from Hacker News

Covid-19: Landlords will kill our economy

by drenginian on 3/24/20, 7:56 PM with 64 comments

• by kadonoishi on 3/24/20, 8:41 PM

  So stop all payments. Nobody pays rent, landowners don’t pay their mortgages, banks don’t pay interest. Companies don’t pay dividends, bonds don’t pay interest. Just stop using money to organize productive activity for a few months until the coronavirus curve flattens.

  If all payments are stopped for three months, then it’s simply hitting the “Pause” button on the whole money system. There are no economic data for that quarter. GDP is meaningless, unemployment is meaningless. That quarter is a big fat missing data point.

  Three months later everyone comes out of their houses and goes back to work. Paychecks resume, rents resume, landlords resume paying their mortgages, and no one ever catches up on any payments from the missing period. Just pretend we skipped three months ahead via a sci-fi time knot.

• by taleodor on 3/24/20, 8:18 PM

  > We need legislation to ban rents for COVID-19-affected businesses.

  This only works if the government mandates full moratorium on both rents and mortgages. That also means that no interest on mortgage is accrued during this time.

  Otherwise, landlords are screwed in the same way as tenants - they can't pay mortgage and the property may turn into foreclosure. More so, frequently landlords are screwed even more - because it may be hard to get rid of non-paying tenant especially during this time. So tenant may get sort of temporary free pass by just not paying rent.

  Bottom line - Landlords are not the right target of this rage. Appeal to Governments, not to Landlords.

• by LatteLazy on 3/24/20, 9:01 PM

  It's really concerning here that so many comments basically amount to let's ban all landlords. It's really dumb, people clearly have not thought it through.

• by Veen on 3/24/20, 8:21 PM

  > Ban rent for COVID-19-affected businesses

  Landlords have mortgages and a host of other associated costs. If this were made a policy in the UK, you'd have a huge number of small-time buy-to-let landlords going bankrupt and losing their nest-egg to the bank.

• by appleiigs on 3/24/20, 9:02 PM

  The article is dumb. If the statement "Landlords don’t employ anyone; their benefit to society is frankly pretty marginal" was true, why did the author willingly sign his rent or lease contract (which binds him to pay a large regular payments for a long period)... Why would he do it if there is no benefit!?

• by ianlevesque on 3/24/20, 8:39 PM

  Well, there’s a reason the Plague ended feudalism.

• by pouty-gazelle on 3/24/20, 8:46 PM

  Placing the burden on landlords will unintentionally lead to greater concentration of wealth. Property owners with mortgages will be forced to sell (at a loss, if there is a glut of properties on the market). The buyers will be those who already have a lot of cash, or who are otherwise in a strong enough financial position to wait out the crisis.

• by vearwhershuh on 3/24/20, 8:40 PM

  Proposal: set an immediate 3% interest rate ceiling on all credit cards. This eliminates the immediate cash crunch that everyone is feeling. If a cc company complains, nationalize them.

  Then take six months to put together a comprehensive debt-forgiveness program that looks at income, family situation, etc. Forgive things like food, rent, etc. Slowly increase the interest rate cap as the economy recovers.

  We need ongoing money in peoples hands now to put everyone at ease that they aren't going to be out on the streets in a week with their kids, not a piddling one-time payment in a month.

• by justaguyhere on 3/24/20, 8:18 PM

  This makes a lot of sense. Rentiers are among the worst. My rental contract is so strict that it is insane. For example, I have to give 60 day notice, but those 60 days have to begin on the 1st of a month. It can't be 2nd or the last day of the previous month, it has to be the 1st.

  Rentiers deserve no protection, especially when everyone else is bleeding

• by drenginian on 3/24/20, 8:25 PM

  I think most landlords are wealthy people who are easily placed to weather this financial crisis.

  By definition if you are wealthy enough to own property beyond one house then you’re wealthy enough to survive this.

  And if you can’t afford to, then sell it and suffer like all the other real business owners are suffering.

  Why should landlords be a protected species in all this?