A few days ago, the Supreme Court struck down the proposed extension of the eviction moratorium. This was right and appropriate. Even if the moratorium were somehow justified on public health grounds (and it’s not), neither the CDC nor the President has the authority to institute such a thing, and keeping the government limited to its constitutional role is a big part of the court’s job.
I keep seeing people on Twitter and other social media insisting that this was wrong and landlords should just “get a job.” The perception that landlords are all wealthy exploiters is widely held, and it’s largely bullshit. Here are real-life examples of landlords, based on the places I have lived for the last seven years. This covers the 15 months since I finished college, the four years of college, the year before college that I spent living in this state to qualify for in-state tuition, and the year I spent saving up to move while I still lived in another state before moving to New England. Every situation described, including details, is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I have not changed anything, other than assigning fictitious names.
The Greedy Plumber and his Wife
A month ago, I moved into my own apartment. It’s a lovely little place, with built-in bookshelves, and I got some nice bookends on etsy to add some character and fun in decorating.
My apartment is a segmented portion of a large house. The house is owned by a married couple in their late 50s, Andy and Carol.
Andy worked as a plumber for more than 30 years until he broke his back in an accident. He has chronic pain and severe mobility issues now, making plumbing out of the question. He could never get down on the floor and look at what’s under a sink, nor do any of the other physical maneuvering required to be a plumber. While Andy ran his plumbing business, often working 60+ hours a week, Carol raised their kids, including homeschooling the one with learning difficulties. All are now on their own, productive citizens, including several who served our country in uniform.
When Andy’s ability to continue in his career was destroyed, Carol looked at going to work. With only a degree in English from the class of 1984, the best she could do was work in an office for something above minimum wage (but not much above). The combination of what he got in disability payments and what she could earn would not be enough to let them keep this house — which they love, where they raised their kids, and which has sky-high property taxes.
They invested their life savings, did some renovation, and turned part of this house and part of a barn on the property into one-bedroom apartments. I don’t know what they charge for the barn apartment, which is a little larger than mine. The $1,100 a month that I pay to rent mine is a crucial part of their lives.
I had a conversation with Carol about the rent moratorium a couple of nights ago, just after the news came down from the SCOTUS. I said something like “It must’ve been hard to try to find tenants then—to be sure they wouldn’t move in and immediately stop paying.” She said yes, it was frightening each and every month—that it was one of the worst times in their lives, wondering every month if their tenants would decide to screw them over just because they could, and they would have no recourse.
If their tenants, under a rent moratorium, suddenly stop paying: they would be devastated financially in no more than a couple of months.
The Exploitative Old Lady
Before moving here, I rented a tiny room from an elderly woman named Gladys. She travels regularly, enjoying her retirement, and charged me well below market rate to rent a room in her condo. I did the math once, and what she charged me exactly covered her owner’s association fees plus $200, which essentially means I was paying the ownership fees and covering the utilities I used by what I paid in rent.
She trusted me to take care of the unit while she traveled, leaving a deposit slip for each month when she would be away. I faithfully deposited the rent in her bank account.
If her tenant, under a rent moratorium, suddenly stops paying: this is a much trickier situation than it may at first seem. Some would say, “Oh big deal, a rich old lady has to curtail her traveling.” First of all, fuck your anti-feminism. She earned her money with help from no man and if she wants to travel the world in her golden years, more power to her. Have some respect. Second, an 80 year old woman is vulnerable to almost anyone, of either sex, but particularly to young men. The government declaring that she is required to keep a non-paying person in her home who is (in almost every situation) physically capable of overpowering or enacting violence against her, is an astonishing example of government overreach and potential harm.
The Capitalist Pigs and their Habitat for Humanity House
Before moving in to the old lady’s extra bedroom, I rented a room from a married couple. Matthew and Christina are firmly working class, living in a habitat for humanity house that they spent years working to qualify for after many years of renting. Disability also plays a part in their story. Christina has serious mental health issues and has always had difficulty keeping jobs. Most of the jobs she’s held over the years were cashier, food service, and other “minimum wage or close to it” situations. Matthew worked in construction until a serious accident put him on disability about a year after they got their house. Renting a room is how they supplement his disability income and her sporadic income, and how they continue to be able to live in the house.
If their tenants, under a rent moratorium, suddenly stop paying: they will almost certainly lose their house.
The Soulless Corporation and the People It Fucks Over…by Employing Them.
Before I moved north to go to school, I spent a year working five part-time jobs and saving up. I spent that year living in an apartment, sometimes with a friend (she was in a very dramatic on-again, off-again relationship and was always moving in with, and then back out from, her boyfriend’s apartment). It was a unit in a corporate-owned complex. To the best of my understanding from their website, it is owned by a small corporation and comprises five apartment complexes, with around 1,300 total units.
The complex employed several people when I lived there, including an office manager, two maintenance guys who took turns being on call after hours, and a rotating cadre of local teens each summer to serve as lifeguards in the pool. LaDonna, the office manager, and her family lived in the complex. She took a significant pay cut to accept that job, but it happened to be zoned for a good high school, and it was the only way she could get her kids into that school, which was her priority.
Needless to say, none of those people were working for the joy of fixing leaky washing machines at midnight on a Saturday or the existential orgasm of showing empty units to potential renters — they needed to get paid, which meant their employer needed tenants to keep paying.
If their tenants, under a rent moratorium, suddenly stop paying: eventually the complex will become unable to keep those people employed. How long they could keep meeting payroll depends on many things — their profit margin, the percentage of tenants who stop paying, and what kind of cash reserves they had when this began. We are about to enter month 19 of the pandemic (counting March 2020, when everything shut down in the US, as month one). I don’t know what is typical for small corporations to keep in the way of “X months’ worth of operating expenses on hand,” but what I’ve been able to find in researching this indicates that 1 to 3 months worth of payroll is recommended. Other sources indicate that companies should have an emergency fund of 10-20% of their annual costs. Both of these standards would fall far short of handling the current situation and cause problems well before month 19 if any significant percentage of units become non-paying.
The most likely (and extremely predictable) consequence is that they’ll have to be much more careful about filling any empty units, to maximize the chance that the units continue to bring in money. People on the margins, people with rent to income ratios that are close to qualifying but not quite, people who haven’t worked at their job for very long, and others who, one might say, are “lacking in privilege” — they will find it much more difficult to get approved for one of those units.
Multiply this times all the apartment complexes across the US, and this moratorium isn’t fucking over rich people, and the long-term consequences will not fall on the shoulders of the rich. They will fall on the shoulders of people who struggle.
People Rent Rooms, Too?!?
Not one of the cheerleaders for the moratorium that I’ve seen discussing this ever mentioned the scenario of room rentals. This is perhaps understandable. Before I moved to New England, I never knew that renting a room to a non-family member was A Thing. It is, however, very common here. There is less emphasis on family here than in the South, but also, property taxes are very high. I compared property taxes in this (very blue) state to property taxes paid by a friend in Mississippi, and the difference was stark. Her property taxe rate could be almost quadrupled and still be lower than people pay here when they become homeowners. I have no opinion on property taxes as a means of funding public goods — I simply have not studied it enough — but the correlation between high priority taxes and renting out a room to help make ends meet is clear, and understandable.
Why Now?
A short moratorium of some kind made sense at the very beginning, I think — many renters were aggressively and without warning put out of work when the government declared that they couldn’t go to work, shutting down their employers. It took time for Paycheck Protection and other relief funds to become available to employers, and the beginning of the pandemic was a time of such chaos and confusion. I’m not opposed to some temporary stop-gap in a crisis, which is what a 60 to 90 day moratorium in the spring of 2020 could have fairly been called.
Now? Now we are so far beyond that. Jobs are going unfilled at an astonishing rate. I stopped into Subway on my way to an appointment this morning to be greeted by a sign telling me they’ve cut their hours due to understaffing — if I’m interested in $18 an hour plus tips plus tuition assistance plus a $2,000 signing bonus, please text this number! The post office, where I also stopped this morning, is hiring. So is just about every employer in the country. In the last couple of months, when I’ve looked, the local Craigslist job ads included a dishwasher position for $19 an hour at my favorite pizza restaurant and a local house painter begging for helpers who will simply show up. He’s offering $25 an hour to be paid daily.
In the present circumstance, non-disabled people who are not employed are overwhelmingly (not universally; of course, there are exceptions) unemployed by choice.
But what if they weren’t? What if getting a job was really really hard right now?
Life being hard is not an excuse to steal. Carol and Andy have no obligation, moral or otherwise, to let me live in their property. Gladys has no responsibility to fill her extra bedroom with anyone down on his luck. Nor do Matthew and Christina.
The goal of those pushing for a new, Congressionally-passed moratorium, here at the dawn of month 19, has nothing to do with helping renters. Under current circumstances, the vast majority of renters can find a way to make ends meet if they try.
Their goal is to set a precedent of private property rights being nonexistent — the right to your property being mandated as something that belongs to the state, not the individual.
Some slopes are indeed slippery, people. If you don’t understand that now, as we enter month 19 of “Fifteen Days To Flatten The Curve,” then I can only beg you to examine whether your political allegiance has affected your ability to see reality.
The people who will be hurt by an extension of the moratorium are not the greedy CEOs of the far left’s imagination. They are people like my current and past landlords.
They are ordinary Americans who take the risk of trusting a stranger to enter into a contract. For the government to nullify the contract by force, to the detriment of only one party, is both morally wrong and damaging to our society.
It is not the government’s role to save people from every challenge. Challenge is good, and healthy, and promoting of both growth and character.
If anything is clear in our country right now, it’s that we are in desperate need of better and stronger character. Private property rights provide enormous motivation for self-improvement.
Challenge is the fertilizer for growth, and fucking with that will prove to be an enormous mistake.