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Initiatives like these always tend to hurt the most responsible people more than the rest. The landlords are fine. The people who maybe could have paid their

Initiatives like these always tend to hurt the most responsible people more than the rest. The landlords are fine. The people who maybe could have paid their rent on time but didn't want to reduce spending in other areas to compensate for it end up okay. It's the people who paid their rent first and on time then reduced spending in other areas that are the ones getting the short end of the stick. This only applies to people that could actually switch things around like this, though.

georgeplusplus 5y ago
This can be extrapolated to the handling of the corona virus itself. How are the states that made the hard decision to keep their economy going vs locking it down supposed to feel when in the end states like California who had one of the strictest lockdowns that even drove Elon out of the state ended up getting a bailout anyway..the right thing apparently doesn’t matter when you have access to unlimited fiat money. Lessened learned from the guy who paid and went to work like a sucker
lilyball 5y ago
Nobody is being harmed by having unpaid rent paid off. The people who haven't paid their rent have done so by and large because they couldn't afford it, not because they just chose not to. Paying off their rent helps those people, the people who couldn't afford to pay it themselves, and ensures they don't lose their housing as a result. It certainly is true that landlords benefit from this package as they get their money, as opposed to an alternative like forcing all rent debts to be forgiven. But "landlords benefit" isn't a harm. Perhaps a more equitable solution would have been to determine the median rent across the state and then give that amount of money to all renters. But that has a lot of difficulties, such as how do you handle folks who rented only for part of this time (including those who had to stop renting due to job loss). And what about folks who own their homes and are dealing with mortgages; paying off rent is likely to be more accepted by non-renters than a plan where non-renters get money and renters don't. Of course, the plan could be extended to people with mortgages too. Or heck, just give this money to every person over 18 (or 21?) in the state. This would presumably significantly expand the costs involved in the plan though, but it would certainly be the most equitable.
- hn8788 5y ago
  At a minimum they should at least force you to submit a financial report and show that you couldn't pay your rent. Back when the housing bubble burst, I knew people who stopped paying their mortgage because the only way to qualify for a short sale was if you weren't paying your mortgage. They could still afford to pay it, they just felt like moving and didn't want to lose money on the house.
  - content_sesh 5y ago
    What proof is there that means-testing this to weed out "unworthy" renters will save more money than it costs?
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      If anything, adding an intrusive means test (like a "financial report") is likely to exclude a lot of deserving renters, especially ones who are unbanked/underbanked.
- gruez 5y ago
  > Nobody is being harmed by having unpaid rent paid off. opportunity cost?
  - fattire 5y ago
    You mean the cost of having thousands of renters go insta-homeless and thousands of landlords getting stiffed for a year's worth of rent?
- godshatter 5y ago
  > Nobody is being harmed by having unpaid rent paid off. I wasn't really objecting to the initiative necessarily, just lamenting the fact that the people who decided to sacrifice more to keep their rent paid up during a tough time instead of just letting it slide hoping they can figure something out later are the ones that aren't really gaining anything here. I don't know what the best solution would be here.
olivermarks 5y ago
The landlords aren't 'fine'. I know of a couple of people crippled by lack of rent income, the mortgages were still due. There was no moratorium on paying mortgages and a lot of people have made huge sacrifices in order to hang onto their properties in the last 14 months.
- pxeboot 5y ago
  > There was no moratorium on paying mortgages Maybe not for large commercial loans, but traditional mortgages (usually for 1-4 unit properties) absolutely could be deferred for ~1 year if you could show a loss of income from the pandemic.
- nielsbot 5y ago
  You'd need data to know the percentage of landlords that are struggling. If landlords are struggling with their investments, they were over leveraged in a sense. Personally I am not opposed to this type of bottom-up bailout, however I think this move should not end up being profit-generating for landlords. Not sure how you'd determine that, etc.
  - cmckn 5y ago
    My landlord owns two properties. I live in an expensive area. If I didn’t pay my rent for a year, it’s unreasonable to assume that they could float that. Do we want to live in a world where all landlords are large corporate entities with the leverage to survive a once in a century upset? (I do not.) It’s in vogue to harp on landlords, but it’s one of the more common small business models; owning a rental property is probably the most realistic way you or I could earn some income on the side. They’re not all Scrooge McDucks.
    - nielsbot 5y ago
      No, but what about having more homeowners instead?
      - olivermarks 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
Not every landlord is doing fine. A huge portion of the rental market is individual owners relying on rent income to keep up their mortgage payments.
- xnyan 5y ago
  Lots of investors have been convinced that they are not really investors and housing is not really an investment but rather a source of "passive" income. If anyone is in trouble with their (primary residence) mortgage for whatever reason, I support polices that provide assistance. Outside of that, like all investments renting a dwelling involves risks including the risk that you may not able to boot your tenet if they stop paying for a time.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > including the risk that you may not able to boot your tenet if they stop paying I agree that this is a risk landlords must consider, but there is a big difference between ordinary investment risk (mispredicting future supply/demand/cost/etc.), or unforeseen accidents or "acts of god" (e.g. losing your rental property to a wildfire or flood), and the risk that some powerful third party will step in and prevent you from evicting someone squatting on your property. The first two cases are either your own fault or no-fault; the third case is a direct result of deliberate action by someone else, which means that they, not you, should be liable to repair the harm which they caused.
    - xnyan 5y ago
      I agree that if the government halts evictions, then the government should foot the bill, however it is known that the government does have the ability to force private entities to provide critical services (for example, emergency room services) at the cost of the provider. Right or wrong, there’s plenty of historical evidence that this is a real risk for providers of housing and needs to be considered when making decisions about housing investments.
      - 5y ago
happytoexplain 5y ago
Ignoring the details (who is and is not fine, who is irresponsible vs who is unlucky, etc), you're right - but that's the inevitable social contract behind all government. It's a zero sum game and not everybody wants or needs to benefit from every resource equally, so all action boils down to some form of redistribution, directly or indirectly.
- hn8788 5y ago
  The problem is that it sets a precedent for the future. If a similar situation of extended lockdowns happens, why would anyone pay their rent if the government has shown that they'll pay it for you when the lockdowns are over?
  - anonAndOn 5y ago
    Because you have minimal chance it will happen again at an opportune moment for you. I'm still waiting for Cash-for-Clunkers 2.0 so I can offload my rust bucket. Unless that happens in the next couple of years, I will have no use for the program (again, dammit!).
burkaman 5y ago
People who paid their rent aren't hurt by this at all, they just aren't directly helped by it.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  They are paying or at least on the hook for the cost of everyone else.
  - nielsbot 5y ago
    How so?
    - ar_lan 5y ago
      Because they paid rent (responsible), and now their taxes are going to pay landlords for other's rent. It's basically saying there is an incentive to stop paying rent if the government will just pick up the tab. Note: I'm not saying I agree with the mindset above, but this is a how a good chunk of people think.
      - nielsbot 5y ago
        I assume those who could pay, did. Others (and their landlords) are getting a government bailout.
        ar_lan 5y ago
        Yes, I assume as well. I think "government bailout", while technically true, is a bit loaded, however. Landlord's hands were forced by the eviction moratorium - so it's a bailout for a problem the government caused. Now, that "problem" is probably better then the alternative (a bunch of people suddenly becoming homeless in the middle of the pandemic), but the state did force landlords to not evict even if rent wasn't getting paid (not allowing them to find new renters who could try to).
        5y ago
ar_lan 5y ago
This is a very similar situation to student loan forgiveness, and for a very long time I shared your attitude. You are correct in the sense that programs like this incentivize being irresponsible, on the surface. I went through all of college working extra-hard to make sure I came out debt-free, while other people racked up debt partying - and now they maybe get to get these loans completely forgiven? It feels similar. But one thing I came to realize is overall, the people who are actually being benefited here are typically not people who wanted to not pay rent. They are people who wish their livelihoods weren't necessarily uprooted due to an unforeseen pandemic. It punishes the "responsible" in the same vein that a libertarian might view taxes as punishment. But this is overwhelmingly helping those who got affected the hardest in society - so I think "punishment" is the wrong mindset, and it could really be viewed as just "helping" those who need the help the most.
UncleMeat 5y ago
It depends on your goals. Do you want to create a maximally fair society? Or do you want to minimize suffering? If it is the latter, it can be completely acceptable for aid initiatives to end up giving more to people who planned less well.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- atom_arranger 5y ago
  It would be better to give equally to people. You can raise the baseline without excessively penalizing those who were more responsible.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    It would be different. Like I said, it depends on your goals.
ab737 5y ago
Only civilised society rewards the rule-abiding citizen. Californians have got what they voted for.
toomanyrichies 5y ago
> The people who maybe could have paid their rent on time but didn't want to reduce spending in other areas to compensate for it end up okay. Honest question- do they in fact end up OK? What about their credit? I imagine most credit agencies, future landlords, lenders, etc. would consider it material information to know whether a borrower / prospective tenant had declined to / been unable to pay their rent for over a year.
Karishma1234fff 5y ago
Felt pretty pissed at this. I am both a landlord and tenant. I worked with my tenants to help them pay, reduced the rent etc. Now I feel pretty stupid. I lost money just for being nice to my tenants. As a tenant I paid my bills regularly as I could, feel pretty shitty that I did. Sorry California this is simply unacceptable.
path2power 5y ago
I just really doubt there's that many people out there who rolled the dice like that. First of all, landlords can report late to reporting agencies, which will make it difficult to get another apartment later and can impact the person's credit score. Secondly, there was never any guarantee that this would be the outcome -- it could have been something like having to pay back rent on a schedule. If you have the means to pay rent, why bother with the risk? It doesn't add up.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
Yep. All the people who paid all of their savings are stuck without savings, while all of the people who just stopped paying intentionally (others stopped paying without a choice due to lack of income) are given a free ride.
- ab737 5y ago
  The 2011 playbook: move to SF, sleep in your office space to spend $0 on rent, subsist on ramen to reduce overhead The 2021 playbook: move to SF, defer your rent payments to the state to spend $0 on rent, steal all your necessities (up to $949/day) to reduce overhead
ehutch79 5y ago
I live in California, I paid all my rent on time, and I'm not being hurt. I'd rather this happen then more people getting evicted, or stuck with debt they can't manage.
runawaybottle 5y ago
One thing I want to add is that we have also decided the pandemic created morally superior distraught people. Millions of people have gone in and out of credit card debt, but we have never ever considered them worthy of a bailout. We believe the pandemic to be an emergency, and we believe college education to be noble, so people that take on this type of credit are more … noble? We don’t question that maybe some of these people took on an apartment that takes way too much of their budget monthly, or a degree that costs way too much for room and board and poor upside in the economy. But, we are totally willing to say ‘hey you know what credit cards are, you deserve what you get’. Any of these people taking a bailout willing to take a hit on their credit report or the impact bankruptcy can have on you forever? Are they willing to move to public housing in exchange for the relief? Probably not, right? No, sorry, this is the sins of the upper class spilling into the upper lower class, where there is a ‘noble’ group, your too big too fails, your white collared too good for jail, or in our lower ranks - ‘too good and decent to fail’. We are expanding the pattern of the wealthy, and two wrongs don’t make a right.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
Next you're going to tell me that social security is unfair to all of the people who died in poverty before it was introduced.
seanicus 5y ago
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-op-schermer13-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-op-scher... "people... would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?" Loss Aversion in action - people who were generally gainfully employed and able to make rent despise people who generally were not reliably employed and unable to make rent. My last two industries (corporate events and travel respectively) got demolished by the pandemic. I'm much happier being consistently employed, staying off the dole, and being able to make rent but I should be thinking the poors can shove it, I guess.
risk000 5y ago
How are the most responsible people being hurt by this though? They continue to live in the same world they did prior to the rent being paid for the others. It's simply, in my view, that someone else received an advantage and they did not. My brother's gain is also my gain. Is the viewpoint I'm choosing to take on it.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  Because it's not fair. Same reason why we are upset if our colleague has higher salary for the same job.

georgeplusplus 5y ago

This can be extrapolated to the handling of the corona virus itself. How are the states that made the hard decision to keep their economy going vs locking it down supposed to feel when in the end states like California who had one of the strictest lockdowns that even drove Elon out of the state ended up getting a bailout anyway..the right thing apparently doesn’t matter when you have access to unlimited fiat money. Lessened learned from the guy who paid and went to work like a sucker

lilyball 5y ago

Nobody is being harmed by having unpaid rent paid off. The people who haven't paid their rent have done so by and large because they couldn't afford it, not because they just chose not to. Paying off their rent helps those people, the people who couldn't afford to pay it themselves, and ensures they don't lose their housing as a result. It certainly is true that landlords benefit from this package as they get their money, as opposed to an alternative like forcing all rent debts to be forgiven. But "landlords benefit" isn't a harm. Perhaps a more equitable solution would have been to determine the median rent across the state and then give that amount of money to all renters. But that has a lot of difficulties, such as how do you handle folks who rented only for part of this time (including those who had to stop renting due to job loss). And what about folks who own their homes and are dealing with mortgages; paying off rent is likely to be more accepted by non-renters than a plan where non-renters get money and renters don't. Of course, the plan could be extended to people with mortgages too. Or heck, just give this money to every person over 18 (or 21?) in the state. This would presumably significantly expand the costs involved in the plan though, but it would certainly be the most equitable.

hn8788 5y ago
At a minimum they should at least force you to submit a financial report and show that you couldn't pay your rent. Back when the housing bubble burst, I knew people who stopped paying their mortgage because the only way to qualify for a short sale was if you weren't paying your mortgage. They could still afford to pay it, they just felt like moving and didn't want to lose money on the house.
- content_sesh 5y ago
  What proof is there that means-testing this to weed out "unworthy" renters will save more money than it costs?
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    If anything, adding an intrusive means test (like a "financial report") is likely to exclude a lot of deserving renters, especially ones who are unbanked/underbanked.
gruez 5y ago
> Nobody is being harmed by having unpaid rent paid off. opportunity cost?
- fattire 5y ago
  You mean the cost of having thousands of renters go insta-homeless and thousands of landlords getting stiffed for a year's worth of rent?
godshatter 5y ago
> Nobody is being harmed by having unpaid rent paid off. I wasn't really objecting to the initiative necessarily, just lamenting the fact that the people who decided to sacrifice more to keep their rent paid up during a tough time instead of just letting it slide hoping they can figure something out later are the ones that aren't really gaining anything here. I don't know what the best solution would be here.

olivermarks 5y ago

The landlords aren't 'fine'. I know of a couple of people crippled by lack of rent income, the mortgages were still due. There was no moratorium on paying mortgages and a lot of people have made huge sacrifices in order to hang onto their properties in the last 14 months.

pxeboot 5y ago
> There was no moratorium on paying mortgages Maybe not for large commercial loans, but traditional mortgages (usually for 1-4 unit properties) absolutely could be deferred for ~1 year if you could show a loss of income from the pandemic.
nielsbot 5y ago
You'd need data to know the percentage of landlords that are struggling. If landlords are struggling with their investments, they were over leveraged in a sense. Personally I am not opposed to this type of bottom-up bailout, however I think this move should not end up being profit-generating for landlords. Not sure how you'd determine that, etc.
- cmckn 5y ago
  My landlord owns two properties. I live in an expensive area. If I didn’t pay my rent for a year, it’s unreasonable to assume that they could float that. Do we want to live in a world where all landlords are large corporate entities with the leverage to survive a once in a century upset? (I do not.) It’s in vogue to harp on landlords, but it’s one of the more common small business models; owning a rental property is probably the most realistic way you or I could earn some income on the side. They’re not all Scrooge McDucks.
  - nielsbot 5y ago
    No, but what about having more homeowners instead?
    - olivermarks 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

Not every landlord is doing fine. A huge portion of the rental market is individual owners relying on rent income to keep up their mortgage payments.

xnyan 5y ago
Lots of investors have been convinced that they are not really investors and housing is not really an investment but rather a source of "passive" income. If anyone is in trouble with their (primary residence) mortgage for whatever reason, I support polices that provide assistance. Outside of that, like all investments renting a dwelling involves risks including the risk that you may not able to boot your tenet if they stop paying for a time.
- nybble41 5y ago
  > including the risk that you may not able to boot your tenet if they stop paying I agree that this is a risk landlords must consider, but there is a big difference between ordinary investment risk (mispredicting future supply/demand/cost/etc.), or unforeseen accidents or "acts of god" (e.g. losing your rental property to a wildfire or flood), and the risk that some powerful third party will step in and prevent you from evicting someone squatting on your property. The first two cases are either your own fault or no-fault; the third case is a direct result of deliberate action by someone else, which means that they, not you, should be liable to repair the harm which they caused.
  - xnyan 5y ago
    I agree that if the government halts evictions, then the government should foot the bill, however it is known that the government does have the ability to force private entities to provide critical services (for example, emergency room services) at the cost of the provider. Right or wrong, there’s plenty of historical evidence that this is a real risk for providers of housing and needs to be considered when making decisions about housing investments.
    - 5y ago

happytoexplain 5y ago

Ignoring the details (who is and is not fine, who is irresponsible vs who is unlucky, etc), you're right - but that's the inevitable social contract behind all government. It's a zero sum game and not everybody wants or needs to benefit from every resource equally, so all action boils down to some form of redistribution, directly or indirectly.

hn8788 5y ago
The problem is that it sets a precedent for the future. If a similar situation of extended lockdowns happens, why would anyone pay their rent if the government has shown that they'll pay it for you when the lockdowns are over?
- anonAndOn 5y ago
  Because you have minimal chance it will happen again at an opportune moment for you. I'm still waiting for Cash-for-Clunkers 2.0 so I can offload my rust bucket. Unless that happens in the next couple of years, I will have no use for the program (again, dammit!).

burkaman 5y ago

People who paid their rent aren't hurt by this at all, they just aren't directly helped by it.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
They are paying or at least on the hook for the cost of everyone else.
- nielsbot 5y ago
  How so?
  - ar_lan 5y ago
    Because they paid rent (responsible), and now their taxes are going to pay landlords for other's rent. It's basically saying there is an incentive to stop paying rent if the government will just pick up the tab. Note: I'm not saying I agree with the mindset above, but this is a how a good chunk of people think.
    - nielsbot 5y ago
      I assume those who could pay, did. Others (and their landlords) are getting a government bailout.
      - ar_lan 5y ago
        Yes, I assume as well. I think "government bailout", while technically true, is a bit loaded, however. Landlord's hands were forced by the eviction moratorium - so it's a bailout for a problem the government caused. Now, that "problem" is probably better then the alternative (a bunch of people suddenly becoming homeless in the middle of the pandemic), but the state did force landlords to not evict even if rent wasn't getting paid (not allowing them to find new renters who could try to).
        5y ago

ar_lan 5y ago

This is a very similar situation to student loan forgiveness, and for a very long time I shared your attitude. You are correct in the sense that programs like this incentivize being irresponsible, on the surface. I went through all of college working extra-hard to make sure I came out debt-free, while other people racked up debt partying - and now they maybe get to get these loans completely forgiven? It feels similar. But one thing I came to realize is overall, the people who are actually being benefited here are typically not people who wanted to not pay rent. They are people who wish their livelihoods weren't necessarily uprooted due to an unforeseen pandemic. It punishes the "responsible" in the same vein that a libertarian might view taxes as punishment. But this is overwhelmingly helping those who got affected the hardest in society - so I think "punishment" is the wrong mindset, and it could really be viewed as just "helping" those who need the help the most.

UncleMeat 5y ago

It depends on your goals. Do you want to create a maximally fair society? Or do you want to minimize suffering? If it is the latter, it can be completely acceptable for aid initiatives to end up giving more to people who planned less well.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
atom_arranger 5y ago
It would be better to give equally to people. You can raise the baseline without excessively penalizing those who were more responsible.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  It would be different. Like I said, it depends on your goals.

ab737 5y ago

Only civilised society rewards the rule-abiding citizen. Californians have got what they voted for.

toomanyrichies 5y ago

> The people who maybe could have paid their rent on time but didn't want to reduce spending in other areas to compensate for it end up okay. Honest question- do they in fact end up OK? What about their credit? I imagine most credit agencies, future landlords, lenders, etc. would consider it material information to know whether a borrower / prospective tenant had declined to / been unable to pay their rent for over a year.

Karishma1234fff 5y ago

Felt pretty pissed at this. I am both a landlord and tenant. I worked with my tenants to help them pay, reduced the rent etc. Now I feel pretty stupid. I lost money just for being nice to my tenants. As a tenant I paid my bills regularly as I could, feel pretty shitty that I did. Sorry California this is simply unacceptable.

path2power 5y ago

I just really doubt there's that many people out there who rolled the dice like that. First of all, landlords can report late to reporting agencies, which will make it difficult to get another apartment later and can impact the person's credit score. Secondly, there was never any guarantee that this would be the outcome -- it could have been something like having to pay back rent on a schedule. If you have the means to pay rent, why bother with the risk? It doesn't add up.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

Yep. All the people who paid all of their savings are stuck without savings, while all of the people who just stopped paying intentionally (others stopped paying without a choice due to lack of income) are given a free ride.

ab737 5y ago
The 2011 playbook: move to SF, sleep in your office space to spend $0 on rent, subsist on ramen to reduce overhead The 2021 playbook: move to SF, defer your rent payments to the state to spend $0 on rent, steal all your necessities (up to $949/day) to reduce overhead

ehutch79 5y ago

I live in California, I paid all my rent on time, and I'm not being hurt. I'd rather this happen then more people getting evicted, or stuck with debt they can't manage.

runawaybottle 5y ago

One thing I want to add is that we have also decided the pandemic created morally superior distraught people. Millions of people have gone in and out of credit card debt, but we have never ever considered them worthy of a bailout. We believe the pandemic to be an emergency, and we believe college education to be noble, so people that take on this type of credit are more … noble? We don’t question that maybe some of these people took on an apartment that takes way too much of their budget monthly, or a degree that costs way too much for room and board and poor upside in the economy. But, we are totally willing to say ‘hey you know what credit cards are, you deserve what you get’. Any of these people taking a bailout willing to take a hit on their credit report or the impact bankruptcy can have on you forever? Are they willing to move to public housing in exchange for the relief? Probably not, right? No, sorry, this is the sins of the upper class spilling into the upper lower class, where there is a ‘noble’ group, your too big too fails, your white collared too good for jail, or in our lower ranks - ‘too good and decent to fail’. We are expanding the pattern of the wealthy, and two wrongs don’t make a right.

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

Next you're going to tell me that social security is unfair to all of the people who died in poverty before it was introduced.

seanicus 5y ago

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-op-schermer13-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-op-scher... "people... would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?" Loss Aversion in action - people who were generally gainfully employed and able to make rent despise people who generally were not reliably employed and unable to make rent. My last two industries (corporate events and travel respectively) got demolished by the pandemic. I'm much happier being consistently employed, staying off the dole, and being able to make rent but I should be thinking the poors can shove it, I guess.

risk000 5y ago

How are the most responsible people being hurt by this though? They continue to live in the same world they did prior to the rent being paid for the others. It's simply, in my view, that someone else received an advantage and they did not. My brother's gain is also my gain. Is the viewpoint I'm choosing to take on it.

ergocoder 5y ago
Because it's not fair. Same reason why we are upset if our colleague has higher salary for the same job.