Tenants say a 3-year ban on evictions kept them housed. Landlords say they're drowning in debt

Tenants say a 3-year ban on evictions kept them housed. Landlords say they're drowning in debt.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tenants-3-ban-evictions-kept-133913306.html

Will gov compensate homeowners?
Seems unfair and undemocratic?

Many of the landlords were Black, like Haile, or Asian American, and they said the eviction bans had saddled them with debt and foreclosure worries while their tenants, who have jobs, live rent-free.

 

“There is nothing natural about being forced to house and have people live in your property for over three years and not pay,” said Michelle Hailey, who is also Black and owns a triplex where both her tenants stopped paying. "There is nothing natural, ethical or even humane about that.”

Can/should landlords sue?

 

Well, during Covid when evictions were stayed there was an awful lot of government money flowing to affected landlords. They needed to cooperate to get it though.Some didn't want to meet the standards.

 

If people would rather be slumlords than landlords, they should get everything they deserve.

 

Fixed that for you.

 

I agree! We also saw many landlords who were pocketing the money without reporting it on taxes or who did not want to fill out the paperwork because they prefer the tenants to be evicted so that the price for the units could be raised. The whole thing was atrocious. Not only were single unit landlords making money off of this but the hotels or too. There were so many people put into hotels during covid that the government started allowing batch processing by the hotels of all the forms required so that the tenants didn't even have to re-fill anything out. It's hard to say if the tenants were even actually there the whole time or not, or if the government might have been paying for rooms after the people have been put out. I was helping people apply for rental assistance during this time and it was very interesting to see all of this going on.

 

I wonder how many here with strong opinions against those evil landlords, have rental property?

 

My niece is an evil landlord of a 5-story walk up in Manhattan. She lives in one unit and rents out the rest. During the epidemic she had one fellow that was making very good money but just refused to pay his rent. I assume he was able to save significantly to his retirement account during this period. It took over a year to finally get him out.

 

I heard hundreds of these cases during the pandemic. The large corporate landlords were mostly doing their best to get the rent assistance money and keep their tenants in their homes. A small number of much smaller landlords just wanted to evict. There were ways to obtain a writ of restitution in spite of the stay.