We should have a big crash right now because all the stimulus ended, 20 million people don't have jobs and could be kicked out of their apartments and have a shortage of food access. We shouldn't celebrate before we address these larger needs.
I'm not saying everything's good, but those are all very solvable problems in comparison to what we expected. A few months ago, grocery stores were running out of staple items by noon and there were serious concerns of a nationwide meat shortage.
>We should have a big crash right now because all the stimulus ended
It's probably not instantaneous. Other people in this thread mentioned that savings is up, so I'm guessing people have some money saved up, and therefore can probably last a few weeks (or months?) before running out of money.
>could be kicked out of their apartments
Aren't most cities still not processing evictions? Even if they did, the combination of social distancing restrictions (less court capacity) + flood of evictions probably means there's a huge backlog, which means very little people would end up getting evicted.
It's not clear to me that evicting tenants who would ordinarily pay is a good strategy for landlords. Besides being a dick move, they don't have a guarantee that anyone will move in
All the people who just got evicted? Probably a good time to invest in Uhaul.
I agree, seems incredibly short sighted. I’m not a landlord so maybe I misunderstand the thinking.
Is it something like tenants who get evicted then have to find even worse landlords to rent from so by evicting people in tough economic times you gain access to tenants at their lowest rate/most desperate? So effectively any tenant you get in bad economic times is someone who is more likely to be stable and reliable after recovery?
I’m totally making things up at this point. It is truly baffling to me.
If you have tenants in NYC right now who aren't terrible, I think you want to keep them because there are a bunch of empty apts
In NYC if you want a good apartment right now, you can significantly underpay for the next couple of years (if your lease is up), but a lot of people whose leases are up are leaving
You make a good point, though. There will be a large shuffle for the next few months (and probably gradually back in the following years), so whoever "makes shovels" for moving will be in a good position
Costs continue. Mortgage payments continue, heat/water/electric bills must be paid, maintenance continues, legal wrangling over legit evictions (say, trashing the place) is costly. Cutting those costs can stabilize losses. Empty flats can be deducted from taxes as lost income. Other tax & accounting benefits may apply.
Part of the benefit of renting - for both parties - is ease of vacating.
>Empty flats can be deducted from taxes as lost income.
AFAIK there's no "lost income" deduction. Yes, you pay less taxes, but that because you had less income to begin with, not because of some deduction. If a tenant is not paying, then you're not getting income, so you're already paying less taxes.
Depends on the local tax law. Confluence of maintenance costs vs depreciation vs revenue vs other legal accounting issues can result in reducing/eliminating taxes - even if you have a net positive income.
Upshot: evicting non paying tenants can be profitable, while letting them stay on “they’ll come thru, just give them time” grounds can mean losing the property outright. (Strange this must be explained on Ycombinator.com.)
Definitely not a landlord, so forgive the unfamiliarity:
Are you not able to claim rental property losses if you simply have a tenant who is unable to pay?
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My model for dealing with a pandemic-induced economic slow-down is that if you can just jump forward til the end, most things will revert to normal (for airline companies but also tenants who can't pay rent)
It's not clear to me that evicting someone and then needing to cut rates to find a new tenant who can afford to rent is a better deal than keeping someone who has fallen on hard times for very straightforward reasons
In theory I agree, but this isn't an unknown element and therefore I believe most forecasts are either prepared for this to happen or have accounted for it to not happen due to available credit/liquidity.
It just seems to simple to say "when the stimulus is gone, and people can't pay rent, evictions will be huge".
Much worse and possibly catastrophic if the government doesn’t get its shit together on the next stimulus. Now Trump gets to look like a hero with his executive orders, and honestly you can’t blame the administration for taking the easy layup. Hopefully this shames congress into doing its job because it’s unlikely that the critical unemployment benefit will be getting paid out anytime soon via this route.
Is this one of those “there’s good people on both sides” arguments? It’s not House that can’t get their shit together, it is literally the GOP controlled Senate (specifically, Mitch McConnell) who is causing this. People are going to die because of his stonewalling — I bet it’s possible to actually calculate; what wonder how he’ll end up comparing to other psychopaths?
If you've come to the conclusion that the Senate majority leader is deliberately setting out to kill Americans cause he's just evil like that, you've surely made an error somewhere in your reasoning.
He’s deliberately withholding money. Money is cross-fungible with expected life-span. Therefore, the withholding of funds can be equated with loss of years; every lost ~78 years is a lost life. I used to do these analyses at UTMB Galveston when interning in the nosicomia division.
That seems like the source of the error to me. It can't be the case that anyone who ever rejects a proposal to spend money is inflicting a loss of life years.
> It can't be the case that anyone who ever rejects a proposal to spend money is inflicting a loss of life years.
Not all proposals are the same. A man who refuses to buy his child a new video game console is not the same as a man who refuses to pay for his child's life-saving surgery.
Your jump from "refusing to act against a deadly plague" to "refusing any spending proposal at any time" is breathtaking: I'm a little skeptical that this was a pure mistake...
165,000 Americans are dead. Most of them died in agony on a respirator. The vast majority of those deaths were completely avoidable: https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/19/faster-response-prevente... And people of color are hugely overrepresented in this number.
Since the start of the pandemic, McConnell has systematically opposed any rational reaction to it, and strongly supported the psychopathic lies of Donald Trump.
McConnell is not some nice old man who systematically caused tremendous damage to the hundred million poorest and blackest Americans for the last thirty years by mistake and now accidentally killed another hundred thousand, sorry guys!
I strongly hesitate to use the word "evil" in general - but if any human ever has been evil, then McConnell is a profoundly evil man.