
Coronavirus Heroes Are Getting Tossed from Their Homes by Scared Landlords - spking
https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-nurses-face-eviction-housing-discrimination-from-scared-landlords
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mullen
If the renters have signed a contract, these quick evictions are not legal.
Also, good luck trying to get a ER Nurse evicted from a residence during a
pan-epidemic. If the ER Nurse at the beginning of the article wants to
shutdown that eviction, just put the landlords name on the Internet and let
the Internet take care of it.

~~~
PenguinCoder
Vigilante justice is not the answer.

~~~
xemoka
But public shaming is. Name names, find news outlets, post it online. This is
unacceptable. There are repercussions for every action.

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torpfactory
My wife is an ER nurse. One of her coworkers recently went through a nasty
divorce. Yesterday her estranged husband filed paperwork to get full custody
of their child on the grounds that her mother (an ER nurse) could not provide
a safe environment due to exposure to CoVID19.

~~~
101404
Strange argument, because children don't get Covid-19. They may carry the
SarsCoV2 virus, but that's about all.

~~~
RegnisGnaw
[https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/22/us/georgia-coronavirus-
girl-h...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/22/us/georgia-coronavirus-girl-
hospitalized/index.html)

Here's a case of a 12 year old getting it.

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atonse
F*ck this landlord.

Evictions in many states have been suspended. I hope they get their asses
handed to them in court.

~~~
volfied
Yeah if the nurse was able to fight this in the court (that's the whole other
problem, where will she find time / money to fight it during a pandemic), the
landlord is in deep legal trouble, no?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Yes, but in the meantime, that nurse is homeless. These examples are when you
need rapid community involvement to buffer until the justice system can step
in (which has some latency).

In the case of unlawful evictions, we have a network of people who will take
someone in (as well as our family if we can) until an attorney friend (IANAL
yet) can file suit against the landlord. Shelters can be suboptimal (and
downright fraught with peril) depending on the location and their resources.

Let us not forget these examples in the future of policy and social service
gaps that need fixing.

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mattkrause
Are these spur-of-the-moment evictions even legal? I thought it was usually a
protracted process.

~~~
ng12
Yep. There is not a state in the US where a 24h eviction is legal without a
court being involved.

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bluntfang
land lords are bad. shelter is a human right, not an investment.

"landlords are indignant because they thought they'd get all the perks of
investing in a vital resource and none of the moral imperatives"

~~~
dangus
Landlords are not bad as a rule.

They allow me to keep my assets diverse and my liabilities at minimum.

Why would I want to own a home? I would be owning a single expensive asset
that:

\- Cannot reasonably be relocated (wasting my time/life if I ever get a
different job that's further away)

\- Cannot be liquidated without losing 6% of its value to REALTOR® fees and
closing costs

\- Has its own value tied into other assets in its immediate geographical
vicinity. If someone gets foreclosed next door, the value of my house drops
_instantly_.

\- Needs to be insured because it's so fragile that a storm could completely
destroy it. In a rental I essentially only need to insure against legal
liability and stolen possessions (if that's even a concern).

\- Does not appreciate beyond inflation in the longest investment term

\- I don't actually own it anyway (property taxes, eminent domain)

Renting minimizes risk and liability for the vast majority of typical people.
I would argue that a lot of the doom and gloom articles talking about
millennials being "unable to afford homes" are discounting how little home
ownership _ever made sense in the first place_ without artificial stimuli
(like the G.I. Bill and various other home ownership encouragements).

~~~
deanmoriarty
I say a loud "I don't care!".

1) Put a law that prevents people from owning more than one rental house

2) Watch the market price of real estate fall tremendously (good!!)

3) At that point it will become economically feasible for people like me to
buy a condo in the Bay Area, like it should be: housing is a primary need,
more so in a high cost of living area

OR

1) Put a law that caps the maximum amount of rent you can charge to people,
based on the bottom quartile of income for an area, or something like that

2) Watch the market price of real estate fall tremendously (good!!)

I am sure my reasoning has tons of blind spots and it's probably "economically
immature", but I don't care. I see rich people around me hoarding multiple
multi-million dollar homes and starving the rental market, while they sit on
property taxes significantly smaller than my rent. They are not providing a
service to society, they are benefitting from wild speculation at the expense
of other people. It shouldn't be allowed to do that, it's basic logic.

~~~
dangus
Rent controls constrict supply, exacerbating the problem.

Disallowing multiple unit ownership effectively bans landlords entirely. It’s
an extreme solution that would be ridiculously disruptive. It would be
impossible to find anything to rent short or long term. It would be impossible
to find medium to large size condo or apartment buildings as they’d
essentially be illegal, which wouldn’t help the bay area’s single family home
issue. It would make single family homes nearly the only practical choice.

Without vacant properties owned by a real estate company there’s no way to
move anywhere unless you’re doing a 1:1 trade with a homeowner or constructing
a new house (try finding a vacant lot in San Francisco).

You’re glossing over the actual solution: more housing supply. Eliminating
zoning restrictions dictating single family detached homes and parking
minimums would cause the Bay Area market to naturally become more dense.
Homeowners would sell their homes at inflated prices to developers who would
build condo buildings and towers.

Having developers build luxury apartments and condos seems bad, but it frees
up housing stock and increases supply. Usually, yesterday’s luxury apartments
and condos are today’s affordable housing.

Another point that you’re missing is that the Bay Area is an outlier. Few
other American cities have these housing problems. If you live in Chicago or
Houston or Indianapolis and you’re holding down a half decent job you can own
a house if you want that.

