It was August 12, 2014, when my wife and I toured the property that we decided to buy for our retirement home. Great location, a livable, if nevertheless fixer-upper house, and a fantastic price. However, we were not quite ready to retire, so, rather than leave the house sitting vacant, we rented it out.
In January of 2017, we gave our renters notice that we would be taking possession of the property on July 1, 2017. That gave them six months to find someplace else to live, and enabled their children to finish out the school year to finish out the school year.
But just imagine: what if I had retired in 2020 instead of 2017. With the eviction moratoria imposed by various levels of government, if our renters had simply decided to cease paying rent in April, and not to leave the property by the end of June, we could still be stuck in Pennsylvania, still waiting to take possession of our own property.
The Washington Post has a long, feature story on what has happened to rental property owners due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the covid economy of 2021, the federal government has created an ongoing grace period for renters until at least July, banning all evictions in an effort to hold back a historic housing crisis that is already underway. More than 8 million rental properties across the country are behind on payments by an average of $5,600, according to census data. Nearly half of those rental properties are owned not by banks or big corporations but instead by what the government classifies as “small landlords” — people who manage their own rentals and depend on them for basic income, and who are now trapped between tenants who can’t pay and their own mounting bills for insurance, mortgages and property tax. According to government estimates, a third of small landlords are at risk of bankruptcy or foreclosure as the pandemic continues into its second year.
There were bills we had to pay on our rented-out property: property taxes, some repairs, and, just a couple of months before the renters were to leave, to have the septic tank pumped out. The HVAC system needed to be serviced. Fortunately, this was before the virus struck, and we were still receiving our rent payments.
The Post story details the problems through which other landlords have had to go, but so many people see landlords as all being wealthy, all being Snidely Whiplash about to tie Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks.
Now a federal judge has thrown out the nationwide eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control:
Federal judge vacates CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium
Court rules agency lacks legal authority to impose it
By Kyle Swenson, Staff Writer | May 5, 2021 | 3:11 PM EDT
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overstepped its legal authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium, a ruling that could affect millions of struggling Americans.
In a 20-page order, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich vacated the CDC order, first put in place during the coronavirus pandemic under the Trump administration and now set to expire June 30.
“It is the role of the political branches, and not the courts, to assess the merits of policy measures designed to combat the spread of disease, even during a global pandemic,” the order states. “The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not.”
The Biden administration has indicated it will appeal the decision. The ruling does not affect state or local eviction moratoriums. In Washington, D.C., for example, the city government’s ban on all evictions remains in place.
Translation: the ruling is very limited in scope. But here was the line that really got to me:
After Wednesday’s decision, tenants’ rights advocates called for the Biden administration not only to defend the policy but to step up legal protections that will keep people in their homes.
No, no, no, no, no! The eviction moratoria have not kept “people in their homes,” but kept people on other people’s homes!
In the wild and unthinking reaction to the virus, governments across the country, federal, state and local, have devastated our economy and turned individual American citizens into both slaves and agents of the government. The landlord who cannot collect his rent, yet not evict the squatters who are living in his property, has been transformed into an unpaid government housing agency, and has had his property effectively seized by the government for the private benefit of others. What was his is no longer his. The Fourteenth Amendment states that the government may not seize anyone’s property without due process of law, but unless due process of law includes government edicts, that constitutional provision has simply been waved away.