Small Landlords Squeezed by Eviction Ban

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Small Landlords Squeezed by Eviction Ban

August 14, 2021 at 2:10 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 8 Comments

https://politicalwire.com/2021/08/14/small-landlords-squeezed-by-eviction-ban/

"SNIP......

Politico: “Landlords are unsympathetic figures in the eyes of many struggling tenants, but they’re emerging as a new economic problem for Congress and the White House, after Democrats prioritized renters by pushing for the revival of the eviction ban earlier this month.”

“The Biden administration has yet to find a way to accelerate the release of federal rental aid, meaning property owners will continue to be squeezed until the eviction moratorium expires Oct. 3 or is struck down in court.”

.....SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Why is there a bottleneck?

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2. My online tax company knows who my landlord is. Surely it can be sped up?

[gulliver]

3. Is this Republican/state/local meddling or incompetence?

I read of state laws that say a renter can avoid eviction if they attest that their income was impacted by COVID. Well, if you're going to have a law like that, it has to be funded. If that attestation automatically gets the renter out of paying rent, it should also automatically obligate the state to pay the landlord, without delay or interruption.

The law should assign payment of the rent to the state, not simply stop it (which would be obviously unfair and inept law).

[Igel]

4. It's not a red/blue thing.

Some red areas have done well, some blue areas have sucked.

It's a local competence versus local incompetence issue, an issue of how well state governments deal with decentralizing control over funding and the level of documentation they want. Some renters have to demonstrate that they actually were unemployed, seeking work, and found none--and they're screwed if they just stopped paying. Others don't, so the selfish folk who decided to keep the rent money they had and just not pay their landlords benefit.

Some states devolved implementation to NGOs and advocacy groups, some to local governmental structures (town or county). I heard of one place that pushed a lot of aid with minimal paperwork--it was a success, they said. But they did almost no checking on who applied and received money, and little auditing infrastructure. Remember how the US dished out millions in Iraq early on, only to be derided for lack of fiscal controls? Yeah, that.

Some states have landlords initiate the rental aid process; some allow landlords and renters; some just renters. Many renters have not been motivated to do squat as long as they don't need to. Some places require a lot of documentation, some require less.

DeKalb County (GA) put a maximum cap of 60% on paying out what the renter owed, figuring that the funds would be over-requested. Then they backtracked when so much money had yet to be disbursed.

Next problem will be when the funds run dry because the funding wasn't enough to handle the debt through the end of July, and then they add a couple of months more to what the insufficient funds have to cover. Meh, another completely predicted emergency that'll catch folk by utter surprise 4 months after it was first identified.