The Victims of the Eviction Moratorium

What "working class" person owns investment property in NYC? They amount of capital required to do that is so enormous that the article calling them "working class" is deeply misleading. They certainly aren't working class in the way that most NYC tenants are.

That’s more of a rationalization than a moral foundation. The land we’re talking about (in North America), in a lot of cases, was stolen by means of violent force from the indigenous people who lived here before the arrival of European settlers. If we’re going to call that a moral basis, then we’re back to arguing the account of Thrasymachus [1] and might makes right. It’s a cynical take on justice, to be sure, but also a difficult one to counter.

[1] https://iep.utm.edu/thrasymachus/

From multiple angles:

1. Landlords already serve no real market function. They're middlemen - literal rent-seekers that offer no real service to their tenants. And somehow I'm supposed to feel bad for them?

2. The bulk of the housing shortages throughout the US (and other developed nations, for that matter) derives directly from the treatment of real estate as an investment rather than, you know, merely space to live/work/play. People buying homes (particularly low-density ones, mind you!) as "investments" are the perpetrators of that shortage, not somehow the victims; not only do they consume an outsized portion of the housing supply, but they have a vested interest in benefiting from the effects of that constrained housing supply, and therefore will logically do everything in their power to continue to constrain it because it pushes their property values higher.

3. If real estate is to be treated as an investment, then the risks of that investment must be acknowledged. Why should I feel differently about landlords who burned their savings on rental properties than I would about people who burned their savings on, say, GameStop stocks or some cryptocurrency pump-and-dump?

Like, if anything the renter demanding $12k from the landlord has a point. The very notion of land ownership externalizes opportunity costs on everyone else in a given area, specifically because land is finite / in fixed supply and therefore land ownership is definitionally zero-sum (one person's ownership of land is at the exclusion of others). Landlords are long overdue to internalize these externalized opportunity costs - specifically, through a land value tax (possibly supplemented with a flat income tax starting above some threshold; Milton Friedman was a proponent of this combined tax scheme), the proceeds of which would fund programs like UBI and single-payer healthcare to make up for those opportunity costs.

I feel for these landlords only in the sense that they're newcomers to this country hoping to find opportunities to better themselves and secure their financial future, and I hope they - alongside the rest of their fellow Americans - can get some much-needed financial support. That doesn't mean they're somehow the "good guys" in this story just because they're poor immigrants.

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And to be clear, the delinquent renters/squatters certainly ain't the "good guys" in this story, either. Refusing to pay anything for the space one inhabits - especially when one has the means to do so - also externalizes opportunity costs onto other renters (who are now excluded from that unit despite their willingness and ability to pay for it). I might disagree strongly with the morality of a landlord extracting rent, but refusing to pay rent entirely is not the way to go about fixing that. Rather, the fix is in actually correcting the circumstances that led to this situation - namely, by forcing the internalization of externalized opportunity costs, and by replacing landlords with housing cooperatives.

Have enough money to invest in property? No longer working class.

It’s attitudes like this that prevent the working class from participating in the generation of wealth through capital. As soon as they dip their toe in, they’re now “rich” and get the rug pulled from under them.