Paying people to spend more than they can afford in order to let them keep paying rent is a bad idea that ultimately helps only landlords.

If someone lost their job due to covid, then they need to find a new job, and that often means finding a new job somewhere else and quite possibly for different pay. Similarly landlords in areas where jobs have dissapeared need to know what the true demand is for their units so they can be priced appropriately.

Just paying money to pretend nothing has changed in each location is not good for either the rental market, or the job market, or the people who are pretending.

This only works at a macro level when you refer to “people” as an abstract concept and totally ignore the fact that the government caused the market asymmetry not people. It occurred everywhere. At the same time. There is no magic place to go.

Further, during COVID with schools closed you could not find child care let alone affordable care. During COVID your job may not be available (restaurants / bars / gyms) because the government forced their business to close.

This was meant to be temporary stopgap measure to pay people whose jobs were lost due to the government closing their businesses. This isn’t the hand of the market at work.

Landlords also had relief. Everybody was offered money as a temporary measure. Prices will return.

There is more to it than that.

Funding people to get through these rough times is not pretending at all.

Really, it is an investment. These people have agency they would not have otherwise and that counts for a lot!

Maybe they need to build a skill.

Or, they can get another job that pays well enough to keep them on a similar life path with similar expectations.

In the case of families, a forced move, or transition to being homeless has a huge impact on kids amd their development. Development which will have a significant impact on their politics.

"True demamd"

While I get what you mean here, it is also important to recognize a majority of the labor force at this point is underpaid. That same investment has educated people about markets and what they mean for labor better than most anything else has.

In many cases, getting another job is increasingly likely to result in under compensation. Some info out there pegs this at somewhere in the 10's of trillions over the last few decades, since late 70's.

Landlords are increasingly aware of what remote work means. If they are in an undesirable area, yeah rent is likely to have to go down, but given the low wage scenario out there, they could make the case it happens that way more than it should.

Some people are saving that money. Others may catch up on debts and such.

One member of my family basically arranged to be laid off so they can prep their home for sale and go mobile, homeless by choice with enough in their savings to live reasonably for a couple decades taking work where they can get it.

I think this has been great for the lower wage job market. People are balking, asking questions and often figuring out they can ask them in large numbers too.

A primary one being why they need to continue working for a wage that pays less than it costs them to exist and show up for work. Large employers have huge numbers of people on assistance while putting billions in profit in the bank.

They can still put most of those billions in the bank and pay people enough to make it and should.

Why should we be subsidizing labor like that?

Given new and better answers, more equitable from a labor point of view, landlords evaluating "true demand" may well realize they may not have to reduce rent as much as support labor getting paid enough to make it more than happens now.

And that is just for starters. We have all these things intertwined and need to think through higher order effects more than is happening today.

I have no idea whether you are a Libertarian or not but comments like these expose the ugly nature of Libertarian philosophy.

> that ultimately helps only landlords

or, in the situation like COVID, helps the entire society.

> then they need to find a new job, and that often means finding a new job somewhere else and quite possibly for different pay

What if you are a certified gym instructor and the gyms are closed? Or a great childcare worker with all the daycares closed? Or a travel agent? Should they all just go and start bagging groceries or flipping burgers because those are the only jobs open?

What if you have children who are now stuck at home due to school closures? Who would look after them?

As bankruptcy proceedings primarily help borrowers, it's not clear what punishing them would accomplish.

Bankruptcy frees stranded assets.

If tenants aren't paying rents, and landlords aren't paying mortgages, banks and real estate trusts have illiquid assets of difficult-to-assess (and likely low) value.

With evictions, failures to assess risk ripple downwards, to tenants. Without evictions or bankruptcy closure, risk ripples upwards to creditors.