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If you’re a tenant, and you’ve lost your job, how are you paying the rent?
If you are a landlord, and your tenant has lost his or her job, how are you collecting rent, while keeping up with expenses, paying your mortgage etc.?
Two articles highlight this issue. One, by the Washington Post, discusses how landlords, and their lobbyists, are launching a legal war on the federal eviction moratorium instituted after the coronavirus pandemic led to economic shutdowns, lost jobs – some temporary, some permanent – and left tenants with no way to pay rent.
The second article, by Anne d’Innocenzio for the Associated Press, discusses how landlords are being squeezed between tenants, who can’t pay rent, and lenders, who want their mortgage payments for the properties.
The articles were published on consecutive days in October 2020 in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In one instance, if tenants have lost their jobs, they have no way to pay rent. The landlords can’t get blood from a stone. And, even if they get their jobs back, they will still owe back rent. Will they be able to catch up?
In the second instance, landlords have to make a living, too. They want, in most cases, to work with their tenants, having empathy for their situation. But they have expenses, too, that rent helps cover. Those expenses not only include mortgage payments, but also repairs to their rental units. And, of course, many landlords depend on that rent for their own survival.
Federal aid helped initially, but that aid has largely run out and the wheels of government are turning slowly to extend it.
Apartment dwellers and other residential tenants in the U.S. owe about $25 billion in back rent, the AP article says. It may reach $70 billion by the end of the year, the AP article quotes an estimate in August by Moody’s Analytics.
At that rate, some tenants and landlords may never recover from the fallout of the pandemic.
In fact, the National Council of State Housing Agencies in late September estimated that, potentially, 14 million renter households, totaling approximately 34 million Americans, will owe $34 billion by the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratorium expires at the end of the year, the Washington Post article says.
It goes on to say that 1 in 3 adults say it is somewhat or very likely they could face eviction or foreclosure over the next two months. It attributes that to survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
That would create a full-blown housing crisis.
What’s a person either in the landlord’s or tenant’s situation to do? One thing is to look for other ways to earn an income that one can do whether there is a pandemic or not.
Fortunately, there are many such programs out there that require a few, part-time hours a week, that anyone, regardless of education, experience or background can do to supplement his or her income – perhaps even dwarf one’s previous income. But, one has to be open-minded enough to check them out.
To learn about one of the best such programs, message me.
In short, this housing crisis is not going to disappear soon. Regardless whether you are a landlord or tenant, you may be in for some difficult financial times. If you were lucky enough to keep your job and keep up with your rent, consider yourself lucky. Your landlord undoubtedly is thanking his or her lucky stars for your situation.
But if you weren’t so fortunate, consider thinking a bit outside the box and look at other ways to put money in your pocket and keep up with rent, mortgage or other regular expenses. You may find that the pandemic can create an opportunity for you to be less vulnerable to circumstances you can’t control.
It may even allow you to not only survive, but also to dream of a better life.
Peter