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That money just goes straight to landlords. Henry George's time has come.
by markdown 6y ago
That money just goes straight to landlords.
Henry George's time has come.
- t-writescode 6y agoThose landlords also need bailing out. They need to pay their loans, as well.
- nradov 6y agoI don't want my tax money used to bail out landlords. Let the lenders foreclose. If the landlords didn't want to deal with loans then they should have paid cash for the properties.
- t-writescode 6y agoI'm interested in my tax money being used to help stabilize the local population to minimize harm to them during this time and thereby minimize unrest and keep the whole of it safer. If my money is going to be going to making missiles and weapons for overseas, some of it can come back and pay for rough times instead.
- AdamJacobMuller 6y agoA less drastic solution, which doesn't require much money, is to just force lenders to allow landlords who lost tenants or whose tenants can't pay to allow the landlord to defer loan payments (extending the final date of the loan). It's not exactly fair to landlords who own the properties outright, but, I can live with that.
- t-writescode 6y agoIs it turtles all the way up? Do the landlords who are paying down their mortgage also get a deferment? What do we do about the people that presently have no money? Do we also give them a stipend to pay for food, etc? Or force them onto credit cards?
- peteretep 6y agoIf you can borrow from the central bank, the buck stops at you. Seems fair
- nradov 6y agoMany commercial property mortgages already contain clauses allowing the borrower to defer payments if they don't have a tenant. For those that don't, well they should have negotiated better terms before taking out the loan.
- respondo2134 6y ago>>It's not exactly fair to landlords who own the properties outright, but, I can live with that. Well of course you're OK with that, you're obviously not a property investor who worked to get free and clear. What if instead we levied a special premium salary fee on technology workers who make more than the median salary? Not really fair but us worker bees are OK with it...
- imtringued 6y agoYou can live with endangering the banking infrastructure? The place where all your hard earned money is stored at? This will end with a bank bailout because nobody wants to lose their money because some idiot decided to implement deferment of loan payments.
- apta 6y agoHow will preventing lenders from foreclosing prevent harm? If anything, it will allow people to purchase property since prices will reduce as there is more supply in the market.
- username90 6y agoIt would be nice if it actually worked that way, but about 25% of US government spending are debt and not taxes in a normal year. So these bailouts doesn't come from your taxes, they are pure government debt that will crash the economy sometimes in the future when the government stops propping up the gdp via endless debt accumulation. Imagine if they were honest instead and said "We pay these bailouts now and increase taxes from 30% to 50% for the next 10 years to make up for it", how many would be happy?
- twblalock 6y ago> If the landlords didn't want to deal with loans then they should have paid cash for the properties. If the tenants didn't want to pay rent, they should not have signed leases. Why is it that tenants can get a break on their obligations but landlords can't? Why are tenants more deserving of help? Most landlords are not rich. They are providing a service to their tenants, who cannot afford to purchase buildings and would have no hope of opening a business if there were not landlords around willing to rent things out.
- nradov 6y agoOwning real estate is an investment, not a right. It's no different than any other investment. If I have a loss on leveraged stock investments should the government bail me out?
- twblalock 6y agoWe are not talking about investment losses here. We are talking about breach of contract. A renter signs a contract promising to pay rent. The value of the building, whether it drops or increases, is the investment component of being a landlord. That is not in dispute here. If a building drops in value the landlord just has to deal with it. But until now, if someone promised to pay rent and did not do it, a landlord could sue them, or evict them, because the landlord would be the victim of a breach of contract that has nothing to do with investment value. What is in dispute here is that people who promised to pay rent are being allowed to stop paying, but landlords who promised to pay their mortgages are not allowed to stop paying. That's not fair. It's not good for the economy either, because most businesses can't afford to buy property and need to rent from landlords, and we are now making it very unattractive to be a landlord.
- t-writescode 6y ago> but landlords who promised to pay their mortgages are not allowed to stop paying. Why not provide them an extension during this time, as well?
- denkmoon 6y agoDo I get a bailout for my losses on the share market? What if I had bought shares on margin? Why does one class of investor get a bailout but not others? (Why bailout any investor? Risk is part of investment.)
- runawaybottle 6y agoThe moral hazard argument does not work in this case for a variety of reasons.
- javagram 6y agoThe S&P 500 and NASDAQ are both up year to date. The government has already taken actions, including injecting trillions of dollars into the economy, to bail out shareholders. > Why bailout any investor? Risk is part of investment. The damage caused by this pandemic is so rare it is less than a 1-in-100-years event (1918 pandemic killed millions, but businesses were typically shuttered only for weeks at most, not 6 months). Certainly bailouts for natural disasters are quite common in other respects. And if the government were to seize your property via eminent domain, they owe you money. Why shouldn’t they also in justice pay out if they order your business shuttered for a half a year?
- swiley 6y agoGod no. They've been sitting on empty buildings for years. It's time for them to default on the underwater loans and let people actually put the wasted space to use. Every city in the US has a similar issue including the one near where I grew up and it's the weirdest most broken thing. I remember many times walking down streets flanked by empty buildings with homeless people sleeping outside.
- DeonPenny 6y agoThats 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.
- newfriend 6y agoAnd then you want to give them my money, taken from me by force by the government.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- swiley 6y agoThat 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.)
- 6y ago
- dehrmann 6y agoAnd property taxes.
- jojobas 6y agoWould you also bail out those who bet on black and got red? When you bail out something like Ford you keep it running and collect tax revenue. If you don't, factories stop and the business essentially disappears. When a landlord goes bust nothing happens, other the financial loss for the landlord.
- refurb 6y agoWhen a landlord goes bust nothing happens, other the financial loss for the landlord. It's like the old saying "when you own the $10,000, that's your problem", "when you own the bank $1B, that's the banks problem". When 1/3 of NYC commercial real estate gets foreclosed, that's not just the landlord's problem, that's everyone's problem.
- jojobas 6y agoWhen 1/3 of NYC gets foreclosed the new tenants will swarm to rent the places at a discount and reopen the cafes and everything else as soon as they're allowed to operate.
- wmf 6y agoBailouts combined with mandated (maybe partial) rent forgiveness would ensure that money did not go straight to landlords.
- runawaybottle 6y agoI don’t want restaurants with good locations to lose their spot, even if it means bailing out landlords.