So basically the rental market just crashed, but landlords are unwilling to admit it and lower their prices accordingly. Because if some vast number of people are now unwilling to pay, the truth is the service is no longer worth the price being demanded. I am not surprised when we admit how insanely high rental prices have become, based on a totally unrealistic real estate bubble lasting decades. There is no magic law that insures that the cost of renting can only ever go up, in step with an artificial real estate market.
At the end of the day, to balance the equation, real estate and rental prices have to be kept within a realistic proportion of people's real wages, and that ratio has been spiraling out of control into insanity for decades now.
If landlords don't like it, they can either offer lower rates until the economy recovers, or else they can evict, and hope they can find tenants able to pay an inflated price.
Personally, I would like to see the government demand some solid evidence from landlords seeking evictions, that the rental price they are demanding is actually a realistic market expectation, before we have our police and sheriffs enforce their evictions at taxpayer expense. It's the exact same concept of proving damages in a civil suit, you can't just pull numbers out of your ass and have the court enforce them. In this case, we should not let landlords make up the rental prices as though nothing has changed in the market, and demand the tenants keep paying or else the cops will kick them out.
I agree with everything you wrote, except the last paragraph. The landlord should be free to charge whatever they wish, if the market won’t bear that price then it’s on the landlord to eat the cost of having no tenant. The tenant signed an agreement to pay a given price, if they can’t afford that price they aren’t entitled to that service at the expense of their landlord.
Look, I agree fully with what you said here, except for one thing: that "signed agreement to pay a given price". Sorry, but in reality that all just flew right out the window because of this bullshit pandemic. Those agreements are perfectly sensible in normal times, when markets need and can support long term contracts for stability. It also happens that landlords have been horribly spoiled into assuming they never need to take a price cut, and the only change they will ever have to make is an annual increase in their own favor. Well too fucking bad, that all just failed, and the rest of us taxpayers shouldn't have to pay to enforce a contract that is no longer aligned with a brand new market reality.
Ultimately the reality is that rental prices are driven by real estate prices, and those are driven by an investment market. The people behind that investment market (including banks) happen to be the only people with any money any more (indeed they're fucking swimming it more than ever before in all of history), and it is finally time they are going to have to take a bloody hair cut, because their own fucking puppets in government just destroyed the markets, and now We The Peons can't keep playing the game they set up to enrich themselves on our dime, paying hugely inflated rent so they can keep getting richer.
An example starting point: we could say "landlords can't evict if the tenant is willing to pay 50% rent". In turn, we could also say that if the landlord can't afford to keep up the mortgage payments, that the bank or other investors can't repossess the property if the landlord pays 50% on the mortgage. And the investors at the top can suck it up, for the first time in decades.
So basically the rental market just crashed, but landlords are unwilling to admit it and lower their prices accordingly. Because if some vast number of people are now unwilling to pay, the truth is the service is no longer worth the price being demanded. I am not surprised when we admit how insanely high rental prices have become, based on a totally unrealistic real estate bubble lasting decades. There is no magic law that insures that the cost of renting can only ever go up, in step with an artificial real estate market.
At the end of the day, to balance the equation, real estate and rental prices have to be kept within a realistic proportion of people's real wages, and that ratio has been spiraling out of control into insanity for decades now.
If landlords don't like it, they can either offer lower rates until the economy recovers, or else they can evict, and hope they can find tenants able to pay an inflated price.
Personally, I would like to see the government demand some solid evidence from landlords seeking evictions, that the rental price they are demanding is actually a realistic market expectation, before we have our police and sheriffs enforce their evictions at taxpayer expense. It's the exact same concept of proving damages in a civil suit, you can't just pull numbers out of your ass and have the court enforce them. In this case, we should not let landlords make up the rental prices as though nothing has changed in the market, and demand the tenants keep paying or else the cops will kick them out.
I agree with everything you wrote, except the last paragraph. The landlord should be free to charge whatever they wish, if the market won’t bear that price then it’s on the landlord to eat the cost of having no tenant. The tenant signed an agreement to pay a given price, if they can’t afford that price they aren’t entitled to that service at the expense of their landlord.
Look, I agree fully with what you said here, except for one thing: that "signed agreement to pay a given price". Sorry, but in reality that all just flew right out the window because of this bullshit pandemic. Those agreements are perfectly sensible in normal times, when markets need and can support long term contracts for stability. It also happens that landlords have been horribly spoiled into assuming they never need to take a price cut, and the only change they will ever have to make is an annual increase in their own favor. Well too fucking bad, that all just failed, and the rest of us taxpayers shouldn't have to pay to enforce a contract that is no longer aligned with a brand new market reality.
Ultimately the reality is that rental prices are driven by real estate prices, and those are driven by an investment market. The people behind that investment market (including banks) happen to be the only people with any money any more (indeed they're fucking swimming it more than ever before in all of history), and it is finally time they are going to have to take a bloody hair cut, because their own fucking puppets in government just destroyed the markets, and now We The Peons can't keep playing the game they set up to enrich themselves on our dime, paying hugely inflated rent so they can keep getting richer.
An example starting point: we could say "landlords can't evict if the tenant is willing to pay 50% rent". In turn, we could also say that if the landlord can't afford to keep up the mortgage payments, that the bank or other investors can't repossess the property if the landlord pays 50% on the mortgage. And the investors at the top can suck it up, for the first time in decades.