Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 595 posts

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#301

Post by pfundstein »

drewmol wrote: post #270
jungletime wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're very lucky. Rented to a single mother with two teenage sons. The teenage sons that decided to strip down living trees of their branches, to make bonfires for parties in the backyard. Two trees are severely damaged, and anything that was burnable in the landscape is burnt. I don't even know how to go about pricing out the damage. Insurance is paying for their rent, because the last house they lived in burned do…

How big is the tree? Beavers cause this type damage and they also can't be reasoned with. If it's small enough to reach 60% of the bark just have it cut down and into pieces. It seems to make good enough firewood for them, hopefully the'll burn through most of it and you can plant a new tree in the ashes next month?

If only trees were that easily replaceable. I'm not sure how long you think it takes to grow a tree but a good formula is 1" of girth = 1 year of growth, so a reasonably small tree with a 1 foot trunk is over a decade old.

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#302

Post by nsxwolf »

xenospn wrote: post #283
busyant wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These stories that come out of the woodwork every time tenants are mentioned are why I’ll never be a landlord. My wife and I own a number of (8) rental properties. My wife manages them and we rarely have problems with tenants. I will tell you what I think is the secret. My wife figuratively crawls up the ass of all prospective tenants. She needs to see credit history, pay stubs, and proof of punctual rent payments…

Last time I rented from a private person, they asked me for some basic information. I sent them my last 3 pay stubs and a credit check in a short email. They accepted me on the spot, and said most people can't even manage to write a proper email.

Every time we advertise for a new tenant we get many calls that go like this:

"Do you do criminal background checks?"

"Yes."

"Ok, thank you, goodbye."

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#303

Post by michaelmrose »

joe_the_user wrote: post #75
dv_dt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, as part of the unfolding of the post 2008 recession, a lot of rentals shifted from individual or smaller landlords to larger corporate landlords whom take a much more impersonal approach to making it through the depression. To some degree, to the extent they can take out holdover loans and let rentals sit empty, they will do just that - irregardless of the social utility of compromise. https://www.thea…

This is the pernicious dynamic. For Large landlords, certainly but also generally, you have a situation where property appreciation becomes more important than rental income, so evicting people and getting nothing becomes a better outcome than lowering rent. Edit: Also note this appreciation driven dynamic is something of a product of QE - printing money. As the treasury dumps money into markets, anything of apparent…

If you raise taxes on non owner occupied housing you can achieve any reasonable target for real estate "investing" you desire.

If you just want to target holding but not renting property because it decreases housing supply you can do that even more aggressively.

I'll take 100% of appreciation for the months it sat unoccupied if it sat unoccupied for 3 or more months for 1000 Alex.

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#304

Post by m463 »

beervirus wrote: post #56

I have a commercial tenant who was forced to shut down their business during the lockdown. I just waived rent until they were allowed to reopen. You can't get blood from a turnip, and I really don't want to force them into default and try to find another tenant in this environment anyway. Almost everybody is taking a haircut this year.

> Almost everybody is taking a haircut this year.

I haven't had a haircut since febuary. (cutting my actual hair) :)

Some of my friends look a little bushy too.

I've paid the lady who cuts my hair anyway, I've been seeing her forever and this is her only income.

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#305

Post by MiroF »

kovacs wrote: post #114
diogenescynic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably someone who actually looked into what QE actually does--it's more deflationary than inflationary. Look at Japan--they've been doing forms of QE for decades. These Fed printing money, inflation trolls are almost never right even though they've been screaming about it for decades.

Trolls? Sounds like YOU need to understand what QE is. From Wikipedia... "Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy whereby a central bank buys government bonds or other financial assets in order to inject money into the economy to expand economic activity." Sounds pretty inflationary to me. Especially when they buy up illiquid mark to fantasy assets that nobody wants and unloads them on the taxpayer to foot the…

There are so many issues with this comment, it's hard to pin point any exact one.

You're right that it's idiotic to describe QE as "deflationary" (don't know where they go that idea) but QE is neither inflationary nor deflationary as either description would be reasoning from a price change [0].

> The fed has effectively destroyed any price discovery on any assets

Don't see why this would be the case - price discovery is relative.

All this talk about rioting in the streets - inflation is projected to go down in the next few years, which should help the average American saver. If there is any place for outrage, it's over the Fed not acting forcefully enough!

As it stands now, the Feds policy stance is contractionary, just as what followed 2008.

[0]: https://www.themoneyillusion.com/never-reason-from-a-price-c...

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#306

Post by mydongle »

Alupis wrote: post #277
mydongle wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a temporary stimulus payment anyway. We all paid for it. It helps a lot of people who really needed it, especially hourly wage workers in the service industry who instantly took a hit from the shutdowns and these workers tend to not have healthcare insurance to begin with due to the low wages. It would be foolish for someone who had a well paying job with benefits to permanently stop working for "more" money on…

Well sure, but I'm still not seeing where this "proves how deeply underpaid those jobs were". The explicit intention behind CARES was to provide some resemblance of financial security during a very uncertain time. If paying people a couple hundred more dollars per week than they'd earn while working is what achieves that... and it's temporary... ok fine. But the CARES Act will continue to payout through December... w…

That's right. As I said, I prefer those industries to collapse rather than let them continue on, surviving merely due to the exploitation of cheap human labor. Unless they can change and pay better or make work conditions better.

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#307

Post by MintelIE »

thephyber wrote: post #165
noad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like when Wells Fargo investigated their mortgage department and found no problems, right? Or when Google investigated Andy Rubin and decided he wasn't that bad and protected him for three more years? Why on earth would you ever trust a corporation to police themselves? They always lie, they always fail.

It can't hurt to expect companies to actually troubleshoot their own policies. We don't have to expect that it's the only recourse (eg. government regulation, civil suits, public brand shaming, etc).

Sure it can, you’ll just end up demoralizing yourself. Expect companies NOT to troubleshoot their policies, and then when one occasionally does you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If you expect them to police themselves, most of the time you will end up being disappointed.

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#308

Post by MiroF »

boromi wrote: post #296
MiroF wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not how the stock market works. "More investors" doesn't trigger price increases.

Markets go up when the amount of bullish positions outnumber the amount of new bearish positions

Depends on the size of the various positions. If a bunch of new (and naive) investors enter the market with irrationally bullish positions, institutional investors will short and profit off of the fundamentals.

Bad positions are just an opportunity for arbitrage.

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#309

Post by brutus1213 »

dv_dt wrote: post #59
bshipp wrote: post #17

This is just the start. Landlords would be smart to work with tenants to share some of the loss and renegotiate temporary adjustments to keep at least some revenue coming in because the heady days of high demand for rental units is likely behind us for a while. It'll be worse in downtown areas. I've heard from multiple firms that are looking at downsizing their expensive office space and continuing to allow employees…

Unfortunately, as part of the unfolding of the post 2008 recession, a lot of rentals shifted from individual or smaller landlords to larger corporate landlords whom take a much more impersonal approach to making it through the depression. To some degree, to the extent they can take out holdover loans and let rentals sit empty, they will do just that - irregardless of the social utility of compromise. https://www.thea…

Was a renter in 2008 and you are spot on. Same situation in the Bay area as well as NY/CT. It was insane that rents started to go up during that time. People basically walked away from their houses and started to rent. It was weird. Also, the "corporatization" of housing scared me a bit. Consider the area in downtown Mountain View. Rent was under 2K around 2008. The corporate landlords did minor renovations (fancy gyms, granite counters, maybe a redo of flooring) - they then did fancy websites and sold a lifestyle. Totally focused on the high-paying tech jobs. I used to live in a complex with families and non-techies. All that evaporated as rent shot up to 3.5-4K for the exact same units.

Re: Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms

#310

Post by sfj »

inetknght wrote: post #234
sky_rw wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I see comments like this, and no direct offense intended, It always strikes me as coming from somebody who has never filed large insurance claims before. Been seeing this so much with riots lately, "oh you have insurance right, why you mad about your business getting destroyed?". If only it was that simple.

The largest insurance claim I've had was for a little over $5k for a vehicle repair after collision while avoiding a pedestrian in the street. I'm not sure if you think that's "large" but it was very painless to do IMO.

I wasn't able to collect on insurance for “damage not due to a collision” on my motorcycle when it blew over in strong wind, because the insurance agent said, “There was a collision. When your motorcycle fell over it collided with the ground.”
Post reply on HN