You don't have to be rich to be a landlord, and I say this as a pretty poor schmuck that owns zero houses (including my own; I'm a tenant). A lot of older people inherit properties from their deceased parents and rent them out to help a bit or pay their own rental or current mortgage while still working themselves. Some even have mortgages on
both homes because the person they inherited it from didn't pay it off completely before dying (something increasingly common with today's ridiculous 40-year mortgages). After the real estate crashes of the last decade, a lot of people prefer to rent out as a theoretically more future-proofed alternative to selling. Telling people to "just get a job" to offset not getting rent (while they still have to pay for the costs of owning property, repairs, etc.)
precisely because other people have lost their jobs due to the job market sucking for everyone is also pretty one sided and contradictory, especially given many of them are 60+ and retired.
It's a very naïve assumption to think that it's only the super wealthy that are the people out there owning multiple properties and being impacted by the lack of rent coming in. I used to write mortgages, so obviously this is all anecdotal, but I'd guess that at least half the people I used to qualify who had rental income were still only barely getting by with it. These aren't people who just go out and buy ten houses because they hit the lotto. A lot of times it's people who inherit their parents' home after they pass and decide to rent it out for some extra cash, or have their "starter home" and then get married and have kids and rather than sell their first home they just rent it out so they can eventually pay off that mortgage.
There are a lot of these people that are leveraged to the eyeballs on these mortgages and all of their tenants just got a free pass on paying the mortgage. Obviously they shouldn't have allowed themselves to get over-leveraged to begin with, but that doesn't make their situations any better or any less deserving of getting assistance. These are people that are now feeling the impact of COVID economy just as much as anyone else in the service sector. (And obviously I'm also not referring to these massive real estate investment companies.)
The result of this all, too, is that these tenants aren't going to be able to pay their back rent so you're going to have a glut of people evicted from their homes by landlords who were forced to keep them in without having any assistance given to their own financial situations to begin with. This whole thing is a downward spiral that didn't need to happen if we just had some sort of leadership in Washington who could have been proactive with these issues as opposed to waiting until now and having it all be reactive.
Here. :)
Pretty much this, but Era is pretty young, ageist, and has little empathy or contact with people outside their age bubble that aren't their own parents.
