate trying to prove Trump wrong by not putting a temporary ~3 month Trump administration regulation on the same level as all the post 9/11 measures. Absolutely.
We've been locked down for half a year. Maybe you don't live in California but it's still full draconian lockdown here, and our state guidelines are crafted such that it is literally impossible for us to re-open.
My point about the Trump thing, not to de-rail, is that the Democrats want to "prove him wrong" for "minimizing" the virus, and they seem to think that locking down indefinitely and torching the economy / public health will make it look like Trump's fault and help them win. That's just my theory. But note that the problem here psychologically is far worse than just partisan politics, it's a defect in the way humans evaluate risk and particularly it's a problem with a globally connected world. Social media allows mind viruses to spread like crazy, and COVID-19 is the deadliest mind virus we've ever encountered. As far as the physical SARS-2 virus, it's pretty wimpy for people under the age of 70.
Look at the hospitalizations. No, they're not doing good. They actually have one of the highest infection rates. And as you can see the deaths are increasing too.
> We've been locked down for half a year. Maybe you don't live in California but it's still full draconian lockdown here, and our state guidelines are crafted such that it is literally impossible for us to re-open.
I do live in CA. The last time the state started to reopen, with looser guidelines, the infection rates grew substantially. Deaths/day stayed pretty high for a long time, and is only slowly shrinking.
They have a better death rate than half of Europe. They're not even in the top 10 and better yet they aren't getting a second wave. They were down to 13 hospitalizations last week. Never shut down. Never mandated masks. It really is true that for people under 50 the odds of dying of Covid are less than 1 in 10,000.
There are only 12 states doing better on a death rate perspective than South Dakota. And they've been 5 times more effective at preventing deaths than New York.
I would say if they get a spike almost 6 months after literally never shutting down anything, they've done extremely well either way.
No state should care about infection rates among healthy populations. That's normal and expected and necessary to reach herd immunity. Hospitalizations would be alarming but hospitalizations have plummeted nationwide even as case counts have risen.
>> Maybe you don't live in California but it's still full draconian lockdown here
Also, draconian? What? In SF restaurants with outside seating are open and populated. State and national parks are largely open (unless closed due to fire / smoke hazard). A lot of stores are open for indoor shopping.
I've had this exact sentiment since the beginning but like you say, I've been shouted at (digitally here on HN and in person) that I don't care about grandmas dying.
> Why doesn't the government have more power to shut things down so we can save my 99 year old grandma on life support from being taken from us in her prime?
Seriously. I know too many people that simultaneously denounce any sign of dictatorial government, but then can't praise loud enough any governor that shuts down their entire state.
> § 70.2 Measures in the event of inadequate local control.
> Whenever the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines that the measures taken by health authorities of any State or possession (including political subdivisions thereof) are insufficient to prevent the spread of any of the communicable diseases from such State or possession to any other State or possession, he/she may take such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.
(emphasis mine)
I'm sure this will be challenged in court, but the text as written seems extraordinarily broad. The CDC can do anything they "deem reasonably necessary"!
the eviction moratorium is pretty far removed from the list of examples given. Can the CDC also mandate that no one be laid off during a pandemic, or that hospitals provide care for free? The cdc's interpretation of this law leads to some pretty ridiculous implications.
Stopping lay-offs? Probably not. Demanding hospitals provide free care that is relevant to preventing or limiting the spread of a dangerous communicable disease? Absolutely. As the saying goes: "The Constitution is not a suicide pact." When it comes down to it, in an emergency we can do whatever we collectively think is necessary for survival.
The examples given include they can break into your house and kill your dog. So from that perspective, keeping you from getting evicted seems very mild!
I’ve built several, but currently own none, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. I know many families, though, who have invested their life savings in building rental properties, most often in disadvantaged and working-class communities.
I feel for the poor owners. They are all trying to get out, but I’m sorry to say, I feel they’re doomed.
Well atleast the poor owners won't be getting evicted themselves. I'm sure someone can see the positive here? Your poor owner friends won't be living off the streets.
You bet it can disappear! There is no moratorium from the banks - if there is a mortgage on that property, and it's not paid on time, the bank will foreclose and take the house away.
I skipped a few steps; here’s the layman’s interpretation.
Rental stock doesn’t spring into existence; it comes from private investment, predicated on reliable returns made possible by the laws surrounding rental. Suspending those laws in turn destroys this investment/return equation. No more rental stock.
Similar calculus for wage controls; no more profits - no more jobs/wages.
You can demand whatever you want; you just get to live with the results of your demands, long-term.
Elites (such as those who run the CDC) look at rental housing owners as a group, but the impacts are disproportionately borne by those who have the fewest properties - families who are doomed to lose their life-savings.
Real-estate investment trusts, etc., can both outlast family owners, and are usually owned as a fractional portion of people’s portfolio; their failure is not a catastrophic event.
Families losing their inheritance is catastrophic.
Elites extra-legally terminating historical conventions on rental liability are dooming families to poverty, not just “helping” a renter.
Please explain how rental owners are not "fungible" in an economic sense?
Does it matter to me if my landlord is a big real-estate trust or a poor put-upon "family" owner with only two or three spare houses to their name?
Sidenote: you could even argue that big corporate landlords are better for society. In my experience, they tend to be more professional, and more committed to obeying the letter of the law w/r/t to tenants' rights.
People in this thread REALLY should go read about the Irish famine crisis and the 1918 pandemic and see how preventable homelessness made the deaths so much worse.
I'm very familiar with landlord-tenant and real estate laws, at least in my home state, and I remain extremely concerned about this extreme interpretation of the CDC's statutory authority.
It's a bit of a detour from the topic, but in my experience the number of people who understand the term "real estate" even superficially is close to zero.
If you are suggesting that justice and security can arise from executive orders being tested in court on the basis of efficacy alone, rather than being attributable to a specific enumerated power, then I view this as a very naive and privileged view.
If the "necessary and proper" clause subsumes the entire limitation on power in Washington DC, it is the most disadvantaged in society who will suffer for it.
No matter how good a decision Congress or POTUS might want to make, I prefer that they be strictly restrained.
The idea of "the united States of America" as the default political unit (rather than more localized decision-making) is a relic of an age without the kind of communication technology we have today. I am especially cautious at agencies like CDC, which have blundered their way through some important decision-making, being given expanded powers at a time when more local agencies are capable of consuming precisely the same wealth of information.
Speaking from Oakland CA here where the eviction moratorium is one of the most intense in the country. I think most renters who opt not to pay during eviction moratoriums suspect that being brought to court for rent arrears is akin to squeezing blood from a stone.
My lawyer advised me to negotiate rent to an amount my tenant can pay stating, "the only way you'll be able to collect is by a future collection action, and many times those types of judgments are worth about as much as the paper they're printed on."
I say this all to try and drive the point home, a moratorium on evictions is akin to an implicit rent reduction or rent elimination.
It's not like avoiding rent is a good deal for renters. They get out of paying for some number of months, yes, but they then face the likely prospect of both eviction and being unable to find new housing in the near future, which is an extremely harsh disincentive.
While there are always edge cases, I really doubt any significant number of people who can afford to pay would even consider taking advantage of this.
They might not have a choice wrt paying vs not paying: some parts of the United States have chosen to cure a headache by decapitation, and are still shut down.
To be fair, in many places (including the SFBA) you could get a rent reduction just by asking these last few months. My rent was knocked down significantly because we asked (and circumstances were reasonable), and I know of people on month to month leases who got reductions by threatening to move out.
Anecdote time: My tenant said they were denied unemployment. They never tried to negotiate the rent. After 4 months of nonpayment when Oakland formalized my ability to offer them a "Covid19 rent reduction" which wouldn't affect their lease'd rent price on an ongoing basis I gave them a 20% reduction. 7 months later I still haven't received a dime.
I finally decided to look them up on LinkedIn—turns out they used to be a property manager, something I'd overlooked during my background check. I think they just know how long the rope is right now, and how my hands are tied, so they're using the system to their advantage ¯\_(ツ)_/
Or... They actually were denied unemployment and their prior employment has no bearing on their current situation except that maybe they understand the fine print a little better? And you going out of your way to make negative assumptions about your tennant is a great example of why people think landlords are jerks?
Debts are still accruing. Landlords will still have the ability to pursue payments in the future. This does nothing but restrict landlords from kicking people out of their homes.
It might lower payment rate (if an eviction isn't coming those folks may put their money toward more immediate issues like healthcare/food). But it will also decrease overall revenue for landlords - someone who isn't able to pay their rent can't be evicted and theoretically replaced with someone who can... then again I'm not certain how many folks are moving apartments right now.
>It might lower payment rate (if an eviction isn't coming those folks may put their money toward more immediate issues like healthcare/food).
It is tough to feel bad that landlords might have to temporarily sacrifice their profitability so their tenants don't literally starve to death. Comments like this are just telling on themselves that they care more about the financial health of the home owner class than the literal health of the renter class. Once again, this doesn't change how much a tenant owes. It just removes the ability to kick a tenant out. Courts will work to resolve these financial disputes once we are over the pandemic.
You are incorrect - I care deeply about the well being of those renters and I don't give a hoot about the large rental managers - those corporations can absorb the temporary slow down in revenue. I care about those tighter margin managers of property that will be out of an income if renters can't continue to pay rent.
The economy is like a big giant circle of life, some parts are terrible, some parts can withstand a lot of business, but if momentum starts to die then we're all in trouble. I'm also not advocating for a full re-open I think that's more damaging in the long run, I'd support diverting money from some of the big government sinks (i.e. defense spending) to help social issues in the short term, Boeing and folks have enough of a war chest to withstand some short term losses.
You certainly aren't showing compassion to renters when your first response is to criticize a move that you admit allows people to prioritize buying food and healthcare over rent. Where are in the middle of an emergency. When in an emergency you respond with triage. The first step is to identify the most urgent and time sensitive issues and address them before moving on. Stopping evictions is the first step. We shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good.
We are in agreement with the only slight quibble of "fix that first". Using that triage example again, we need to get the patient's heart beating again before we worry about changing the patients diet to address their heart disease. And sometimes a defibrillator is the "better idea" but you don't always have one available and CPR is better than nothing.
I disagree - I think the US has plenty available to subsidize the economy - rather than having mortgage payments be frozen why don't you just freeze the DoD budget and redirect that money toward economic subsidies - a hundredth of what the DoD eats in a year would float all the social services for like a decade.
Hiding behind the DoD being "politically untouchable" is cowardice when 200k folks are dead.
There are two different components to that. Would it be politically possible? And would it be effective ?
The answer to the political feasibility question is a straight no. There is not going to be political support to redirect DoD funds to direct stimulus payments to the population. We can't even agree to print new money to pay for more stimulus checks. This basically kills this conversation until at least November.
Whether it is practical is a more difficult question to answer. You were the one who brought up the whole economy is a circle of life idea. That DoD money doesn't just disappear. It goes to buy good and services and it goes to pay people. Abruptly stopping those payments would cause economic problems just like stopping people from paying mortgages. I would even bet that the multiplier is higher for DoD spending than mortgage spending based on the recipients of the money. Would this mean that DoD spending is better for the economy than mortgage spending? I honestly have no idea. Although I do agree that this country should reduce DoD spending and increase spending on social problems long term, it isn't as easy as making an immediate transition in the middle of a pandemic.
An often overlooked, but important, aspect of the Irish famine is how landlords and the ever increasing subdivisions of their property[1] brought about the conditions for the famine, and how evictions afterward[2] hastened the deaths of already starving people.
> Landlords will still have the ability to pursue payments in the future.
I see you have never tried to collect on a debt. The expected repayment rate for these rent debts is probably going to be single-digit cents on the dollar.
For people who truly cannot pay, yes. But a person who could pay, and chooses not to so they can take advantage of the moratorium, would be recoverable.
No, because if you don’t pay you can still be evicted the moment the moratorium is lifted. Landlords can still do everything in the process up to actually kicking somebody out.
The moratorium also notably doesn’t apply to people who can pay, but just choose not to.
Probably terribly - but in the US your credit score isn't federally managed so they'd need to nationalize Equifax or try and force business practices to do anything about credit scores.
I'm not sure why the fact someone can't pay rent, shouldn't factor into their credit score. Even with the moratorium, it means they are piling up debt in missed rent payments without income.
Credit scores are a really terrible system, my score was absolute trash when I went to buy a condo since most of my transactions use debt cards and paying with cash - I avoid debt like the plague and thus I am considered to have a really poor credit score. When it comes to loan "worthiness", or whatever the measure is, lenders want to know if you're likely going to be able to repay the loan - exceptions happen and right now Covid is (hopefully) a gigantic exception that we'll eventually move beyond.
Why would I evict someone if they are paying their rent? I mean I suppose there are a few cases when that happens, but by and large non-payment is the primary reason for eviction. I'm glad I don't own any rental properties right now. I figure the bank would not be happy if I told them I'm not going to pay until I get paid, even if "debt is still accruing".
Yea a family member of mine manages properties and they don't have great margins to begin with - this moratorium might end up forcing a lot of small businesses to be folded into the large property management companies and those guys are pretty terrible.
>Under the provisions of the CARES Act, individuals with federally backed mortgage loans who are experiencing financial hardship due to COVID-19 can request a forbearance period by contacting their mortgage servicer. Federally backed mortgages include FHA, VA, USDA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
>The CARES Act provides for affected borrowers to defer their mortgage payments for up to 180 days. Borrowers also have the right to apply for an extension of another 180 days of forbearance. There will be no penalties or fees added to the account, although regular interest will still accrue.
Not all mortgages are backed by the federal government, but if you’re serious about not being able to afford your mortgage you should look into yours, and check to see if your state has any resources too.
Geez, them fancy words, yet you wear blinders and are trying to deny cause and effect.
What is a democratic government but a representative of society (ok in the US it's mostly a representation of corporate money, but I'll return to that...), if you take society to its origins of a village of farmers, when one farmer gets sick, the others don't say "well, too bad, if he can't work, he's not going to eat.", instead they would share their food with him until he can work again (even if he doesn't, or if he can't work because of age instead of sickness, they wouldn't let him starve).
Nowadays everyone's just hungry for money that they're thinking "Fuck society, all I care about is getting paid.". It's amazing how the Republicans said for years they can't do handouts, if you don't work to live you're lazy, etc, but when millions lost their jobs, the GOP rulers suddenly agreed to give everyone money to survive. Oh, suddenly socialism is possible? It only took a global pandemic for the GOP to care about the citizenry they're supposed to serve.
While helpful, it just seems to postpone the inevitable. If you lost your job due to COVID and submit this declaration, it sounds like the landlord can make you pay the full amount when it expires or kick you out.
I guess it gives you time to find another job and get a new place lined up, though.
This is absolutely absurd. And the fact that they justify it as to stop spread of COVID-19 is even more bizarre.
The government imposed this mortality-inducing and economically destructive lockdown, if they want to prevent evictions they need to pay the landlords what they’re owed. Reparations.
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While I’m at it, a reminder that with COVID-19 we abandoned the critical pathological vs physiological distinction and define COVID-19 as “rt-PCR-positive for SARS-2” in the absence of any symptoms, which is just wrong. “Asymptomatic COVID-19” is an oxymoron, no symptoms means no disease. “Pre-symptomatic COVID-19” makes sense, but not asymptomatic.
You can have HIV without AIDS. Your skin can be colonized with C. Acnes without acne. But if you are PCR-positive for SARS-CoV-2 they call that COVID-19.
The above absurd definition of COVID-19 is how the death count is being inflated. Died of a motorcycle accident in Orange County? COVID death. 2 month old infant born with intestines outside of body? COVID death. George Floyd? COVID death (he was PCR-positive). All 3 of those examples are real examples, not ones I made up.
We’re going to look back at this as the first example of worldwide collective delusion (except Sweden). Dutch tulip bulb mania across the entire globe.
Rental properties are an investment, why in the world would we subsidize investment losses? The fault is having housing for the majority of people classified as a financial instrument. There is no scenario where the landlords should be compensated.
Also your argument that they imposed lockdowns that were economically destructive and caused death is exactly the opposite of what we know to be true as evidenced by the countries that successfully implemented lockdowns initially and slowed the spread. It's these types of mental gymnastics that represent our failure as a nation to combat this.
Punishing landlords seems like an odd choice, I’d begin with the CDC punishing themselves for testing lags and not forcing people to wear masks.
Like, imagine I have a bug in my Production hospital billing system, and instead of looking inwards, I decided to say “there is now a moratorium on car sales — they sell cars which cause accidents which land people in the hospital, to hell with the dealerships — those dealerships are investments and deserve to lose!
> why in the world would we subsidize investment losses?
We do that all the time. Major industries are bailed out all the time by the government with negligible interest loans. We've literally done that in COVID times already.
We should have deferrals up the chain if the government is preventing people from working.
> Rental properties are an investment, why in the world would we subsidize investment losses?
Unless you can change the reality that rental properties are investments, making them artificially riskier will reduce new housing construction and lead to less affordable housing overall.
Investments are things you place a gamble towards. Stocks, Lottery, Bonds, Business and etc.
Once your investment has renters and a legal document it's a contract and a business. And the person that signed the lease made an agreement and the gamble is almost over, now the issues you have afterward are quite risky ( maintenance, evictions, and etc ). I am glad the CDC is stepping up to stop people from being kicked out during issues of business being closed. But a contract is in place which ends the fact its an investment and turns into a structured business.
Why is Sweden back below normal excess mortality if lockdown works so well? Somehow everyone in “your camp” refused to accept evidence that the herd immunity strategy does work. Note Sweden should have done a better job with their elderly care facilities - but so should have New York and California.
The continued belief in this herd immunity bullshit by people who apparently cannot comprehend basic statistics is simply beyond me. Sweden fucked up. They choked on this one, big time. Their excess mortality was far in excess of their neighbors and the Swedes know it. They killed thousands of their own citizens and did not even get the economic benefit that they had hoped for. The only morons who still think that Sweden performed admirably are right-wing Americans desperate to pretend that lockdowns don't work.
Sweden with a lower population density and actually having meaningful warning about what was about to happen vs. Italy who took the brunt of the more virulent first wave? Yeah, Sweden failed. Take a look at the map on your own link and you will see Sweden as a dark blue failure surrounded by light blue neighbors who succeeded at containing the spread.
EDIT: You weren’t even replying to me. I’m sorry for totally misinterpreting your whole comment. That’s what I get for being on mobile.
Leaving my comment up cause the points themselves are still valid
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(1) Middle of the pack while having never locked down is incredible. Most pro-lockdown people still trot out Ferguson’s model which predicts about .8% of the entire population dying.
(2) You didn’t really look at the number I said to. Look at excess mortality over time. Sweden at this point had no excess mortality. They are done with COVID mortality.
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Unfortunately there is a vested interest in ignoring Sweden’s success. They fucked up the nursing homes, Tegnell has said as much, but they got the important part right: they NEVER locked down and COVID-19 mortality is no longer a thing.
Herd immunity is a natural emergent phenomenom. I don’t know how your “side” has suddenly decided it’s a myth. It’s just math.
BTW, you never answered my question about how Sweden’s mortality is back at or below baseline in the absence of lockdowns nor universal masking. All you did was screech angrily about politics, not realizing that it is the lockdown-loving camp that made this whole thing about about politics over public health policy.
The bullshit is that Sweden has reached herd immunity. People in this thread clearly understand that there is a certain level of population immunity where R₀ goes below 1, they are arguing that Sweden has not reached the point where things are 'normal' and R₀=1, they are taking various measures to control the virus, and the rate of spread will go up if they relax those measures. That's not unqualified 'herd immunity', it's not even close.
I'll chalk it up to an innocent typo, but you got the terminology wrong. R_0 means R(t) where t=0. In other words, it by definition means the basic reproduction number which does NOT account for any level of immunity.
R, or as I prefer to call it, R(t), is the number that factors in how many have immunity. So you mean herd immunity is when R(t) < 1.
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Anyway, I was having trouble understanding exactly what you were saying about Sweden, but to be clear, Sweden has hit herd immunity, unless you think that the utter absence of COVID mortality at this point is due to seasonality.
What you need to understand is that simplistic models view the population as homogenous, both in terms of mixing (social connections) AND susceptibility/transmissibility. Neither are true. Essentially, the people who tend to get infected sooner in the pandemic are the ones who tend to spread more, so the first, say, 10% of antibody prevalence is worth a lot more than the next 10%.
There's also the presence of pre-existing T-cell cross-reactivity; exposure to other hCoVs is protective against SARS-2. It seems that it does not protect infection, but it does make the disease course a non-issue: this probably explains the high degree of asymptomatic infection (with part of it just being explained as an artifact of the PCR cycle threshold fuckery). Technically these findings are already implicitly factored into the estimates we have for R_0, etc. (BTW, initial studies were claiming R_0 of 5.2, 5.5, etc, but now with more data it seems it's around 2, give or take)
Many, and I am in this category, believe that the true herd immunity threshold is somewhere around 20% of the population. That explains what we've seen in places like New York, Sweden, etc. This is lower than what the classic herd immunity formula would predict, because that formula does not account for a non-homogenously-mixed population (as I mentioned earlier), nor does it account for certain individuals having an innate genetic resistance that makes it less likely that they get infected.
Ssshhhhhh.... Sweden can only be used as an example when you compare it to complete fuck-ups like the US or UK, or if you add in countries that were hit early before we knew how virulent covid-19 was and that it could be spread asymptomatically. If you put it into context with its similar neighbors then the failure of the herd immunity plan is laid bare.
So bad form to reply to one's own comment, but am I the only one who finds it quite ironic that today the Swedish PM was warning of a growing second wave there because people were not following social distancing suggestions and it turns out that they were not even close to achieving herd immunity.
Sure, the PM didn't know what they are talking about, but an ill-informed rando on HN who clearly has no expertise in either medicine, epidemiology, or statistics is the one we should pay attention to... Case numbers are rising. Death rate still far in excess of Norway, Finland, or Denmark. Well, at least we get a no-name comic tweeting pictures of life in Sweden to prove our point. This whole conversation is such a waste of time.
> if they want to prevent evictions they need to pay the landlords what they’re owed
There is cognizable legal argument that this order might qualify as a 'taking' within the terms of the 5th amendment, which might require the government to compensate landlords, but I don't think that argument will be successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
As an aside, I wish Jacobson v Massachusetts was never a thing. It opened such a big can of worms. Public health pseudocrises now allow our government to take on full emergency powers in perpetuity.
If the explanation you imply here (COVID deaths are just misclassified deaths that would have happened anyway) were true, then we’d see the overall all-cause death rate holding steady, as COVID-classified deaths replace other deaths and cause heart attacks etc to drop. In fact, we see the opposite - all cause mortality has risen substantially, even more than the COVID-classified deaths account for. In uncontrolled outbreaks like Spain, Italy, New York early this year we saw the death rate more than double. In controlled outbreaks like we have in the US now, it’s more like a 10-20% increase. Either way, it’s clear the COVID is causing a significant number of additional deaths.
I don’t deny that COVID has caused deaths, I am just stating that a huge chunk of these so-called COVID deaths are not. Excess mortality is real, I agree (altho not solely due to COVID obviously).
I believe that lockdown policies worsen COVID-19 mortality. Severe COVID-19 is an immunoregulatory disorder, and lack of vit d / nitric oxide, lack of exercise/sleep, unwarranted fear/anxiety, lack of socialization all make the immune system incapable of regulating itself properly.
So I believe we would have less COVID death amortized over a year without lockdown. Look at New York’s absurd mortality rate, it’s worse than having done nothing. (NY was iatrogenic harm from early invasive ventilation which in retrospect was a horrible idea, plus lockdown depriving people of sunlight and exercise, plus Cuomo’s famous nursing home gambit)
+1 to __blockcipher__ 's points. Maybe in the beginning draconian measures might have been justified, but current panic over cases (casedemic) and continuing moral panic and lockdowns are not.
BTW, since there's not a good place to make this point, I wish more people understood that IFR is not this fixed thing. As a contrived example, if you get medical advancements that lead to half your population living to 200 years old, even the most pathetic common cold virus would appear to have a crazy high IFR.
I live in California, and every year our misguided leaders let wood and dry brush stack up like crazy. Every year wildfires erupt and every year we artificially suppress them. The result is there's a huge pile of fuel just waiting to go up.
Similarly, when you have a minor flu season for a couple years, you get a large population of elderly people that build up and are capable of being taken out by a pathogen like SARS-2.
SARS-2 already, even with the inflated death toll, is weak enough overall that we'd have barely noticed it (in our day-to-day lives) if we'd never knew it existed. But go back a few centuries to when it was rare to have people live past 60, and it would literally be an unnoticeable virus.
I can actually get behind a lot of what you say, but you go too claiming the death count is inflated. It is not.
You can look at excess mortality all around the world, and there are large, otherwise-unexplained spikes in mortality everywhere. Sweden has the same large spike in deaths from all causes.
I guess I should have spoken more clearly. There are real COVID deaths. Excess mortality is real. But a vast majority of the deaths classified as COVID deaths are not COVID deaths.
The problem is that if you die and are PCR-positive for COVID, that's a COVID death. We don't use that standard for any other disease because it's the wrong standard.
Once you get infected and recover, you still test PCR-positive for months afterwards even when you have NO viable SARS-CoV-2 inside your body. This is because the rt-PCR cycle threshold is set at 40-something when it should be 30 maximum. This means we're magnifying DNA by several orders of magnitude beyond where we should, and thus hitting on the presence of viral debris.
This is why, for example, George Floyd was PCR-positive despite having recovered from SARS-2 infection weeks or months earlier.
BTW, I also believe that lockdown increases COVID-19 mortality. Meaning if you do get infected you are more likely to die, since you've been stuck inside out of the sun, riddled with fear and anxiety, with almost all avenues for exercise closed down, etc. But like you said, in places that never locked down, like Sweden, there was still excess mortality.
BTW, I wish more people talked about life-years over lifes. Flu is a bimodal distribution; it kills the very young and very old. COVID kills the very old but not the very young. Look at the average age of death. I haven't ran the numbers but each COVID death probably only represents an average of 2, 3, 5 years of life lost. As opposed to a baby dying of the Flu, which would be 70+ years (picking the most extreme example of course).
Sweden failed with that part, yes. But what they got right was not locking down.
Universal lockdown, ignoring constitutional rights for a second, increases the proportion of at-risk individuals who must get sick before herd immunity is reached.
If you have a population of 100 people, the HIT is 20% (assume homogenous mixing), of which half your population is high-risk and half is low-risk, you can enforce universal lockdown and end up with 10 high-risk and 10 low-risk infections, or you can encourage just the at-risk to isolate and end up with like 18 low-risk and 2 high-risk. It should be self evident which course is better.
Unfortunately the world has been tricked into viewing “herd immunity” as a dirty word as opposed to an emergent phenomenom.
You're right that 'asymptomatic' doesn't necessarily make sense when counting prevalence of a disease, but it does make sense when trying to contain that disease, as asymptomatic people can still be contagious. The metrics that have been published come from the context of trying to slow the spread, not from the context of counting the people most badly affected.
That’s fine, I agree. I disagree with containment as a strategy but IF you want to practice containment asymptomatic infection is relevant. Altho just so you know there is essentially no evidence that COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically. However I can point you to a bunch of studies strongly demonstrating pre-symptomatic spread (important distinction).
My point is COVID-19 stands for coronavirus infectious disease 2019. If you have no symptoms you have no disease. You don’t have COVID-19 without symptoms, you have a SARS-2 infection. The distinction is incredibly important.
So if your grandma rents out her second house to someone, they should be allowed to live there rent-free past the eviction deadline?
I disagree. When a company goes under for a bad investment, they need to not be bailed out. But when the government comes in and says it’s illegal to work your job period, the government needs to pay all the lost income from that forced closure. That’s all I’m saying.
If you prefer it this way, they should pay the renters who should pay the landlords. Happy?
My point is the government should not make it illegal to generate income and then turn around and say that renters need to pay rent, but neither should they say that landlords must be stuck holding the bag.
Do people understand that landlords aren’t this mysterious class of evil overlords? They’re just people. I’ve taken evil landlords to small claims court before, but that doesn’t mean I think I should be entitled to live in someone’s house for free.
I am absolutely flabbergasted by how “billionaire” and “landlord” are now bad words.
I think its for good reason that “billionaire” and “landlord” are now bad words. It doesn't take a that much reading to see why the mere concept of a billionaire is horrible, for everyone. It is especially bad in context of wealth inequality and how many billionaire simply dont give back to the collective in any way and only horde mass amounts of wealth for themselves. It also requires only looking at the homeless statistic and the housing market to figure out that being a landlord is also pretty immoral, at least if you think that shelter and housing is a human right.
Bilionaires get wealthy by producing value and capturing some of it. They wouldn't have gotten that money if someone didn't pay them for a product or service.
The only exceptions are those who made fortunes via government monopolies, which is yet another example of why the State needs to have its power checked. Unrestrained capitalism is not the problem, crony capitalism is, and crony capitalism is a function of Statism.
You: The government messed it up. The government needs to fix it.
Government: Absolutely! We too would also like to become a larger socialist entity that puts everyone on the dole. We will fix it all for you! Just give us complete control!
Landlords probably should have considered this possibility when making their investment in rental property. They wouldn't be in this position had they left that home on the market for an actual resident to buy.
You don’t want to live in a society that is forever at risk of forced government closures. It drives up risk which drives up the necessary return for an investment to be worth it which makes starting new ventures prohibitively difficult. It makes thinking long-term impossible because you can’t risk hiring full time employees.
Here in California, my rock climbing gym, which has to pay sky-high rent, was closed down when we locked down 6+ months ago. When gyms were allowed to reopen they weren’t classified as a gym and somehow were never allowed to reopen. Now gyms are closed again anyway (thanks Newsom). It’s been like 7 months of them being completely closed while paying sky-high rent. They weren’t swimming in money before all this; rock climbing is a niche market. What was done to them is WRONG.
The government is broke. They will just have to take on more debt to make the proposed business "reparations." I think it's all gone. There's nothing that can fix what has happened to this nation... from the criminal monetary policies to this situation...America is gone.
If that's your position, then people will begin resorting to violence. Your property is only secured by force. Put the people in desperate situations and they will no longer play by the rules which put them at an extreme disadvantage.
This is the lesson every corrupt nation learns the hard way. We agree to the laws of the nation to secure peace, but when that peace becomes oppressive, when that peace means slavery to the oligarchy, that peace is no longer peace but silent war.
The people will not tolerate this extreme inequality anymore.
Edit: to those claiming what I've said is "hateful" or incendiary...this is simply the truth -- as proven by history. Don't shoot the messenger.
To anyone following this comment thread, this is exactly where the belief “others should be compelled to give me resources” leads. Thanks for illustrating where your hateful ideology ends up.
The person you're responding to can perform a similar dismissal of your comment. The only thing that you have illustrated is that it's easy to create straw men for each other to feel smug about, when you have no goal of understanding or finding common ground. Pushing an obtuse overly-simplistic narrative merely attracts others to respond in kind. No wonder we're headed towards civil war.
IMO the underlying don't-fight-your-fellow-citizen analysis here is that the debt treadmill has to bind up some time. Housing rent is at the first level, followed by mortgages, then muni bonds, wall st paper games, etc. All these levels of recurring payments that have been created to channel real wealth upwards and force everybody to keep working in spite of technological abundance. If it does not bind up now, that's just delaying the inevitable to some time in the future when the phony asset valuations have gotten higher and even less serviceable.
In their myopic worldview, landlords are this abstract notion of evil capitalists, not real people. Thus seizure of their resources is not just justified, it’d be immoral not to.
Suffice to say I disagree. Call me old-school, but I believe in the rights to life, liberty, and property.
