What's the difference if it's empty? Same loss of revenue. And sure, some maintanence/upkeep for tenants, but given how fast properties rot when vacant, that's probably a wash.
Rent seeking with someone else's money? Yeah, that's risky.
Was it empty though? There is a shortage in housing and it's pretty rare to have an empty rental in this market. You're injecting conditions that don't really exist to make your point.
Oftentimes the landlord covers utilities and lumps that up in to the rent, and I have a place in New England where that is the convention. We pay $500-$600/month for heating oil in the winter. Then we have about $300 in electricity and another $300 for water/sewage.
The government edict didn't appear in a vacuum, it was a response to a massive crisis affecting the entire country. Ultimately, from a financial perspective, this is no different from any potential crisis that could have caused a downturn in the rental market, and those risk factors are what you take on when you make rental investments.
The government changed the terms of fully executed private contracts. But as risk increases, so follows insurance. So if the government wants to abuse contract law, watch the rent, penalties and security deposits climb to compensate for any future "moratoriums".
The government enacted emergency powers and public health laws they already possessed when those contracts were signed. Where is the abuse?
I'd be personally ok with the government bailing out smaller landlords (just because), but the largest percentage of these defaults are going to affect private equity firms who have bought an outrageous amount of the housing stock. We need to stop socializing risk and privatizing profits, and this would be a good place to start.
The abuse was largely in the duration and indiscriminate scope, regardless of ability to pay or not.
Student loans are cheaper precisely because they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Rent is cheaper because of eviction. Now that we've seen the government unilaterally discharge rent through moratorium, you can expect to see that risk profile baked into an increased monthly payment.
It sounds like they stretched their own finances to the limit. The government was trying to solve a much larger problem that required indifference to the risks they took, but sometimes that’s what the government has to do. It’s the investors job to cover risk.
“It sounds like they stretched their own finances to the limit. The government was trying to solve a much larger problem that required indifference to the risks they took”
Your second point sort of invalidates the first. You argue that the government isn’t the source of the harm, then justify the government action as a prudent balancing of harms.
I think the point most are making is that they were trying to solve a much larger problem, but didn’t think the problem through particularly well.
> Your second point sort of invalidates the first. You argue that the government isn’t the source of the harm, then justify the government action as a prudent balancing of harms.
No it doesn't. The pandemic caused the harm, the government acted to mitigate the worst effects of it. You seem to be of the opinion that the "worst effects" are the landlords losing out on rent, but the worst effects are millions of people ending up homeless during a pandemic, which is what the government prevented. Even if it was clumsy, I tend to think landlords would have been worse off anyways if there had been mass homelessness and higher body counts. You can't collect rent if your renters are dead or your own head is in a basket.
Seems to me there's a constitutional amendment against that particular unfunded mandate. (Yeah, I know, that was specifically housing soldiers. I'm not sure a court would agree, constitutionally, that the government can force you to house civilians either.)
Considering the current makeup of the Supreme Court, I highly doubt they would fail to make the distinction between soldiers and civilians. Aren't half of them literal constitutionalists?