So I see 553,742 people homeless at last estimate (2017, unfortunately). 11M would 20x this amount, an amount that seems catastrophic and unmanageable.
Moreover, this seems like a situation where an emergency event is treated like an ordinary, non-emergency situation. And the reason for this is apparently that America's system of governance is so polarized and dysfunctional that no entity either can or will put forward a broad plan to escape the situation.
While I agree that this number is a catastrophe no matter how you look at it, it's unlikely 100% of those people would become homeless.
Some would find (more expensive) shorter-term rentals, others would move in with relatives, and a small percentage would find a landlord willing to sign a new lease with them.
You would think so--but I don't think the rental market is that elastic anymore. I'm in a college town, so take this with a grain of salt, your milage may vary, etc, but around here with the looming possibility of all the schools being online only in the fall, loads of houses are sitting unrented. In a naive model you would expect to see these houses rent fall in a bid to capture any sort of rent. However what we're seeing in many places here is the opposite--the rent is RISING. The owners behind these properties have non-elastic costs. They've purchased these properties as investments using borrowed money. The bank doesn't stop collecting their payments just because the house is empty. So they have a stable of properties and falling numbers of renters so they RAISE the rent to try and extract any value from the few renters they can capture to try and cover their debts.
It was happening with commercial properties before the COVID pandemic. I started noticing this because I was looking for warehouse space for personal woodworking projects and office space for my business (neither with any sort of urgency, so lots of browsing over time). I noticed that the stock increased every month, but the prices never budged. Then in the local business newspaper they started listing square footage of unrented business properties. Month after month it has increased with no visible signs of rent adjustment.
I suspect the only thing that will eventually cause rents to decrease property speculators defaulting on their loans, which will lead to bank foreclosures and sales. The banks will then hold on to the properties and keep listing them because they can afford to hold the properties and attempt to wait to receive a 'market rate' sale price. Once the banks can no longer afford to just sit on the properties and sell them for whatever they can get for them, then you'll start to see a cycle of falling rents. Until then I think you're going to see stagnant or even increasing rents.
You should also consider there is a "bottom" price for a rental property -- the damage accrued from general usage, and the risk of particularly bad renters, can mean that it's cheaper to leave it empty.
The risk of particularly bad renters is accentuated in areas with strong renter-favored laws -- it becomes difficult to get rid of the guy, and to recoup the cost of damage. COVID has made it particularly problematic; if you have a bad renter today, you can't evict in areas where courts have effectively stopped. So they don't pay rent, cause damage, accrue fines, and you can't remove them.
In addition, a bad renter can both devalue the property tremendously, as well as accrue an arbitrary number of HoA fines, which can wipe out whatever gains you made on the property. And in COVID-world, a good renter can suddenly turn bad, as soon as they lose their job, further increasing the risk -- and those bad renters are usually bad because they don't have money in the first place, so even if tried the courts, there's nothing to get back
Or, there's going to be 11M people who start squating and paying what they can. I'd be interested to see where the cops in America fall on this. It'll destroy cities and towns.
DHS has a limited capacity to do this, given present staffing, funding, responsibilities, and capabilities.
While DHS boasts an impressive headcount of 240,000 employees, the bulk are unlikely to be paramilitary goons of the sort seen in Portland and Seattle, where several dozen troops have had minimal effectiveness in projecting force more than a few metres from the federal courthouse.
Additional requisitions from a deeply divided Congress are unlikely. Where just a single city's police force numbers over 55 thousands (NYPD), the prospect that a few hundreds, or even thousands, of reassigned TSA screeners and border patrol might play landlord-support squad in 100s of cities throughout the US to an ever-growing public resistance is parlors thin.
DHS is already training up vigilante militia[1]. Don't underestimate what this administration is willing to do.
"attendees will participate in scenario-based training and exercises conducted in a safe and positive environment, including, but not limited to defensive tactics, firearms familiarization, and targeted arrests."
There's A LOT of people in America just waiting for their chance to go full-on Purge mode on minorities. This looks like what they've been waiting for all along.
Cops aren't gonna spend the manpower evicting people unless the chief makes it a priority. The chief won't do that unless the politicians tell him to and the union gives a nod. The politicians won't do that if it's political suicide.
Remember when Baltimore PD went on strike and they basically just solved murders, kept tabs on drug trafficking and sat in their cruisers running their side businesses? That's the natural state of policing.
They don't care about a bar that always has brawls. They don't care about someone riding an ATV on the street. They don't care about some teenagers lighting a cardboard box full of feces on fire on the mayor's doorstep. They don't even care about writing tickets to generate revenue. They don't care about evicting people. But they care about keeping their jobs so if the chief says to care about those things they'll care.
Keeping that in mind, any communities that get "destroyed" are doing it at their own hand because the political to make those evictions happen needs to be so much greater than the will to make them not happen (landlords are less numerous than renters but more moneyed and politically active, it's hard to call) that there's enough impetus to still get it done at scale after being laundered through the politicians (who would rather not piss off the renters if they don't have to) and police management (who would rather not kill morale by sending their employees to do the politician's dirty work), losing momentum in both cases.
It will be made a priority. Landlords have money and donate to political campaigns. People who are being evicted do not.
Money matters far more then angry everyday people. Unless they start rioting and looting (which costs the rich money, so in a way, money still matters more).
Also, homeless people can't really vote a lot of the time, so as a politician, why care if a bunch of people are made homeless? They aren't gonna be able to vote you out.
> So I see 553,742 people homeless at last estimate (2017, unfortunately). 11M would 20x this amount, an amount that seems catastrophic and unmanageable.
Not people. Households. 11 million households. Different metric.
So, if you want to convert to people, you have to break that down into an equation where the ratio of households reflects their diversity: single, children, extended families, shared accommodation, collectives,... Plug 11 million into that equation and the output will be a magnitude of several orders of that.
The U.S Census data shows an average household in the U.S. having 2.63 persons between 2014-2018. So, a ballpark guestimate would be 28.93 million individuals.
However, this could still be way off: if evictions happen in highly populous areas, or coincides with areas where the demographics show large households, you'll get a much larger number. For instance, California has, on average 3.1 persons, whereas North Dakota only 2.1.
To put all of that into perspective: There are currently 37 million Canadians. So, basically, the problem probably entails a group as large as the entire Canadian population.
In this case, 29 million seems reasonable. One factor was given as 11 million, after all, not 11.00 million. And don’t take my comment too seriously. It’s a minor nit, but one that frequently bugs me.
So, I was just shooting a dart at a target. Translate the target to a Cartesian plan and you can express the position of the dart as a tuple (x,y) with two real numbers.
However, you don't know the exact position of the bulls eye you're aiming at. At best, you're aiming for a bounded area representing an approximation. So, you're basically guestimating the distance between the position of the dart, and any other point within that area which might probably be what you're shooting for.
Maybe I'm close, maybe I'm less close. I could have rounded upwards to 29 million, but unless you know exactly what you're aiming for, it's not possible to establish how rounding impacts accuracy. We do know that rounding within an interval of 1 million likely won't skew the answer too much, so both numbers are acceptable.
So our error estimates should have error estimates of their own? ;-) More seriously, though, both numbers are acceptable, and quite like far from the truth, but yours gives off an aura of accuracy with little or no basis. That’s not a problem on hn, given a highly numerate audience, but in other settings it could be problematic.
Reminds me of a javelin throwing contest years ago, where results were measured in feet and inches. Given that an inch is 25.4 mm, a Norwegian paper did report the results with submillimeter accuracy.
> America's system of governance is so polarized and dysfunctional that no entity either can or will put forward a broad plan to escape the situation
There is a federal eviction moratorium in effect on federally-subsidized and federally-backed housing [1]. Many states and cities have more-comprehensive moratoria in place [2].
I'll also note that CARES Act was almost 3x the size of the EU's recent package (over 7x if one ignores its loans) and 4 months earlier. The Republican's follow-up bill, half the size of the Democrats', is still larger than the EU's single package.
American government has plenty of faults. But inability to act in a crisis is not one of them.
Here in the southern US we've already started up the process of evicting people. Richmond, VA (which always finds itself in the top 10 cities in the US with the highest eviction rates) is in full swing.
I know it's easy for a lot of us to forget about people outside NYC and LA but there are not many renter protections down here in general, let alone during an economic crisis/pandemic.
> I'll also note that CARES Act was almost 3x the size of the EU's recent package
The EU isn't a national government, their package is a lot more generous than any comparable US-centered supernational regional org.
As far as national governments go, the German package passed in April was about US$10,000 per capita, about 1/5 of GDP. CARES was about US$5,000 per capita, about 1/12 of GDP. Germany passed additional packages, for a total aid passed through through June of over $17,000 per capita, over 1/3 of GDP.
There is a federal eviction moratorium in effect on federally-subsidized and federally-backed housing [1]. Many states and cities have more-comprehensive moratoria in place.
As I said, the problem isn't the US isn't throwing money at the problem, the problem is that there isn't a cohesive plan being articulated for how to get out of this. We probably won't have millions of people driven from the homes, penniless and living on the streets now that moratorium you linked to has ended (it's end is in fact what prompted the OP, btw). But these measures look haphazard and temporary - and just looking haphazard is enough to create a sense of panic in people (good leadership both is organized and clear and appears organized and clear).
You're wrong in that European aid programs in total are larger but that's not the main point. The point is that Europe and all most industrialized nations have dealt with the situation as a crisis during which people will get help and be somewhat guaranteed safety and a crisis, which once it goes away, people can return to normal from. The messaging the US has been a spew of confusion - the "opening up" a month ago was disastrous both in terms of spreading the disease and in terms of casting US leaders in total as confused incompetent morons, and that won't make it easier for them to lead.
And leadership is key here. What people are told to do is as big a factor in spreading the virus or not as any particular measures. And that goes for the situation of landlords and tenants. As the article correctly points out, leadership is needed to protect landlords from themselves. The current situation gives the impression everyone is on their own. Even if some aid does arrive, congress makes a strong showing that no one should count on that aid and that doesn't cause people to behave well.
From their source, the HUD Exchange, I found a more recent report.
> On a single night in 2019, roughly 568,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States.
> Nearly two-thirds (63%) were staying in sheltered locations—emergency shelters or transitional housing programs—and more than one-third (37%) were in unsheltered locations such as on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation.
Personally, having lived among the homeless in the U.S. (for a period of a few long years in my youth), half a million seem like a low estimate.
There are systemic, structural, and political/cultural reasons for the plight of the homeless, and much of their unnecessary suffering (their treatment by police, lack of healthcare, to count a couple aspects in addition to lack of affordable housing).
To put this in perspective, the linked data shows that 43% of all renters are at risk of eviction, which is 17M households. The 11M number is just in the next four months.
This reminds me of the saying "If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem." There has to be an opportunity for collective action here.
Imagine trying to raise kids like that. You enroll them for school (whatever that means right now), not knowing whether you'll be able to maintain a residence within the school district for the entire school year. This is already the reality for many families, and this year it's going to be the reality for countless more.
...while your credit rating drops 200 points for the next 10 years.
The alternative is calling your landlord and speaking to him - almost as if he's a real human being. Tell him you'll have to move if he doesn't temporarily lower the rent.
do you have a citation for this? my experience in Boston in that landlords have stopped jacking up rents. that's about it. I haven't seen any come down yet.
Really? I used the wrong account number to pay rent once and the fees were about $200. How on earth is the solution to rack up that number every month? People that are struggling probably live paycheck to paycheck and there's no way to pay back that backlog of missed payment fees with interest along with the total rent you missed.
This is part of why I blog and run r/GigWorks and r/ClothingStartups: I figured out how to make money from the street while very ill.
This is solvable. We just aren't working on the right things.
We need to get people working again in a way that doesn't spread the virus. We need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of existence.
We collectively know how to create affordable market rate housing in walkable neighborhoods. We just basically choose not to in the US.
And now it's A Real Crisis, not "just a few losers with personal problems". We need to get our head out the sand and stop pretending we are too stupid to fix this, good god. We aren't too stupid. That's not the issue.
I'm not very comfortable with the answer to this problem being 'how to make homeless and sick people keep working'. America desperately needs better social security nets. (for example) Seeing Bezos net worth skyrocket by billions at the same time as millions of people losing their homes is absolutely disgusting.
A third of Americans not paying their rent or mortgage is not about sick and homeless people not working. It's about people not working due to lockdown.
A lot of those people not working are lower class. A lot of professional jobs just shifted to work from home.
We need that one third of Americans working. They need opportunity. They aren't getting it.
I think the point of the person you responded to is it's not really reasonable to tell the poor and homeless to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to work some low wage job during a pandemic. The problem is until the world manages to find a safe way through this problem, we should have a social safety net for those who can't work--and the thing standing in the way of getting there is a few people who have enough wealth to wholesale purchase a medium sized country if they wanted to.
Yes, there are some jobs that we do need done and are safe to do, but the labor bubble probably isn't big enough to accommodate all of those currently suffering.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I don't qualify for disability, though I am disabled.
If I hadn't tried to establish an earned income, suicide would have been my only way out of my predicament. No one was going to rescue me.
With a third of people not working, we don't have the means to rescue everyone. The only way to fix this mess is to find ways to get people working again. There is no other real solution.
I get really tired of hearing pie in the sky talk of how people in lousy circumstances "shouldn't have to" do x, y or z. In practice, it winds up being a means to trap them there and give them no way out.
> With a third of people not working, we don't have the means to rescue everyone
Other countries seem to manage it. Bigger income taxes and use the money to help those who are out of work
I know it may seem like your actions are being criticised, I really don't think that's the case, we're all grateful for the efforts that you're making. But as someone else pointed out, you're walking through the trenches distributing band-aids. At the same time we need to ask ourselves why there are so many people in the trenches in the first place, whilst others are living in mansions 200 miles behind the front lines.
Exactly. Arguing that there's no possible way to help everyone, while the top 1% are hoarding more and more is exactly how that same 1% want it.
Don't tax the job creators! Those billionaires earned every penny and didn't exploit anyone! We need to cut Amazon's taxes or they might not build another distribution center here that pays less than a living wage!
Just note that a lot of more socialist countries do not have clearly higher taxes, and they look much better financially when you factor in the ridiculously high price US folks pay for healthcare
In other countries, people would have come to rescue you, the government would have been able to provide you with housing and enough money to live. Not everyone can work and those people deserve social net to be able to live comfortably.
While your circumstances are unfortunate, this is about the government maintaining stability during a widespread disaster. If a fire burned down half the country, nobody would be saying “well those people should get back to work.” We’d have politicians rushing to win votes and support those afflicted by the disaster until we could come up with a good way to get life back to normal.
The current course America has now is to pretend things are normal during an ongoing disaster. It hasn’t been working. People working low wage jobs during this just because they’re struggling to pay rent are quite miserable—more so than before.
It’s not even employer provided healthcare. It’s employer subsidized health insurance with pre tax money with deductibles of $3k+ and out of pocket maximums of $7k to $13k. For employer chosen in network providers. For medicines from employer chosen formularies.
For 86 of those years, ownership of another human being was the law of the land and for all of it rampant discrimination against any not of English Protestant ancestry was pervasive, so for a start there was that.
From 1862 to 1934, over 1.6 million homesteads were created through the Federal Government. For a filing fee of $18 (~$200--$500 in 2020), and five years sweat equity, a 21 year old male could claim 5-640 acres by building on and working it. Homesteading continued as a vastly reduced practice, though remaining an option, until 1976 in the lower 48 and Alaska until 1986. Open range provided for additional livilihood based on unowned acreage for ranchers, and mining stakes were prospected throughout the West. But by 1890, the notion that there was unsettled land for the taking had passed; the frontier was closed.
Not that this access was available to all; blacks, Native Americans (this was originally their land), Mexicans, Chinese, Catholics, and other non-Anglo groups were routinely denied rights to land.
Prior to 1860, unorganised squatting was common. A Free Soil movement, based in part of free or cheap land grants to white farmers also emerged.
Too at the time, wage labour was relatively uncommon -- many households were effectively their own businesses, most farmsteads, others practicing trades or professions. The rise of factories, railroads, steel mills, and coal mines gradually shifted this balance. But exposure to the money economy was often lower than now. Less upside perhaps, but also less systemic risk for most households.
Life expectencies were far lower than today: 49.3 years in 1901, 60.2 in 1934, 78.8 today. Pensions tended to be private, often failing, or support offered through multigenerational households (an idea whose time may be returning). Those living to old age often found themselves with no means of subsistence. Social Security had a solid basis in real lived pain.
I think you are underestimating how large this problem is. It's one thing to not have a social security net when there are a "handful" (still too many) people whose luck betrayed them are on the streets. It's another when you have 11 million.
The problem is systemic. We are getting really close to the economic events that have happened during the Weimar Republic. We are going to see a huge increase in radicalization and instability if the article is correct. It won't end in a world war but it could get very violent.
People will start squatting in vacant buildings together. Groups that live together will create their own "pet" system of governance that will appear to solve these problems and then there will be rivalrous behavior among them like gangs fighting each other.
The best thing you can do is keep them busy with a job.
Why are they underestimating? If I understand their point, they are saying that the social security net in the USA needs to be reinforced, and band-aid measures like trying to find gig jobs for the homeless are not the real solution
>>We need to get people working again in a way that doesn't spread the virus. We need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of existence.
If "world peace" was mentioned too, I would have thought this was a Miss World winner's acceptance speech. "We need to..." sure we do, but since these are worldwide problems, maybe it isn't so easy as dropping a few blog links in a thread?
The world has lifted a lot of people from poverty but then new problems come up as standards increase.
So, during WW2, before the internet when one world leader sent identical globes to two others so all three could be on the same page, they managed to do things effectively with global impact. But we can't because...?
As someone chewing their way through a WW2 history book (Neptune's Inferno) at the moment: I think the presence of external enemies mattered hugely. As it did during the cold war. Those in charge actually needed the effort and bodies of the public, for material war-fighting purposes. That drove nation-building solidarity efforts.
It also forced a certain amount of pragmatism; useless ideologues whose plans failed could get replaced rather than promoted, and at the middle ranks there was even the possibility of them getting themselves killed.
America in the present day is consumed with imaginary internal enemies, which is why it's deploying troops on the streets.
I've always wondered why there is no job guarantee today. Without it the minimum wage is worthless because employers can just deny you a job. It doesn't increase your bargaining power. It's the opposite. If you don't have enough bargaining power you don't get a job in the first place. A job guarantee fixes that.
I didn't know about this, interesting. I definitely like it better than UBI, at least you get something for your money, plus people get the dignity of working and being productive. This seems like it would be a good way of (re)training people for skills that have become obsolete.
I think a lot of the buildings and trails at the National Parks used the WPA (or similar) labor. People 90 years later are still benefiting.
Sorry if I sound flippant but, well maybe I'm being flippant. Your idea of creating jobs is awesome and objectively laudable, but your post ignores the actual reality of millions of people becoming homeless for reasons out of their control very, very soon. Many people, even if they gained employment at the moment that you're reading this, will be carrying around their blankets and food outside of their former place of housing before the next pay period.
The scale of this issue is so incredibly large that it's kind of hard to understand unless you yourself have recently had to pack all your shit up and find a safe place to park for the night (assuming in this case you've got a car, which many do not).
I applaud your efforts to create more jobs, which WILL BE HELPFUL, but it's kind of akin to offering bandaids in the WW1 trenches. Useful! But not the solution.
Feel free to come up with better answers and outshine me and make me look like a fool. I will be happy to sit back and clap and say attaboy/girl!
In the meantime, I will continue to offer the spoonful of assistance I'm capable of offering while much of HN seems to pass the popcorn and watch the world burning like it's entertainment.
Are you implying that I've somehow missed evidence that creating some jobs will keep millions of people from becoming homeless in the coming week and my post was simply to be a wet blanket?
As I said repeatedly in my post this is a good idea and I applaud her efforts. My point was (I'm sorry that this isn't clear) that the required changes need to be at a much larger scale than individuals creating jobs (unless it's organized at a... much larger scale).
While I am absolutely delighted to watch people do what they can, and encourage it wholeheartedly, I'm not all-in on the whole "job creators" idea as a panacea. Infact, if a person chooses to do ONLY the "job creation" thing and declines trying to address systemic issues, I'd also in some cases view them as eating popcorn while they watch the world burn with the added activity of patting themselves on the back.
Bad luck, bad timing, and poor life choices. Figurative crippling student debt, literal crippling bike accident (2 broken arms) w/ associated disruptions, an economy in the shitter, and trying to start a startup with savings which didn’t take off before the money ran out.
The concept of being homeless didn’t really hit me until after I was homeless. I was sleeping on the floor of someone I just met, and at one point the room got a bit too small for the two of us and he kicked me out. I remember thinking to myself “where am I going to put my stuff tonight?” I could find a place to sleep, but I couldn’t necessarily find a place to sleep & not lose my stuff. I had a laptop that was my lifeline to searching for work, and without that I would have been royally jacked.
Having spent a bunch of time helping homelessness charities in Australia, I now have a much better understanding of it. Enough to realise that I was technically homeless for a while when I was much younger (circa 2004), in the couch-surfing leaning on others kind of way.
Some of the associated problems are hard to deal with. Mentally you end up in a spin, spending all your mental energy on making money go far enough.
I had very unstable self-employed IT income. No ability to get a job because I'd dropped out of University (because of lack of money). As much as I was never at risk of sleeping rough, it was still a humbling experience.
I hadn't really made bad choices*. In hindsight there were many things that I could have done better, swallowing my pride and telling people being at least one. But hindsight is 20/20 and has the benefit of years of reflection.
The financial problems took years to resolve even when the income became more stable. It also became a puzzle. In order to get a house you have to have a bond, even finding a share house they want stable income (to be clear I wasn't making nothing it was just sporadic).
Not being aware of even where to ask for help is also problematic (There are websites now that help with this a little).
There are many reasons that people end up homeless, and to varying degrees. Society tends to lump them all together.
Drugs and mental illness may be issues that cause homelessness, but so are unstable finances and domestic violence.
Now, it will absolutely be COVID19 related, but that won't change the negative experience.
I wasn't commenting about the voting on Hacker News. Traction is not about upvotes which I mostly don't really care about, contrary to what far too many people think.
> We need to get people working again in a way that doesn't spread the virus.
Doing what, and how would you train them at scale?
> We need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of existence.
This is true, and is primarily the market’s fault. Developers focused on building higher margin luxury development and private equity started acquiring affordable private multi family en masse, renovating it and jacking up the prices.
> We collectively know how to create affordable market rate housing in walkable neighborhoods. We just basically choose not to in the US.
Again, this is a battle of competing interests. Those that control zoning and development aren’t as concerned about making cities walkable as those who actually live in them. Fewer and fewer people own the real estate they live in. You make it sound like laziness and that we “need to get our heads out of the sand.”
Unfortunately, the real estate market isn’t that simple, and the single largest influence in making waves in real estate is truckloads of money, plain and simple.
> By the time this is over savers will be completely destroyed.
As a saver who owns his home outright, this statement cracks me up.
My outlook on this situation is that I can weather the storm for years with zero income and stay in food and shelter throughout without government aid.
The folks with little savings and high rent or expensive mortgages are who I'm concerned about. They seem far more likely to be "destroyed" in the coming months/years.
Us savers can either sit pretty and watch the chaos, buy the dip and profit handsomely from the recovery, or go shopping for cheap homes.
The parent seems to be implying that fed policy will continue to drive down the value of the dollar.
In this scenario savers get crushed as inflation whittles away the value of cash while asset prices climb. And the “folks with little savings and expensive mortgages” that you allude to actually come out on top.
> the “folks with little savings and expensive mortgages” that you allude to actually come out on top.
What good is an expensive mortgage when you can't pay it, lose your home, and now have bad credit preventing you from capitalizing on all the new opportunities created by all the foreclosures and vacant rentals?
The savers have options. At any given moment a saver can decide to buy a pile of stock, or go get a mortgage. Why would we sit idly by while inflation gets so bad it no longer makes sense to hold cash? It doesn't happen overnight, there will be plenty of interesting opportunities in the mean time available to those with good credit and/or a pile of cash.
I find this really interesting because if I were a landlord and had a tennant who was now paying and otherwise had a good history, I would NOT want to be trying to fill a place at a time like this. I'd just forgive and forget.
Not if you sell it. The real estate market is extremely active right now, especially with interest rates dropping below 3%. if I’m stuck with a renter who can’t pay the rent, causing me to not be able to pay the mortgage, sorry, I have to evict so I can sell.
I wonder what the Expected Value is of selling today vs holding and waiting for the rental income to come back. Surely some smart person has figured out an algorithm to plug in numbers to figure out the EV?
You don't really own the land when it's mortgaged. Selling property to reduce risk is a good strategy in times like this. No rental income on a property is a negative return, that can't be managed for long.
You are presuming the active real estate market is full of people looking to become or extend their landlord role which seems counter to this whole discussion.
If you own a rental property outright, you'd be keen to keep good tenants -- people that took care of their homes, nominally paid their rents on time, all that. Covid or otherwise, you'd be smart to cut those folks some slack if they went through rough times.
On the other hand, if your rental property is mortgaged, you need that cashflow -- not only because it's your income, but also because you're shouldering the risk for the loan. If you go under, it's not like the bank is going to let those tenants just sort of live there after repossession.
There really isn't a universal rule that makes sense in all scenarios.
As a small-time landlord, it's more complicated than that because the dynamic changes based on neighborhood and city. Filling is not a challenge for me specifically because I'm in California in one of the major cities, the reality of the locale is that there's always /somebody/ seeking (I suspect this is the case in most big cities) and while I try to help my tenants by being a little laxer than some owners I still have to pay property tax if nothing else (this is more complicated currently but it's still a presence). I'm also not some mega complex with a war chest though, I'm eight units with a revenue of 120k. Thankfully so far none of my tenants have been totally shut out from their work, there's been a few months some needed extra time but they've all managed to spring back.
Is there no grace period while properties are vacant? In the UK the tenant is responsible for paying the equivalent of city taxes, the landlord only needs to pay if it's vacant for more than 6 months. The only other taxes you need to pay are income tax on the rent you receive.
California will charge you no matter what normally. The logistics vary by region a little and to some extent you can claim losses as a business expense but in the covid era the end result is still that the grace period for paying rent is more generous than the graces I get for paying property taxes. I do get some amount of relief but that relief isn't comprehensive to the point that I wouldn't be ahead if I evicted someone who had completely lost all work and was unlikely to find new work for half a year. Hopefully more aid will come but the state government is still in denial about the whole situation around covid (I strongly suspect our infection rate is radically higher than reported) so I'm not gambling it'll be soon.
Thanks, guess if you're in a position where you're oversubscribed then you have the option. Out of interest, how would you look upon a prospective tenant from somewhere else who was evicted over non-payment during corona? I guess I am asking if all evictions are equally bad or if you would care less about the last few months?
For Corona it's hard to say because it's unlikely someone would move to my neighborhood in such a situation (we're not ritzy but there's low-income areas that are 3/4 the price a 30 minute drive away). In general all evictions are the same because there's a ton of regulations in the state about what I can ask and what I can use as a reason to reject an applicant. If you're persuing a zero risk strategy then you get whatever is volunteered during a call to confirm their previous address and what's provided in a background check. The catch is that you can be persued legally for saying something that can be demonstrated to have resulted in an unfair rejection, so the safest strategy is to simply volunteer nothing while hoping the other party has a gabby manager. In parallel, California is really landlord hostile. That's not totally bad because we have the leverage but it means for example that even if I reject a tenant they could in theory sue me if I couldn't adequately demonstrate the rejection was part of a consistent policy (which is hard to do for a pandemic scenario). That's sort of a longshot situation but California judges also tend to side with tenants when they can so as a small landlord for whom court is expensive it's safer to have a policy towards evictions that is agnostic to the specifics.
wow. broadly ignorant statement. many landlords (like me) just kept a house they moved out of. i’m not s professional and was charging way under market because i liked the trnants. they stayed there 10 years. during that time i replaced the roof and ac unit among other things. not sure how i’m inflating thr market by charging 1200/month for a 2k sq ft house with 1/2 acre in a very hot area?
Because you're owning a home as an investment property while not living in it? it doesn't matter if you rent it cheaply, it's one less house available to purchase and there's a finite amount of land and houses.
landlords drive up housing costs? try the pyramid scheme we call our economy. your scrutiny is severely misguided. i could care less what anyone thinks of me choosing to keep and rent the house i moved out of. work 60 to 80 hours a week like everyone else or go buy a tiny house in the woods and find happiness
Landlords only respond to the market, they don't make the market. In fact, they actually provide a service by increase the housing supply when the demand is there (assuming that new construction is allowed).
I guess what they hope for is that landlords would face foreclosures or dump property, causing prices to fall, enabling more people to buy their own housing. That all depends on how many of current tenants are just outside the ability to buy and that being the main reason they rent instead of own.
The last thing you want if you
want to decrease unemployment is for people buying homes. Once you buy a house you limit your mobility and limit your optionality to go to where the jobs are.
In fact, you should be encouraging shorter leases.
I got rid of my house in 2012 after getting married so my (step)sons could stay in their much better school district. I was hesitant to buy a house in 2016 because I had no idea what direction my career might take when my youngest graduated in 2020.
I might have even gone the r/cscareerquestions route and “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” and move to the west coast. But my rent was increasing like crazy and I wanted to lock in my housing costs by buying.
Thank God I found a remote opening at $BigTech. If not, I would be selling my house in the next couple of years and trying to move - under normal non pandemic circumstances.
If the mobility was true to such an extent you wouldn't have the overinflation the real estate market to the degree we see in certain places. That all goes out the window if the employers in the area close down, of course. But then the landlords have the same problem anyways.
Over inflation is mostly on the west coast because of the inflated salaries of tech companies that until now, didn’t want people to work remotely. There is no reason that a software company couldn’t have all of its employees work from anywhere in the country.
As far as I know, the entire cloud consulting division of the three major cloud companies always had plenty of by default remote jobs. I know that AWS does (that’s where I work).
I probably would if everything dropped 25-50%, I imagine a lot of other people would too. Or if they were already going to buy a house or condo they’ll just get a bigger one.
So it would help pretty much anyone who is not over leveraged (barring second effect like a pension relying on MBS) and in the market for real estate which is pretty good in my book. We shouldn’t set up our economy so that we allow people to overleverage in investments assets and then bail them out when they run into issues because of that.
I could not care less if overleveraged landlords crash and burn. It’s money in my pocket because my rent may go down (when I switch places) and it makes it easier for me to afford a place to live in.
We were renting a house, and the land lord was playing games with mortgage. We kept getting notifications, It was insanely stressful.
One day the sheriff and bank came to “evict us” they were shocked to find the house was being rented out. Since we had lease, they couldn’t evict us. But still.
We ended up moving out a couple weeks later anyway. Bank paid us a good amount to leave. We were happy to get away from it all.
Shortly after 2008 I had a similar experience, land lord kept hounding me for rent (poor college student) and one day I get a Bank of America representative asking where my landlord was. He informed me the house was in foreclosure and told me to stop paying rent. This was thankfully after Obama signed the act to prevent evictions for renters.
Out of the wood work my landlord comes threatening eviction if I don't pay rent, he lived on the other side of the country so I wasn't really concerned. Got 3 more months of rent free living in a brand new house...
Not all. Many in CA had their father pay off their building decades ago and are still enjoying that 1970s property tax rate while collecting the same top of market rent as new construction.
So I'm a landlord, and desperate. Someone comes and says that they can't pay their rent. I'd evict them... if I had someone to take their place. (I'd make sure I have at least one unit empty, just in case.) But if I don't have takers (and, if 11 million households are suddenly homeless because they can't pay market rent, I'm not likely to have takers at market price), then I'm likely to let them stay if they can pay me something. Because, you know, if I evict them, I get nothing, and something > nothing.
I am a landlord (part owner in a family run business) - 9 residential houses/condos/duplexes and 4 commercial buildings. We suspended rents (meaning no payment expected at all) at the start of the state COVID shutdown for some of the 9 residential properties where there was need. Since some have started paying voluntarily based on their capability. For months the commercial properties could not be open we suspended rents as well.
We have good tenants who usually pay on time and aren't problems. There is no way we'd kick them out. Quality tenants are gold. I cannot overstate this. Some tenants have rented from us for over 20 years. We've seen them lose and get jobs before, and we can all weather this one out as well, I'm sure, with cooperation.
In Italy landlords have to pay taxes for the rents even if the tenant doesn't pay (the government defaults to not trusting citizens to declare income), thus creating a pressure to formally evict tenants. (This problem was fixed a few years ago for residential rents but it's still a problem for commercial rents). How does this work in the US? How does it compare, as a landlord, to face months of likely vacant property versus months of months continued use but with missed payments?
In the US, landlords would still pay property tax, but not income taxes if they didn't collect any income. Things might get complicated if you rent significantly below market rates though I'm not sure about that.
The US, unfortunately, has an ethos that failure to pay rent is almost always an individuals personal failure. This makes it culturally acceptable (generally) to evict someone who can't make rent because it is a moral failing of the renter (and not, say, the outcome of systemic failures beyond the renters control.) So while landlords probably benefit from getting a portion of their normal rent, they are under significant cultural pressure to evict people who can't pay.
I would hesitate to say that there is "cultural" pressure to evict a tenant. Landlords aren't evicting people because their friends tell them to. They evict people because they think they will have better luck trying to find a new tenant who will hopefully be able to pay their rent.
In some countries they banned landlords from evicting tenants during the pandemic to stop stuff like this happening. They then asked banks to provide mortgage holidays so that the landlords could afford to keep non paying tenants. In my opinion this is a good example of government intervention for the greater good.
Is there any political will in the US to do the same? Could something like this ever be considered in congress or would it be seen as too 'socialist' maybe?
I wouldn't be surprised to see a bill with mortgage holidays, etc pass the House. The Senate is far too conservative to even let this go to a vote, though; McConnell just put a relief bill to a vote that dramatically reduces unemployment assistance ($600/wk -> $200/wk), and I doubt we'll see anything better.
The Republicans have always been the problem. They are rat-fucking the country and laughing about it - McConnell laughed when asked about unemployment assistance - he has no intention of helping Americans. He is a ghoul. We are doomed as long as the Republicans have power.
The Republicans aren't the ones pushing so aggressively to shut down the economy and destroy these people's livelihoods. Unemployment is significantly higher in states with stronger lockdowns (https://www.aier.org/article/unemployment-far-worse-in-lockd...), and Blue states generally have the strongest lockdowns.
Do you actually think Democrats want to "shut down the economy and destroy these people's livelihoods" just because they are mean and bad at governing? Really think about what you just typed. The point of lockdown is beating the virus, as other countries have done - but no, we can't do that here because of obstinate REPUBLICANs refusing to wear masks because "muh freedoms" - I haven't seen one logical or good thing come from Republican leadership during initial few months of this global pandemic. It's just more head-in-the-sand and blame-democrats, just like usual. If you're on the side of Republicans, you are on the wrong side of history, it's really as simple as that at this point.
I mean...you understand why the lockdowns are happening, right?
Other countries are seeing COVID cases dropping, while the USA just keeps going up and up because lockdowns and proper masking and distancing procedures are being resisted.
By arguing against lockdowns, you're implying that an increased death toll is an acceptable cost to save the economy.
All of those things were done in the US. The eviction moratorium expired on July 24th but is likely to be renewed with the next relief bill under consideration in Congress right now. Some localities have passed moratoriums on evictions that go further than that.
It's well past time we built and maintained affordable social housing in this country. Not gigantic, underfunded, monolithic projects but appropriately scaled, tax funded, distributed apartments.
It's been successful in many parts of the world, including in the US. It won't be enough to solve this immediate crisis, but maybe it helps us land on our feet better and builds resilience for the next time.
What problem are you hoping to solve through this?
We did it in Hong Kong. Over 30% of the population lives in virtually free housing rented from the government.
They don't have an incentive to work. They get to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world for free, without contributing.
Meanwhile, those who have a job slightly better than McDonald's are not eligible for this generous giveaway, and are punished by being forced to live in tiny private apartments that they are unlikely to ever afford to buy.
Is this what you consider justice? Punish the working class?
Roughly half of Hong Kong received subsidized housing in 2019. I strongly doubt they all choose not to work.
The idea that because one receives a benefit like housing or socialized medicine they'll just decide not to work is absurd. The people collecting these benefits aren't living like kings, there's plenty of incentive to seek a higher quality of life through work if one is able.
1. You're saying that anyone who can't afford housing is a leech without any alternative explanation.
2.You straw man. He didn't say we need to give people who don't work houses that are above the private standard.
I would consider it justice either to put people on the streets because the job that supports them falls away from underneath them, of no fault of their own.
Having a roof over your head, having shelter is a human right. Granted, that does not have to be in an expensive city, but transporting people to a cheap, rural place is not great either. In a big city, at least there should be a large opportunity to find a job.
But overall, the issue you seems to be having with this is that a person's worth is tied to their (having a) job.
In the major European city I live in, 62% of people live in social housing. Most people still seem to want to work here.
Even if there were a few 'leeches' here and there I'd gladly subsidize them for the benefit of a social safety net.
Personally, I also wouldn't consider those people leeches at all. Your assumption seems to be that everyone who works is automatically contributing to society - with all the bullshit jobs around, I find this questionable at the least.
Assuming what you describe is true (I don't know), you're saying the design is wrong because one implementation is wrong. It doesn't have to be free-vs-unaffordable. There are many approaches to linear and nonlinear funding and taxing.
I've forever been a proponent of personal responsibility. Saving a few bucks here and there and building up an emergency fund that can carry you through 6-8 months. With that said, the current situation seems untenable. I'm curious to read other opinions and suggestions here because to me the only solution appears to be a re-opening and relaxing of current restrictions in order to restore economic activity.
Surprising enough, all this chatter about evictions and missed payments hasn't rocked the US housing market one bit. In fact, prices are up.
curious to read other opinions and suggestions here because to me the only solution appears to be a re-opening and relaxing of current restrictions in order to restore economic activity.
We do need to resume working. But we need to do it without relaxing pertinent restrictions.
Little Caesars has a pizza portal. We should have every eatery have something similar for contactless walk up take out.
We need more remote and work from home opportunities for people who aren't highly skilled white collar professionals.
We need more solutions that meet both standards: an earned income and germ control.
We can't get there if we don't even bother to try because we insist it has to be one or the other.
With the rising costs of living and low wages we have seen in the last couple decennia, making ends meet is troublesome for a lot of people, let alone the having the capacity to save for an emergency fund.
Personal responsibility is easy to say, but when you are born rich or advantaged you need minimal personal responsibility to get by and when born poor you can have all the personal responsibility you want and still get f*cked over. The problem is bigger than personal responsibility. Social security is very poor in the US compared to modern European countries.
How do you save six to eight months of livelihood if you can barely afford to make ends meet month to month? How long do you suppose it takes to save 6 to eight months of income even if you could save 10% of your income every month? This is also not taking into account that most people who do have insurance have deductibles.
Let’s not even consider a minimum wage worker, let’s talk about FC workers at Amazon (the nations second largest employer) making $15/hour.
It hasn’t effected the housing market because few people are selling.
We can also literally pay most people not to work. There's already a ton of proposals for essentially scrapping the bureaucracy and overhead of evaluating issues and just paying everyone. (With a similar total spend) A lot of conversation is stuck now with false dichotomy of: people need to work or they won't have money. Raise taxes on top percent, freeze a lot of army spending, freeze or cancel student debt, and give people money for rent and food. It's that simple, yet not popular.
How can someone be personally responsible for an economy with tens of millions of Americans out of work? How can they personally create a job to work at? How can they be personally responsible for generational poverty that meant they couldn't afford to eat - have you tried making good grades when you're hungry and you're forced to work after school to help support your family? Have you tried making good money when you've never had the opportunity to do anything other than barely scrape by to feed your younger siblings and disabled mother?
Society has failed these people, and there are a lot of them. A lot of them are products of severe systemic racism. They don't deserve to die from their illnesses because they can't afford healthcare. They don't deserve a lifetime of poverty because they struggle to feed their family and can't afford an education.
> Saving a few bucks here and there and building up an emergency fund that can carry you through 6-8 months.
That's easy when your income is significantly higher than your living expenses.
But with constantly rising rents, that's very difficult for people working low-wage jobs. Even when I was a store manager in fast food, after paying the rent, utilities, car insurance, and budgeting about $5-10/day for food, I was left with ~$200/month to either throw into savings or spend on pleasure, and when you work a shit job, you're more likely to want to spend that money on something fun.
But then the alternator dies in your car and it's a $600 repair because your apartment complex doesn't let you do car maintenance in their parking lots, and it wipes out 3 months of your disposable income.
11M out of the current US population is 3.3% Think about that for a second. If this article is correct, more than three percent of the US population may become homeless in only four months.
It's estimated that about 2M people were homeless during the great depression in the US, which is only about 1.6% of the population at that time.
I don't enjoy sounding like an alarmist but at this point I can't help it: my opinion is that if the US does not introduce something pretty close to democratic socialist policies soon to ensure there's a safety net to take care of these people, massive civil unrest is all but guaranteed.
Social safety net is not "democratic socialism". This is not some exceptional, ground breaking policy, the US is just catching up to the rest of the planet. Americans have to stop poisoning online political discourse with their illiteracy.
I’m not American, and yes it is democratic socialism (social democracy). What’s politically illiterate is avoiding the S-word at all costs when what you’re talking about is wealth redistribution.
11,000,000 * $1500 = $16.5 Billion a month. Since we've gotten to the point where we talk about $trillion deficits and bailout, this will not break the bank. Yes, why not give me too money, they'll just stop working and live rent free..etc etc. All valid points, but Covid is a real thing and the economy is shot.
or the government can send anyone up to a certain income limit in need $1500 per household for 6 months. If they sent to all 128 million households it would be about $1.2 Trillion for 6 months. If I was a politician, this is what I'd do for votes /popularity since the purse is being opened anyway
Clearly, this many evictions would be a bad thing. But being allowed to evict is only the first of multiple roadblocks. The local eviction court has to grant the eviction, and law enforcement has to show up to actually force them out. Even if all 11M evictions get approved, I don't foresee law enforcement having the bandwidth to make them all happen. When I was a landlord, even under normal times, it would take weeks to get an appointment set with the sheriff to show up and force the eviction.
I'm not saying this is a good situation, I'm saying that there is more to this process than just stamping some paperwork, with multiple opportunities to slow it down.
Depends on where the eviction is occurring (some states/cities/counties are faster/slower). When I worked for a property manager, you didn't have to wait weeks for the deputies to show up. If an eviction was scheduled for a date, a deputy is there. The landlord hires contractors to move everything onto the curb, and the deputy is there to ensure there's no violence. If there's really this many evictions, they'll likely group them so that less deputies will be required.
Hopefully lots of things will slow it down, but I doubt that's one of them. The only thing that will definitely slow it down is to have longer moratoriums.
“Could” is a pretty important word here. This estimate is from a survey of how people feel about their ability to pay rent. It’s not an actual estimate of the number of distressed tenants or the number of landlords looking to evict.
I would imagine there is plenty of uncertainty at the moment due to Congress being completely dysfunctional. But let’s say they pass an unemployment extension and send out another round of stimulus checks. What’s the next survey going to look like?
As a landlord, I'm sure some of our tenants _feel_ like they might get evicted, but the reality is that we aren't processing almost any evictions at the moment. We have to maintain the same tough processes (threatening letters, late fees, etc) on rent collection because we have no way of knowing who can/can't afford it right now.
One might be able to find a way to inquire about tenants' financial stability. Tough policies, without intent to follow-through seems a little like bullying/extortion.
Finding a way to work with tenants seems like an opportunity for a win-win. Deferring partial rent payments should see some uptake among those who will find work when the country finds a way to right the ship.
If you have good tenants whom you want to keep, keeping them may take work and discounts. I have colleagues who are working/schooling from home who have opted not to renew their expensive urban leases for the coming year. I suspect they would have renewed at a temporarily-discounted rate.
Most small time landlords like me cannot implement an that process because we have kids at home, mortgages, and also full time jobs, in addition to all the same pandemic problems everyone else has.
I do not have the time to vet the financial situation of every tenant, even if I could assume they provided honest data. Moreover, most are working from home and still able to pay full rent - so the danger is having word spread that I'm giving out discounts.
For me, the more efficient process is actually to pressure non-payers to leave and just accept lower rents on incoming tenants.
I'm not saying that's the best ethical way to handle it, but it is the most cost and time efficient method - given my limited resources.
I appreciate the honest breakdown on strategy here. It's interesting that this is the economically correct solution to this problem. We all know that evictions happen, and it's frustrating that 99% of the time they happen to people who really, really need them not to happen; but this is how the US is structured.
Surely it wouldnt be hard to get this data. Every apartment I’ve lived in ran a credit check and asked for months of paystubs, bank statements, any verification of income at all.
This is what a completely immoral capitalist sounds like.
Is it impossible for the owner to reach out to tenants? Ask them how they are doing and what their payment prospects are? If true stress is indicated (it will be obvious which are really in dire straights), work with those tenants on plans to help them land as softly as possible? Rather than just terrorize them into crawling away, more injured by their association with you than they had to be.
As written, the comment is completely unsupportable.
When I took over this building, the prior landlord had developed cancer a year earlier and was on chemo.
One of the tenants found out, and spread the word to all the other tenants - and encouraged all of them to stop paying rent. A little over half of them stopped paying an elderly man rent while he was in the hospital having chemo.
That meant that he couldn't pay the mortgage on the building and was forced to sell it.
That is what it's like being a landlord. You should try it and your opinion on "evil capitalists" will quickly change from your current twelve year old's perspective.
Despite the uncertainty, just that the current pandemic can drive a country so extremely wealthy as the US to a point where such a humanitarian crisis on US soil is a somewhat realistic possibility, it's crazy. 11 million households, what a number.
After all, in the larger context, this pandemic is pretty benign among disasters of that magnitude. History is riddled with cataclysms – decades-long droughts over whole continents? Been there, bought the studded leather shirt, got murdered by Mongols. The Black Death, Mount Tambora, a Carrington Event in modern times, Tunguska (but larger), ... This sort of thing has happened lots and lots of times and will happen again.
If anything, our recent past has been extraordinarily calm. If it turns out the US government can't keep, something like a tenth of the population? in secure housing during this, good luck with climate change, good luck with the next big one that maybe won't be so benign. This is deeply disconcerting.
The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters. Very benign when you take into account the various statistical distortions e.g. most COVID deaths being more like "tested positive at time of death" rather than actual additive deaths.
But the over-reaction to it is on an ahistoric scale. It's quite cataclysmic. You've had people pulling their own teeth out with pliers because the dentists were all closed [1], you have people being locked in their homes for weeks or even months without being able to go outside [2], people being welded inside buildings [3], you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing [4], you have the elderly being abandoned in care homes to die [5] [6]
So whilst I agree diseases have happened before, the kind of global end-of-days mentality we're seeing here is extremely rare. It's not driven by the actual facts of the virus, there's something else at work.
My understanding is that it’s the other way around — both cases and deaths are being undercounted substantially. And testing capacity has been intentionally kneecapped by the govt (if you test fewer, you’ll find fewer cases, which looks good).
All told, COVID looks to be about 10x deadlier than the flu. Which is still low, but not trivial given how quickly it spreads.
10x deadlier than the flu would require it to have an IFR of 1%. Even the US CDC, which has been over-exaggerating the dangers from the start, peg it at much less than that, more like 0.3% and many studies are putting it even lower, like between 0.08% (low end, Denmark) and 0.36% (Germany, Heisenberg).
But those IFRs are also calculated using the standard definition of a COVID death - someone who died, and was testing positive.
If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on, and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates.
All suggestions of undercounting are based on the assumption that all excess death is caused by COVID, and nothing else, even though in some countries e.g. the UK many excess death certificates don't even mention COVID, and in other countries like Germany there basically isn't any excess death:
If you look at the CDC data on Excess Deaths[1] then you can see that COVID and the response to COVID has been responsible for a significant number of excess deaths in every week since the week ending on 3/28.
So, maybe not 10x deadlier, but certainly way deadlier in total count of deaths.
COVID and the response to it - maybe yes. But remember that many countries have seen no excess death at all, their graphs are totally flat. Just look at EuroMOMO.
People have tried to figure out why. It's supposedly the same virus everywhere. It's not related to hospital overload or healthcare availability because nowhere ran out of that, despite the initial scares.
It might be care home related, as that's where 80% of the deaths are (reported to be). It might be related to decisions to flush hospitals to make way for a modelled surge that never happened. But then that'd fall squarely into the response bucket.
The US data is hard to interpret because it only goes back to 2017. I can't seem to find longer term data. Do you know where to find it?
In the UK - one of the 'worst hit' in the world supposedly (but those stats were found to be wrong) - to find similar excess deaths you have to go back to 1998/1999/2000. Is this bad? Well, "once in 20 year excess death spike" may seem bad. But events that happen once every 20 years aren't especially rare. Back then nobody panicked. Nobody talks about the terrible winters of 1999 when they lost so many loved ones. So it's really important to be able to put these excess death stats in perspective, otherwise you just see a bump in a graph and are told "this is really bad".
> If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on, and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates.
If you look at Italy, the recent ISTAT-ISS report (2020-07-16) showed the opposite: COVID-19 has been deemed directly responsible for the death of 89% of those who died testing positive for coronavirus ("morti per"), with the remaining 11% of deaths being caused by some other disease or pre-existing condition ("morti con").
Even excluding comorbidities such as diabetes and hypertension, which are very common, 18% to 28% of the deaths they analyzed were still directly caused by COVID. I'm not sure this can be brought down to 12% without being exceedingly selective (e.g., people aged 0-30 without hypertension, diabetes, respiratory problems... - I know I'm 27 and I wouldn't qualify).
> - Sono state analizzate le informazioni riportate dai medici in 4.942 schede di morte, di soggetti diagnosticati microbiologicamente con test positivo al SARS-CoV-2 (il 15,6% del totale dei decessi notificati al Sistema di Sorveglianza Integrata ISS fino al 25 maggio). Nelle schede di morte sono certificate, oltre a COVID-19, quelle condizioni e malattie che hanno avuto un ruolo nel determinare il decesso.
> - COVID-19 è la causa direttamente responsabile della morte nell’89% dei decessi di persone positive al test SARS-CoV-2, mentre per il restante 11% le cause di decesso sono le malattie cardiovascolari (4,6%), i tumori (2,4%), le malattie del sistema respiratorio (1%), il diabete (0,6%), le demenze e le malattie dell’apparato digerente (rispettivamente 0,6% e 0,5%).
> - La quota di deceduti in cui COVID-19 è la causa direttamente responsabile della morte varia in base all’età, raggiungendo il valore massimo del 92% nella classe 60-69 anni e il minimo (82%) nelle persone di età inferiore ai 50 anni.
> - COVID-19 è una malattia che può rivelarsi fatale anche in assenza di concause. Non ci sono infatti concause di morte preesistenti a COVID-19 nel 28,2% dei decessi analizzati, percentuale simile nei due sessi e nelle diverse classi di età. Solo nella classe di età 0-49 anni la percentuale di decessi senza concause è più bassa, pari al 18%.
It is common for individual hospitals to occasionally need to load balance to other nearby hospitals. That is nothing unusual.
Overload in an entire region would be, but as far as I know that has never happened anywhere.
However, you can be forgiven for thinking that. Bad news sells newspapers, which seems to have led to a lot of very deceptive reporting. For example, headlines that literally say:
"All the hospitals are full: in Houston overwhelmed hospitals leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER"
but at the time of publishing there were 2500 free beds in the Texas Medical Center system in Houston. So it wasn't possible that all the hospitals were full.
No, but that's inevitable if funeral workers refuse to handle body's due to lack of ppe, which was the underlying cause for the temporary morgues in most places (not sure about New York)
> The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters
I agree with you here - it's not like it kills a third of people who get infected. Also, the virus is not very contagious - all it really takes is wearing masks and distancing for the spread to diminish.
But most everyone has rationally judged that a 1% chance of death is too high, never mind the larger chance of life long complications. So anyone who can reduce their own exposure finds it prudent to do so.
Meanwhile, and this ties into "something else at work", we've got corrupt leaders and corrupt mass media that have done little to address the public health crisis, and everything possible to inflame and politicize the issue.
And so our society is still stuck at essentially the same position we began at in March. Either we're going to have to buckle down and actually work together to control this thing, or we're going to be stuck with this virus (and therefore a broken economy) until a vaccine is created.
Across 32 different locations, the median infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.24%). Most studies were done in pandemic epicenters with high death tolls.
But recall that these IFRs are calculated with a very questionable definition of COVID death (see my other comment). Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age.
This is how you can have countries that have hundreds of thousands of cases yet totally flat excess death charts.
I suspect these kind of inflated figures are partly what's driving people's over-reactions (look at how my post was voted).
And there's some evidence for this. Today there was a poll released with truly shocking results.
In polls Brits are estimating that 7% of the population has died of COVID. In other words they think it's 100x more deadly than current government stats claim, and those stats are themselves currently suspended due to rampant over-counting.
But Americans are even further out. They believe the death rate is 225x higher than it really is. They also believe the virus is 20x more prevalent than in reality.
Top marks go to Germans who believe 300x more people have died of COVID than is really true.
I wouldn’t know how to test for it (maybe by checking for a bimodal distribution in answers, with a fairly narrow ‘hump’ near the correct number?), but I think that more shows many people are awfully bad at this kind of math, in particular probabilities.
Even accepting your figure of a 1 in 400 chance, it is still foolish to needlessly take on that risk. You can't complain about the innumeracy of the population when they overestimate, while taking advantage of 0.24% seeming like some infinitesimally small number for the same reason.
Ultimately you're getting downvoted because you're pushing politically-filtered numbers with copious hand waving. That whitepaper seems tailor made for business owners pushing their employees back into the office. These downplaying narratives are responsible for our current approach of doing nothing but watching the economy crumble, and it's not surprising that most people have grown tired of them.
Most developed countries have gotten this under control. The US has chosen not to. Until the virus is contained, the economy we knew is dead in the water. This is only hard to understand if you deny that there is any problem whatsoever, as most of our "leadership" has been doing from day one.
What risk, exactly? The risk of going outside, going on holiday, spending time with other people?
If the risk is the same or lower than flu, which these studies say it is, then we should act as we do in flu years, which is every year, i.e. we shouldn't be changing anything.
you're pushing politically-filtered numbers with copious hand waving
No, I'm providing hard data in the face of people who have been misled into thinking the virus is more dangerous than it really is. That isn't "copious hand waving". Perhaps though, you wish it was? The virus became long ago a deeply ideological matter for the left, some of whom seem to almost hope it's very deadly. But my points here aren't ideological, they're factual.
Most developed countries have gotten this under control. The US has chosen not to.
I'm not American but this strange "we Americans uniquely suck" narrative just seems silly.
In the past few days the UK decided everyone returning from Spain must go into 14 day quarantine where they aren't allowed out of their house for any reason, not even to buy food, and this must be done even if they are healthy. It was done without any warning and there will be no wage compensation for those who can't work because they're quarantined. Then almost immediately after they decided that actually 14 days wasn't necessary after all (science!!), and dropped it to "only" 10 days.
The justification for this was a supposed "surge" in Spanish cases. Absolute numbers are of course still tiny, but a quick check of the data shows that the surge started at exactly the same time that test volumes started ramping up, and the proportion of tests coming back positive has hardly changed.
There are similar stories of self-inflicted wounds from nearly every country except, it seems, Sweden and bizarrely, Belarus.
And that was my original point. COVID-19 is an entirely artificial disaster, made by the absurd and illogical reactions of people. It's not a natural biological disaster. The bad effects are all coming from the decisions people are making.
Your "hard data" has been drawn from the pool of all studies using a political filter, meaning it has sampling bias and is no longer hard data. I am guessing that is the lowest IFR number you can find, therefore its reasonable to assume that the true one is decently higher.
Here is an example of your hand waving:
> Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age.
If one is not thinking critically, this can sound reasonable. But rather this is a huge back door because nobody dies "of COVID" - it's always going to be some other medical condition caused by COVID. In the short time frame involved, there aren't going to be too many people who test positive for COVID then die of unrelated causes. On the longer term, we can simply look at excess deaths.
> I'm not American but this strange "we Americans uniquely suck" narrative just seems silly.
For one, the fact that Americans haven't been able to do basic things like wear N95 masks starting in February. For two, the death toll. The differences between countries are easily explained with culture. Japan had no formal shutdown but yet stayed in control because Japanese citizens did the right thing anyway. Many Americans seem hell bent on doing the exact opposite, in some simulation of rebelling.
In general, it seems like you're skating as close as possible to calling the topic a hoax, without directly doing so.
Your first paragraph would appear to invalidate any argument about anything that cites data, as anyone can be told they are using a "political filter", that's an unfalsifiable claim. So I'll ignore it. If you have better data, show it! (And some replies from others are doing that)
I don't think I understand your second paragraph. Of course some people die of COVID, or just isn't equal to the number reported for COVID deaths, which is "died with" and not "died of". That's not hand waving, it's well understood fact.
In the short term there are definitely lots of people who test positive then die of something else, as virtually all covid deaths are of the old where it's often very hard to say what exactly they died of, and there can be many causes. Excess deaths are certainly not all COVID and there was an article today in the British press urging governments to focus on the new problem of large amounts of excess deaths in the home that aren't linked to covid in any way, but rather seem to be people who are struggling to get medical treatment for other things.
N95 masks couldn't possibly have been used by all Americans in February for the same reason they can't be used now, the manufacturing capacity isn't there. That's why around the world people are using cloth masks which aren't proven to stop much of anything.
As for Japanese people doing the right thing anyway, well, I don't want to get into national stereotyping.
> Your first paragraph would appear to invalidate any argument about anything that cites data, as anyone can be told they are using a "political filter"
Unfortunately that is what happens when science gets dragged into politics. One team finds a list of studies showing things one way, the other team makes a list of refutations, and they're passed around as talking points. I'd rather just say I don't know without in-depth literature research, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and not attempt to draw strong emotionally-appealing conclusions such as "same or lower than flu".
> I don't think I understand your second paragraph. Of course some people die of COVID
Nobody dies of COVID, just like nobody dies of cancer. There is always some immediate acute condition that causes the death. And so saying that someone who tested positive then died of unrelated old person stuff is just another way of massaging numbers. While this scenario can happen, I don't think it's prevalent.
> N95 masks couldn't possibly have been used by all Americans in February for the same reason they can't be used now
I deliberately set the bar high, because if we had aimed there, we would have the manufacturing capacity by now. Saying we're unprepared now because we didn't do the work before isn't very interesting. Rather, take it as a call to start doing the work now so we're prepared in the future.
> That's why around the world people are using cloth masks which aren't proven to stop much of anything.
Ah, more offhanded FUD to justify inaction. We get it, you don't want to have to do anything. As I said, "skating as close as possible to calling the topic a hoax".
Well, nobody dies of COVID or cancer is a much stronger claim than I'm making, which is ultimately statistical.
I think some people do die of COVID, same as they can die of flu. It's just very rare and not equal to the reported death rate.
Re: science and politics. I've linked you to a couple of meta-reviews, done by people who searched the literature. You appear to be working backwards from a desired conclusion: that is, you deem "same or lower than flu" as emotionally appealing and therefore inherently likely to be wrong. But how is that logical? The correctness of an argument isn't based on whether the outcomes are emotionally satisfying or not.
At any rate, I do hope you go and perform your own literature review or research, to find out what's really happening. Because right now you seem to be one of the people covered by the poll, who were significantly over-estimating the true dangers.
Re: N95 masks. You're still making incorrect claims. N95 masks are built from a form of meltblown fiber. The machines that can create this kind of material are very niche and hard to construct. Each one has a fixed production capacity and the sort of manufacturers that make them work on them one at a time, with most stuff done by hand. Demand isn't high enough for them to be mass produced. That places hard limits on how fast material manufacture can be scaled up. People did look at this in February and realised there was no physical way to scale up N95 mask production on any kind of short timescale. The machinery just isn't there.
Rather, take it as a call to start doing the work now so we're prepared in the future.
There is a sad story related to this. The US only really has one mask company. He didn't ramp up production even during the midst of COVID times because in the past he's learned the hard way that governments panic over mild diseases, order lots of masks, so they scale up and hire new workers - then by the time the mask production is scaled up the panic is over and governments stop buying, leaving them nearly bankrupt. So he just didn't do it again.
Fundamentally, governments are too incompetent and panic prone to manage disease. It's been proven over and over. They even burn people who can make medical equipment, such that they don't want to help again.
At any rate, N95 masks are inappropriate for the general population. You can get things like this:
It's not FUD. Cloth masks can't stop viruses, they're far too small. They only stop liquid droplets, but they also saturate within hours and need to be thrown away. Most people aren't doing that, it's been studied. Again, go do your own research.
I'm distinguishing in a way I think you aren't - to me, exactly because this stuff is so hard, and so many things have bad side effects, it shouldn't be done by governments. That doesn't mean nothing should be done by anyone. When things are done by non-governmental actors, the rest of us have the option of ignoring them if we think they're wrong (usually). When a government does something wrong, everyone is stuffed. And exactly because there's no feedback loop for the vast majority of government employees, except politicians, and even then only weakly, they tend to do things wrong a lot.
One day I think you'll come to understand this perspective. But first you need to realise that doing nothing is not only an option but often, the best option. The assumption that "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done" is a political cliché for a reason.
> you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing
You misunderstood the data. Half of all restaurants that temporarily closed went on to permanently close. >98% of restaurants stayed open, less than 1% permanently closed.
This should have happened already. Checks have already stopped. Even if they do this now, plenty of people will still get evicted without the extra income or eviction protection. The irresponsibility of waiting on a coronavirus relief bill two months in the middle of a pandemic is almost unbelievable. But then I remember the scum who insisted on waiting. Also, they won't pass another bill to provide people with what they need. That's almost certain. Or they would have done so these last two months.
When you have propaganda running 24x7 on TV, you do not get the full picture. Lot of Americans do believe that Trump is doing a good job because the TV says so.
It's possible you're getting down voted even by people who hate Trump. Keep in mind, he lost the popular vote by 3 million and has never had decent approval ratings.
How is it hard to feel sorry for us? We didn't _all_ bring this on ourselves. Certainly not the majority of us.
In the current climate, I believe, the outcome suggested in the title of the article, could be largely avoided, if suitable monetary policies are timely introduced, via responsible bipartisan legislation.
That's because it's not. "could be evicted over the next four months" is the phrasing in the article, and its wildly unlikely.
Look at the posts at /r/realestate. They show the Redfin/Zillow statistics and people selling their houses for more than last year in every major metro area I've been interested in. There's also a lot of concern that lack of construction during covid will lead to a shortage.
If there's going to be 11M households evicted, why are real estate prices doing better than ever? Because all of America is clueless except this one brilliant Fast Company journalist?
1) Home buyers are more likely to be younger people and older people are more likely to be home sellers. Younger people (buyers) are more likely to be active now and willing to move.
2) People are rethinking the small studio apartment they were quarantined in and are looking for better or larger places to WFH in.
3) Money is usually a chief concern for sellers but with the mortgage forbearance and deferral options why would anyone bother to sell their appreciating asset that they can keep and live almost for free in?
4) Interest rates dropped to near 0% and will remain there for about 2 years. That substantially boosted home prices.
5) Some people living in apartments felt that it was hard to social distance there so they bought a house with land and separation.
6) Substantially more free time to browse houses for some people now!
7) The inflation rate is increasing. Fed target is to overshoot 2% to get to 3% or more annual inflation.
8) Old people aren’t interested in moving out to nursing homes and end-of-life care facilities now where cases are perceived to be more concentrated and undesirable.
9) The Census is happening this year and the government would prefer if people move around less to keep their numbers accurate.
10) Homes containing unevictable tenants can’t be freed up for the housing market to consume. Even all the bad tenants that mistreat and mishandle their landlord’s rental homes get to keep mishandling their home while you have to keep looking for an unoccupied affordable home.
There is a massive shortage of homes in certain parts of this country so existing homes keep getting bid up and up. Even if some of these reasons disappear, the others will still remain.
On the first home I offered 5k over asking price when there were 10 other offers and was bid out by 1 other guy. The second home I offered 10k over asking price and narrowly beat out the 10 other offers. With that many offers, the housing supply could double in my area and housing prices would still keep going up. It’s a very hot market and I don’t see it shifting anytime soon. Not at least until we see the Momths of Inventory metric (which is a leading indicator for home price direction) increase to over 6 months and that might not happen until next year or beyond.
This is yet another failing of the federal government. They have the funds to bail people out just like they did in the last recession. They just won't do it. I hope people remember that when they are on the streets. Their government could have helped in the worst crisis in almost a century, but it didn't. It chose to bail out big companies instead. It chose to reduce the extra unemployment to force people back to risking their lives. These would have been easy issues to fix (the unemployment even was temporarily) but our representatives chose not to. Two months the Senate has been sitting on the next corona bill and have done nothing while Americans suffer and now are completely fucked eviction and unemployment wise.
They also didn't do shit to fight the virus itself and instead actively sought to spread it as much as possible.
> We also are bailing people out anyway- the extra federal unemployment made unemployment benefits worth more than workers' average pay.
We had no problem bailing out a ton of businesses that didn't need it, so clearly there is no shortage of money. Also, making more money from unemployment during a pandemic is a feature, not a bug. People need to stay at home. That's the whole, entire goal.
> Because the first bill doesn't expire until the end of this month.
The checks have stopped. Unless you think they can get the bill passed and checks sent and delivered by this Friday, then there will be a gap that most people can't cover. So the Senate has indeed decided not to care as they are quite aware this is the case and have had two months to deal with it, yet refused to. So it's irrelevant when "the bill" expires when people aren't getting anymore money already and there's no plan for them to get any in the near future.
> It's the people that chose to not wear masks. It's the people that chose to go to events and go on vacation.
I agree. But the government has the biggest responsibility. And they haven't done anything but sabotage the process.
Surely 2.3 M households is at least 1% and perhaps close to 2% of the US population. If that is the case and if it were evenly distributed pretty much everyone would know someone who had received such a notice.
How can this be happening in a developed country?
So I suppose that it is very unevenly distributed so that most people are blissfully unaware that it is happening.
The small city I live in is paying people's rent to avoid having small landlords go bankrupt. Because bankruptcy owned buildings can stay vacant for years, while the courts figure out who gets what. All that time, no property taxes are paid.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadMoreover, this seems like a situation where an emergency event is treated like an ordinary, non-emergency situation. And the reason for this is apparently that America's system of governance is so polarized and dysfunctional that no entity either can or will put forward a broad plan to escape the situation.
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
Some would find (more expensive) shorter-term rentals, others would move in with relatives, and a small percentage would find a landlord willing to sign a new lease with them.
I suspect _many_ would find new, cheaper rentals from cash-strapped landlords.
https://youtu.be/f1dnocPQXDQ
Just Devil's Advocate, but wouldn't that still be just shuffling the chairs on the Titanic?
It was happening with commercial properties before the COVID pandemic. I started noticing this because I was looking for warehouse space for personal woodworking projects and office space for my business (neither with any sort of urgency, so lots of browsing over time). I noticed that the stock increased every month, but the prices never budged. Then in the local business newspaper they started listing square footage of unrented business properties. Month after month it has increased with no visible signs of rent adjustment.
I suspect the only thing that will eventually cause rents to decrease property speculators defaulting on their loans, which will lead to bank foreclosures and sales. The banks will then hold on to the properties and keep listing them because they can afford to hold the properties and attempt to wait to receive a 'market rate' sale price. Once the banks can no longer afford to just sit on the properties and sell them for whatever they can get for them, then you'll start to see a cycle of falling rents. Until then I think you're going to see stagnant or even increasing rents.
The risk of particularly bad renters is accentuated in areas with strong renter-favored laws -- it becomes difficult to get rid of the guy, and to recoup the cost of damage. COVID has made it particularly problematic; if you have a bad renter today, you can't evict in areas where courts have effectively stopped. So they don't pay rent, cause damage, accrue fines, and you can't remove them.
In addition, a bad renter can both devalue the property tremendously, as well as accrue an arbitrary number of HoA fines, which can wipe out whatever gains you made on the property. And in COVID-world, a good renter can suddenly turn bad, as soon as they lose their job, further increasing the risk -- and those bad renters are usually bad because they don't have money in the first place, so even if tried the courts, there's nothing to get back
If that means grouping with other households, wouldn’t the better choice be to do that in one of the less expensive existing rentals?
While DHS boasts an impressive headcount of 240,000 employees, the bulk are unlikely to be paramilitary goons of the sort seen in Portland and Seattle, where several dozen troops have had minimal effectiveness in projecting force more than a few metres from the federal courthouse.
Additional requisitions from a deeply divided Congress are unlikely. Where just a single city's police force numbers over 55 thousands (NYPD), the prospect that a few hundreds, or even thousands, of reassigned TSA screeners and border patrol might play landlord-support squad in 100s of cities throughout the US to an ever-growing public resistance is parlors thin.
"attendees will participate in scenario-based training and exercises conducted in a safe and positive environment, including, but not limited to defensive tactics, firearms familiarization, and targeted arrests."
[1] https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/07/10/889726473/i-c-e-cit...
I think we can tell by now: more tear gas. Eventually some commander is going to authorise clearing a street with live ammunition.
(There are even claims that the shooting of Breonna Taylor was connected to gentrification, although the evidence seems tenuous and the claims extraordinary: https://www.salon.com/2020/07/06/breonna-taylor-lawsuit-clai... )
Remember when Baltimore PD went on strike and they basically just solved murders, kept tabs on drug trafficking and sat in their cruisers running their side businesses? That's the natural state of policing.
They don't care about a bar that always has brawls. They don't care about someone riding an ATV on the street. They don't care about some teenagers lighting a cardboard box full of feces on fire on the mayor's doorstep. They don't even care about writing tickets to generate revenue. They don't care about evicting people. But they care about keeping their jobs so if the chief says to care about those things they'll care.
Keeping that in mind, any communities that get "destroyed" are doing it at their own hand because the political to make those evictions happen needs to be so much greater than the will to make them not happen (landlords are less numerous than renters but more moneyed and politically active, it's hard to call) that there's enough impetus to still get it done at scale after being laundered through the politicians (who would rather not piss off the renters if they don't have to) and police management (who would rather not kill morale by sending their employees to do the politician's dirty work), losing momentum in both cases.
Money matters far more then angry everyday people. Unless they start rioting and looting (which costs the rich money, so in a way, money still matters more).
Also, homeless people can't really vote a lot of the time, so as a politician, why care if a bunch of people are made homeless? They aren't gonna be able to vote you out.
Not people. Households. 11 million households. Different metric.
So, if you want to convert to people, you have to break that down into an equation where the ratio of households reflects their diversity: single, children, extended families, shared accommodation, collectives,... Plug 11 million into that equation and the output will be a magnitude of several orders of that.
The U.S Census data shows an average household in the U.S. having 2.63 persons between 2014-2018. So, a ballpark guestimate would be 28.93 million individuals.
However, this could still be way off: if evictions happen in highly populous areas, or coincides with areas where the demographics show large households, you'll get a much larger number. For instance, California has, on average 3.1 persons, whereas North Dakota only 2.1.
To put all of that into perspective: There are currently 37 million Canadians. So, basically, the problem probably entails a group as large as the entire Canadian population.
So, I was just shooting a dart at a target. Translate the target to a Cartesian plan and you can express the position of the dart as a tuple (x,y) with two real numbers.
However, you don't know the exact position of the bulls eye you're aiming at. At best, you're aiming for a bounded area representing an approximation. So, you're basically guestimating the distance between the position of the dart, and any other point within that area which might probably be what you're shooting for.
Maybe I'm close, maybe I'm less close. I could have rounded upwards to 29 million, but unless you know exactly what you're aiming for, it's not possible to establish how rounding impacts accuracy. We do know that rounding within an interval of 1 million likely won't skew the answer too much, so both numbers are acceptable.
Reminds me of a javelin throwing contest years ago, where results were measured in feet and inches. Given that an inch is 25.4 mm, a Norwegian paper did report the results with submillimeter accuracy.
There is a federal eviction moratorium in effect on federally-subsidized and federally-backed housing [1]. Many states and cities have more-comprehensive moratoria in place [2].
I'll also note that CARES Act was almost 3x the size of the EU's recent package (over 7x if one ignores its loans) and 4 months earlier. The Republican's follow-up bill, half the size of the Democrats', is still larger than the EU's single package.
American government has plenty of faults. But inability to act in a crisis is not one of them.
[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/coronavirus/mortgage-and-hou...
[2] https://ny.curbed.com/2020/3/26/21192343/coronavirus-new-yor...
I know it's easy for a lot of us to forget about people outside NYC and LA but there are not many renter protections down here in general, let alone during an economic crisis/pandemic.
The EU isn't a national government, their package is a lot more generous than any comparable US-centered supernational regional org.
As far as national governments go, the German package passed in April was about US$10,000 per capita, about 1/5 of GDP. CARES was about US$5,000 per capita, about 1/12 of GDP. Germany passed additional packages, for a total aid passed through through June of over $17,000 per capita, over 1/3 of GDP.
As I said, the problem isn't the US isn't throwing money at the problem, the problem is that there isn't a cohesive plan being articulated for how to get out of this. We probably won't have millions of people driven from the homes, penniless and living on the streets now that moratorium you linked to has ended (it's end is in fact what prompted the OP, btw). But these measures look haphazard and temporary - and just looking haphazard is enough to create a sense of panic in people (good leadership both is organized and clear and appears organized and clear).
You're wrong in that European aid programs in total are larger but that's not the main point. The point is that Europe and all most industrialized nations have dealt with the situation as a crisis during which people will get help and be somewhat guaranteed safety and a crisis, which once it goes away, people can return to normal from. The messaging the US has been a spew of confusion - the "opening up" a month ago was disastrous both in terms of spreading the disease and in terms of casting US leaders in total as confused incompetent morons, and that won't make it easier for them to lead.
And leadership is key here. What people are told to do is as big a factor in spreading the virus or not as any particular measures. And that goes for the situation of landlords and tenants. As the article correctly points out, leadership is needed to protect landlords from themselves. The current situation gives the impression everyone is on their own. Even if some aid does arrive, congress makes a strong showing that no one should count on that aid and that doesn't cause people to behave well.
> On a single night in 2019, roughly 568,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States.
> Nearly two-thirds (63%) were staying in sheltered locations—emergency shelters or transitional housing programs—and more than one-third (37%) were in unsheltered locations such as on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation.
The 2019 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress - Part 1: Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness in the U.S. - https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/5948/2019-ahar-part-1-...
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Personally, having lived among the homeless in the U.S. (for a period of a few long years in my youth), half a million seem like a low estimate.
There are systemic, structural, and political/cultural reasons for the plight of the homeless, and much of their unnecessary suffering (their treatment by police, lack of healthcare, to count a couple aspects in addition to lack of affordable housing).
In this case, housing assistance would mitigate any individually targeted evictees.
The alternative is calling your landlord and speaking to him - almost as if he's a real human being. Tell him you'll have to move if he doesn't temporarily lower the rent.
First, in every municipality I've leased in, a landlord is only entitled to the rent from a broken lease up to the point where they find a new tenant.
Second, landlords can't typically collect rent after a date of eviction (same reasoning - you can't charge for a service you haven't rendered).
Third, rents are dropping across the US. It's not a given that they'll find another tenant immediately.
Fourth, the cost to recover rent is high, and usually not worth it.
do you have a citation for this? my experience in Boston in that landlords have stopped jacking up rents. that's about it. I haven't seen any come down yet.
This is part of why I blog and run r/GigWorks and r/ClothingStartups: I figured out how to make money from the street while very ill.
This is solvable. We just aren't working on the right things.
We need to get people working again in a way that doesn't spread the virus. We need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of existence.
We collectively know how to create affordable market rate housing in walkable neighborhoods. We just basically choose not to in the US.
And now it's A Real Crisis, not "just a few losers with personal problems". We need to get our head out the sand and stop pretending we are too stupid to fix this, good god. We aren't too stupid. That's not the issue.
A lot of those people not working are lower class. A lot of professional jobs just shifted to work from home.
We need that one third of Americans working. They need opportunity. They aren't getting it.
Yes, there are some jobs that we do need done and are safe to do, but the labor bubble probably isn't big enough to accommodate all of those currently suffering.
If I hadn't tried to establish an earned income, suicide would have been my only way out of my predicament. No one was going to rescue me.
With a third of people not working, we don't have the means to rescue everyone. The only way to fix this mess is to find ways to get people working again. There is no other real solution.
I get really tired of hearing pie in the sky talk of how people in lousy circumstances "shouldn't have to" do x, y or z. In practice, it winds up being a means to trap them there and give them no way out.
Other countries seem to manage it. Bigger income taxes and use the money to help those who are out of work
I know it may seem like your actions are being criticised, I really don't think that's the case, we're all grateful for the efforts that you're making. But as someone else pointed out, you're walking through the trenches distributing band-aids. At the same time we need to ask ourselves why there are so many people in the trenches in the first place, whilst others are living in mansions 200 miles behind the front lines.
Don't tax the job creators! Those billionaires earned every penny and didn't exploit anyone! We need to cut Amazon's taxes or they might not build another distribution center here that pays less than a living wage!
The current course America has now is to pretend things are normal during an ongoing disaster. It hasn’t been working. People working low wage jobs during this just because they’re struggling to pay rent are quite miserable—more so than before.
Employer provided healthcare is the dumbest idea ever, it should be outlawed. I don’t care what it’s replaced with just as long as it’s gone.
From 1862 to 1934, over 1.6 million homesteads were created through the Federal Government. For a filing fee of $18 (~$200--$500 in 2020), and five years sweat equity, a 21 year old male could claim 5-640 acres by building on and working it. Homesteading continued as a vastly reduced practice, though remaining an option, until 1976 in the lower 48 and Alaska until 1986. Open range provided for additional livilihood based on unowned acreage for ranchers, and mining stakes were prospected throughout the West. But by 1890, the notion that there was unsettled land for the taking had passed; the frontier was closed.
Not that this access was available to all; blacks, Native Americans (this was originally their land), Mexicans, Chinese, Catholics, and other non-Anglo groups were routinely denied rights to land.
Prior to 1860, unorganised squatting was common. A Free Soil movement, based in part of free or cheap land grants to white farmers also emerged.
Too at the time, wage labour was relatively uncommon -- many households were effectively their own businesses, most farmsteads, others practicing trades or professions. The rise of factories, railroads, steel mills, and coal mines gradually shifted this balance. But exposure to the money economy was often lower than now. Less upside perhaps, but also less systemic risk for most households.
Life expectencies were far lower than today: 49.3 years in 1901, 60.2 in 1934, 78.8 today. Pensions tended to be private, often failing, or support offered through multigenerational households (an idea whose time may be returning). Those living to old age often found themselves with no means of subsistence. Social Security had a solid basis in real lived pain.
There were frequent economic crises and panics.
You may have heard of the Joads. There's a truth behind that fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
The problem is systemic. We are getting really close to the economic events that have happened during the Weimar Republic. We are going to see a huge increase in radicalization and instability if the article is correct. It won't end in a world war but it could get very violent.
People will start squatting in vacant buildings together. Groups that live together will create their own "pet" system of governance that will appear to solve these problems and then there will be rivalrous behavior among them like gangs fighting each other.
The best thing you can do is keep them busy with a job.
If "world peace" was mentioned too, I would have thought this was a Miss World winner's acceptance speech. "We need to..." sure we do, but since these are worldwide problems, maybe it isn't so easy as dropping a few blog links in a thread?
The world has lifted a lot of people from poverty but then new problems come up as standards increase.
It also forced a certain amount of pragmatism; useless ideologues whose plans failed could get replaced rather than promoted, and at the middle ranks there was even the possibility of them getting themselves killed.
America in the present day is consumed with imaginary internal enemies, which is why it's deploying troops on the streets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
I think a lot of the buildings and trails at the National Parks used the WPA (or similar) labor. People 90 years later are still benefiting.
The scale of this issue is so incredibly large that it's kind of hard to understand unless you yourself have recently had to pack all your shit up and find a safe place to park for the night (assuming in this case you've got a car, which many do not).
I applaud your efforts to create more jobs, which WILL BE HELPFUL, but it's kind of akin to offering bandaids in the WW1 trenches. Useful! But not the solution.
In the meantime, I will continue to offer the spoonful of assistance I'm capable of offering while much of HN seems to pass the popcorn and watch the world burning like it's entertainment.
Well done for doing something, DoreenMichele.
As I said repeatedly in my post this is a good idea and I applaud her efforts. My point was (I'm sorry that this isn't clear) that the required changes need to be at a much larger scale than individuals creating jobs (unless it's organized at a... much larger scale).
While I am absolutely delighted to watch people do what they can, and encourage it wholeheartedly, I'm not all-in on the whole "job creators" idea as a panacea. Infact, if a person chooses to do ONLY the "job creation" thing and declines trying to address systemic issues, I'd also in some cases view them as eating popcorn while they watch the world burn with the added activity of patting themselves on the back.
If you were offended by my post, I apologize.
The concept of being homeless didn’t really hit me until after I was homeless. I was sleeping on the floor of someone I just met, and at one point the room got a bit too small for the two of us and he kicked me out. I remember thinking to myself “where am I going to put my stuff tonight?” I could find a place to sleep, but I couldn’t necessarily find a place to sleep & not lose my stuff. I had a laptop that was my lifeline to searching for work, and without that I would have been royally jacked.
Some of the associated problems are hard to deal with. Mentally you end up in a spin, spending all your mental energy on making money go far enough.
I had very unstable self-employed IT income. No ability to get a job because I'd dropped out of University (because of lack of money). As much as I was never at risk of sleeping rough, it was still a humbling experience.
I hadn't really made bad choices*. In hindsight there were many things that I could have done better, swallowing my pride and telling people being at least one. But hindsight is 20/20 and has the benefit of years of reflection.
The financial problems took years to resolve even when the income became more stable. It also became a puzzle. In order to get a house you have to have a bond, even finding a share house they want stable income (to be clear I wasn't making nothing it was just sporadic).
Not being aware of even where to ask for help is also problematic (There are websites now that help with this a little).
There are many reasons that people end up homeless, and to varying degrees. Society tends to lump them all together.
Drugs and mental illness may be issues that cause homelessness, but so are unstable finances and domestic violence.
Now, it will absolutely be COVID19 related, but that won't change the negative experience.
> I blog about a variety of topics, including things like homelessness and earning money from the street, something I have firsthand experience with.
From the Hacker News Guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Doing what, and how would you train them at scale?
> We need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of existence.
This is true, and is primarily the market’s fault. Developers focused on building higher margin luxury development and private equity started acquiring affordable private multi family en masse, renovating it and jacking up the prices.
> We collectively know how to create affordable market rate housing in walkable neighborhoods. We just basically choose not to in the US.
Again, this is a battle of competing interests. Those that control zoning and development aren’t as concerned about making cities walkable as those who actually live in them. Fewer and fewer people own the real estate they live in. You make it sound like laziness and that we “need to get our heads out of the sand.”
Unfortunately, the real estate market isn’t that simple, and the single largest influence in making waves in real estate is truckloads of money, plain and simple.
You can't do that for millions of people.
If you like your fiat money, you can keep your fiat money (and your Big Government). By the time this is over savers will be completely destroyed.
As a saver who owns his home outright, this statement cracks me up.
My outlook on this situation is that I can weather the storm for years with zero income and stay in food and shelter throughout without government aid.
The folks with little savings and high rent or expensive mortgages are who I'm concerned about. They seem far more likely to be "destroyed" in the coming months/years.
Us savers can either sit pretty and watch the chaos, buy the dip and profit handsomely from the recovery, or go shopping for cheap homes.
In this scenario savers get crushed as inflation whittles away the value of cash while asset prices climb. And the “folks with little savings and expensive mortgages” that you allude to actually come out on top.
What good is an expensive mortgage when you can't pay it, lose your home, and now have bad credit preventing you from capitalizing on all the new opportunities created by all the foreclosures and vacant rentals?
The savers have options. At any given moment a saver can decide to buy a pile of stock, or go get a mortgage. Why would we sit idly by while inflation gets so bad it no longer makes sense to hold cash? It doesn't happen overnight, there will be plenty of interesting opportunities in the mean time available to those with good credit and/or a pile of cash.
If you own a rental property outright, you'd be keen to keep good tenants -- people that took care of their homes, nominally paid their rents on time, all that. Covid or otherwise, you'd be smart to cut those folks some slack if they went through rough times.
On the other hand, if your rental property is mortgaged, you need that cashflow -- not only because it's your income, but also because you're shouldering the risk for the loan. If you go under, it's not like the bank is going to let those tenants just sort of live there after repossession.
There really isn't a universal rule that makes sense in all scenarios.
In fact, you should be encouraging shorter leases.
I got rid of my house in 2012 after getting married so my (step)sons could stay in their much better school district. I was hesitant to buy a house in 2016 because I had no idea what direction my career might take when my youngest graduated in 2020.
I might have even gone the r/cscareerquestions route and “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” and move to the west coast. But my rent was increasing like crazy and I wanted to lock in my housing costs by buying.
Thank God I found a remote opening at $BigTech. If not, I would be selling my house in the next couple of years and trying to move - under normal non pandemic circumstances.
As far as I know, the entire cloud consulting division of the three major cloud companies always had plenty of by default remote jobs. I know that AWS does (that’s where I work).
So it would help pretty much anyone who is not over leveraged (barring second effect like a pension relying on MBS) and in the market for real estate which is pretty good in my book. We shouldn’t set up our economy so that we allow people to overleverage in investments assets and then bail them out when they run into issues because of that.
I could not care less if overleveraged landlords crash and burn. It’s money in my pocket because my rent may go down (when I switch places) and it makes it easier for me to afford a place to live in.
One day the sheriff and bank came to “evict us” they were shocked to find the house was being rented out. Since we had lease, they couldn’t evict us. But still.
We ended up moving out a couple weeks later anyway. Bank paid us a good amount to leave. We were happy to get away from it all.
Out of the wood work my landlord comes threatening eviction if I don't pay rent, he lived on the other side of the country so I wasn't really concerned. Got 3 more months of rent free living in a brand new house...
I am a landlord (part owner in a family run business) - 9 residential houses/condos/duplexes and 4 commercial buildings. We suspended rents (meaning no payment expected at all) at the start of the state COVID shutdown for some of the 9 residential properties where there was need. Since some have started paying voluntarily based on their capability. For months the commercial properties could not be open we suspended rents as well.
We have good tenants who usually pay on time and aren't problems. There is no way we'd kick them out. Quality tenants are gold. I cannot overstate this. Some tenants have rented from us for over 20 years. We've seen them lose and get jobs before, and we can all weather this one out as well, I'm sure, with cooperation.
The US, unfortunately, has an ethos that failure to pay rent is almost always an individuals personal failure. This makes it culturally acceptable (generally) to evict someone who can't make rent because it is a moral failing of the renter (and not, say, the outcome of systemic failures beyond the renters control.) So while landlords probably benefit from getting a portion of their normal rent, they are under significant cultural pressure to evict people who can't pay.
Is there any political will in the US to do the same? Could something like this ever be considered in congress or would it be seen as too 'socialist' maybe?
Other countries are seeing COVID cases dropping, while the USA just keeps going up and up because lockdowns and proper masking and distancing procedures are being resisted.
By arguing against lockdowns, you're implying that an increased death toll is an acceptable cost to save the economy.
It's been successful in many parts of the world, including in the US. It won't be enough to solve this immediate crisis, but maybe it helps us land on our feet better and builds resilience for the next time.
We did it in Hong Kong. Over 30% of the population lives in virtually free housing rented from the government.
They don't have an incentive to work. They get to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world for free, without contributing.
Meanwhile, those who have a job slightly better than McDonald's are not eligible for this generous giveaway, and are punished by being forced to live in tiny private apartments that they are unlikely to ever afford to buy.
Is this what you consider justice? Punish the working class?
The idea that because one receives a benefit like housing or socialized medicine they'll just decide not to work is absurd. The people collecting these benefits aren't living like kings, there's plenty of incentive to seek a higher quality of life through work if one is able.
Having a roof over your head, having shelter is a human right. Granted, that does not have to be in an expensive city, but transporting people to a cheap, rural place is not great either. In a big city, at least there should be a large opportunity to find a job.
But overall, the issue you seems to be having with this is that a person's worth is tied to their (having a) job.
Even if there were a few 'leeches' here and there I'd gladly subsidize them for the benefit of a social safety net.
Personally, I also wouldn't consider those people leeches at all. Your assumption seems to be that everyone who works is automatically contributing to society - with all the bullshit jobs around, I find this questionable at the least.
Surprising enough, all this chatter about evictions and missed payments hasn't rocked the US housing market one bit. In fact, prices are up.
We do need to resume working. But we need to do it without relaxing pertinent restrictions.
Little Caesars has a pizza portal. We should have every eatery have something similar for contactless walk up take out.
We need more remote and work from home opportunities for people who aren't highly skilled white collar professionals.
We need more solutions that meet both standards: an earned income and germ control.
We can't get there if we don't even bother to try because we insist it has to be one or the other.
Personal responsibility is easy to say, but when you are born rich or advantaged you need minimal personal responsibility to get by and when born poor you can have all the personal responsibility you want and still get f*cked over. The problem is bigger than personal responsibility. Social security is very poor in the US compared to modern European countries.
Let’s not even consider a minimum wage worker, let’s talk about FC workers at Amazon (the nations second largest employer) making $15/hour.
It hasn’t effected the housing market because few people are selling.
Society has failed these people, and there are a lot of them. A lot of them are products of severe systemic racism. They don't deserve to die from their illnesses because they can't afford healthcare. They don't deserve a lifetime of poverty because they struggle to feed their family and can't afford an education.
That's easy when your income is significantly higher than your living expenses.
But with constantly rising rents, that's very difficult for people working low-wage jobs. Even when I was a store manager in fast food, after paying the rent, utilities, car insurance, and budgeting about $5-10/day for food, I was left with ~$200/month to either throw into savings or spend on pleasure, and when you work a shit job, you're more likely to want to spend that money on something fun.
But then the alternator dies in your car and it's a $600 repair because your apartment complex doesn't let you do car maintenance in their parking lots, and it wipes out 3 months of your disposable income.
It's estimated that about 2M people were homeless during the great depression in the US, which is only about 1.6% of the population at that time.
I don't enjoy sounding like an alarmist but at this point I can't help it: my opinion is that if the US does not introduce something pretty close to democratic socialist policies soon to ensure there's a safety net to take care of these people, massive civil unrest is all but guaranteed.
or the government can send anyone up to a certain income limit in need $1500 per household for 6 months. If they sent to all 128 million households it would be about $1.2 Trillion for 6 months. If I was a politician, this is what I'd do for votes /popularity since the purse is being opened anyway
I'm not saying this is a good situation, I'm saying that there is more to this process than just stamping some paperwork, with multiple opportunities to slow it down.
Hopefully lots of things will slow it down, but I doubt that's one of them. The only thing that will definitely slow it down is to have longer moratoriums.
I would imagine there is plenty of uncertainty at the moment due to Congress being completely dysfunctional. But let’s say they pass an unemployment extension and send out another round of stimulus checks. What’s the next survey going to look like?
One might be able to find a way to inquire about tenants' financial stability. Tough policies, without intent to follow-through seems a little like bullying/extortion.
Finding a way to work with tenants seems like an opportunity for a win-win. Deferring partial rent payments should see some uptake among those who will find work when the country finds a way to right the ship.
If you have good tenants whom you want to keep, keeping them may take work and discounts. I have colleagues who are working/schooling from home who have opted not to renew their expensive urban leases for the coming year. I suspect they would have renewed at a temporarily-discounted rate.
I do not have the time to vet the financial situation of every tenant, even if I could assume they provided honest data. Moreover, most are working from home and still able to pay full rent - so the danger is having word spread that I'm giving out discounts.
For me, the more efficient process is actually to pressure non-payers to leave and just accept lower rents on incoming tenants.
I'm not saying that's the best ethical way to handle it, but it is the most cost and time efficient method - given my limited resources.
Is it impossible for the owner to reach out to tenants? Ask them how they are doing and what their payment prospects are? If true stress is indicated (it will be obvious which are really in dire straights), work with those tenants on plans to help them land as softly as possible? Rather than just terrorize them into crawling away, more injured by their association with you than they had to be.
As written, the comment is completely unsupportable.
One of the tenants found out, and spread the word to all the other tenants - and encouraged all of them to stop paying rent. A little over half of them stopped paying an elderly man rent while he was in the hospital having chemo.
That meant that he couldn't pay the mortgage on the building and was forced to sell it.
That is what it's like being a landlord. You should try it and your opinion on "evil capitalists" will quickly change from your current twelve year old's perspective.
After all, in the larger context, this pandemic is pretty benign among disasters of that magnitude. History is riddled with cataclysms – decades-long droughts over whole continents? Been there, bought the studded leather shirt, got murdered by Mongols. The Black Death, Mount Tambora, a Carrington Event in modern times, Tunguska (but larger), ... This sort of thing has happened lots and lots of times and will happen again.
If anything, our recent past has been extraordinarily calm. If it turns out the US government can't keep, something like a tenth of the population? in secure housing during this, good luck with climate change, good luck with the next big one that maybe won't be so benign. This is deeply disconcerting.
But the over-reaction to it is on an ahistoric scale. It's quite cataclysmic. You've had people pulling their own teeth out with pliers because the dentists were all closed [1], you have people being locked in their homes for weeks or even months without being able to go outside [2], people being welded inside buildings [3], you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing [4], you have the elderly being abandoned in care homes to die [5] [6]
So whilst I agree diseases have happened before, the kind of global end-of-days mentality we're seeing here is extremely rare. It's not driven by the actual facts of the virus, there's something else at work.
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/people-are-pulling-their-own-t...
[2] https://www.abc.es/sociedad/abci-hombre-permanece-aislado-it...
[3] https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus-residents-welded-insi...
[4] https://mashable.com/article/yelp-restaurants-temporary-perm...
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/canada-care-ho...
All told, COVID looks to be about 10x deadlier than the flu. Which is still low, but not trivial given how quickly it spreads.
10x deadlier than the flu would require it to have an IFR of 1%. Even the US CDC, which has been over-exaggerating the dangers from the start, peg it at much less than that, more like 0.3% and many studies are putting it even lower, like between 0.08% (low end, Denmark) and 0.36% (Germany, Heisenberg).
But those IFRs are also calculated using the standard definition of a COVID death - someone who died, and was testing positive.
If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on, and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates.
All suggestions of undercounting are based on the assumption that all excess death is caused by COVID, and nothing else, even though in some countries e.g. the UK many excess death certificates don't even mention COVID, and in other countries like Germany there basically isn't any excess death:
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Socie...
So, maybe not 10x deadlier, but certainly way deadlier in total count of deaths.
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
People have tried to figure out why. It's supposedly the same virus everywhere. It's not related to hospital overload or healthcare availability because nowhere ran out of that, despite the initial scares.
It might be care home related, as that's where 80% of the deaths are (reported to be). It might be related to decisions to flush hospitals to make way for a modelled surge that never happened. But then that'd fall squarely into the response bucket.
The US data is hard to interpret because it only goes back to 2017. I can't seem to find longer term data. Do you know where to find it?
In the UK - one of the 'worst hit' in the world supposedly (but those stats were found to be wrong) - to find similar excess deaths you have to go back to 1998/1999/2000. Is this bad? Well, "once in 20 year excess death spike" may seem bad. But events that happen once every 20 years aren't especially rare. Back then nobody panicked. Nobody talks about the terrible winters of 1999 when they lost so many loved ones. So it's really important to be able to put these excess death stats in perspective, otherwise you just see a bump in a graph and are told "this is really bad".
If you look at Italy, the recent ISTAT-ISS report (2020-07-16) showed the opposite: COVID-19 has been deemed directly responsible for the death of 89% of those who died testing positive for coronavirus ("morti per"), with the remaining 11% of deaths being caused by some other disease or pre-existing condition ("morti con").
Even excluding comorbidities such as diabetes and hypertension, which are very common, 18% to 28% of the deaths they analyzed were still directly caused by COVID. I'm not sure this can be brought down to 12% without being exceedingly selective (e.g., people aged 0-30 without hypertension, diabetes, respiratory problems... - I know I'm 27 and I wouldn't qualify).
> - Sono state analizzate le informazioni riportate dai medici in 4.942 schede di morte, di soggetti diagnosticati microbiologicamente con test positivo al SARS-CoV-2 (il 15,6% del totale dei decessi notificati al Sistema di Sorveglianza Integrata ISS fino al 25 maggio). Nelle schede di morte sono certificate, oltre a COVID-19, quelle condizioni e malattie che hanno avuto un ruolo nel determinare il decesso.
> - COVID-19 è la causa direttamente responsabile della morte nell’89% dei decessi di persone positive al test SARS-CoV-2, mentre per il restante 11% le cause di decesso sono le malattie cardiovascolari (4,6%), i tumori (2,4%), le malattie del sistema respiratorio (1%), il diabete (0,6%), le demenze e le malattie dell’apparato digerente (rispettivamente 0,6% e 0,5%).
> - La quota di deceduti in cui COVID-19 è la causa direttamente responsabile della morte varia in base all’età, raggiungendo il valore massimo del 92% nella classe 60-69 anni e il minimo (82%) nelle persone di età inferiore ai 50 anni.
> - COVID-19 è una malattia che può rivelarsi fatale anche in assenza di concause. Non ci sono infatti concause di morte preesistenti a COVID-19 nel 28,2% dei decessi analizzati, percentuale simile nei due sessi e nelle diverse classi di età. Solo nella classe di età 0-49 anni la percentuale di decessi senza concause è più bassa, pari al 18%.
Televideo source: http://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/view.jsp?id=888&p=...
ANSA source: https://www.ansa.it/canale_saluteebenessere/notizie/sanita/2...
The ISS-ISTAT report itself: https://www.istat.it/it/files/2020/07/Report_ISS_Istat_Cause...
What do you think that might be?
https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-...
I only just learned about it but if this poll is accurate, it explains a lot.
Overload in an entire region would be, but as far as I know that has never happened anywhere.
However, you can be forgiven for thinking that. Bad news sells newspapers, which seems to have led to a lot of very deceptive reporting. For example, headlines that literally say:
"All the hospitals are full: in Houston overwhelmed hospitals leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER"
but at the time of publishing there were 2500 free beds in the Texas Medical Center system in Houston. So it wasn't possible that all the hospitals were full.
I agree with you here - it's not like it kills a third of people who get infected. Also, the virus is not very contagious - all it really takes is wearing masks and distancing for the spread to diminish.
But most everyone has rationally judged that a 1% chance of death is too high, never mind the larger chance of life long complications. So anyone who can reduce their own exposure finds it prudent to do so.
Meanwhile, and this ties into "something else at work", we've got corrupt leaders and corrupt mass media that have done little to address the public health crisis, and everything possible to inflame and politicize the issue.
And so our society is still stuck at essentially the same position we began at in March. Either we're going to have to buckle down and actually work together to control this thing, or we're going to be stuck with this virus (and therefore a broken economy) until a vaccine is created.
https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...
Across 32 different locations, the median infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.24%). Most studies were done in pandemic epicenters with high death tolls.
But recall that these IFRs are calculated with a very questionable definition of COVID death (see my other comment). Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age.
This is how you can have countries that have hundreds of thousands of cases yet totally flat excess death charts.
I suspect these kind of inflated figures are partly what's driving people's over-reactions (look at how my post was voted).
And there's some evidence for this. Today there was a poll released with truly shocking results.
page 12 here: https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-...
In polls Brits are estimating that 7% of the population has died of COVID. In other words they think it's 100x more deadly than current government stats claim, and those stats are themselves currently suspended due to rampant over-counting.
But Americans are even further out. They believe the death rate is 225x higher than it really is. They also believe the virus is 20x more prevalent than in reality.
Top marks go to Germans who believe 300x more people have died of COVID than is really true.
Ultimately you're getting downvoted because you're pushing politically-filtered numbers with copious hand waving. That whitepaper seems tailor made for business owners pushing their employees back into the office. These downplaying narratives are responsible for our current approach of doing nothing but watching the economy crumble, and it's not surprising that most people have grown tired of them.
Most developed countries have gotten this under control. The US has chosen not to. Until the virus is contained, the economy we knew is dead in the water. This is only hard to understand if you deny that there is any problem whatsoever, as most of our "leadership" has been doing from day one.
If the risk is the same or lower than flu, which these studies say it is, then we should act as we do in flu years, which is every year, i.e. we shouldn't be changing anything.
you're pushing politically-filtered numbers with copious hand waving
No, I'm providing hard data in the face of people who have been misled into thinking the virus is more dangerous than it really is. That isn't "copious hand waving". Perhaps though, you wish it was? The virus became long ago a deeply ideological matter for the left, some of whom seem to almost hope it's very deadly. But my points here aren't ideological, they're factual.
Most developed countries have gotten this under control. The US has chosen not to.
I'm not American but this strange "we Americans uniquely suck" narrative just seems silly.
In the past few days the UK decided everyone returning from Spain must go into 14 day quarantine where they aren't allowed out of their house for any reason, not even to buy food, and this must be done even if they are healthy. It was done without any warning and there will be no wage compensation for those who can't work because they're quarantined. Then almost immediately after they decided that actually 14 days wasn't necessary after all (science!!), and dropped it to "only" 10 days.
The justification for this was a supposed "surge" in Spanish cases. Absolute numbers are of course still tiny, but a quick check of the data shows that the surge started at exactly the same time that test volumes started ramping up, and the proportion of tests coming back positive has hardly changed.
There are similar stories of self-inflicted wounds from nearly every country except, it seems, Sweden and bizarrely, Belarus.
And that was my original point. COVID-19 is an entirely artificial disaster, made by the absurd and illogical reactions of people. It's not a natural biological disaster. The bad effects are all coming from the decisions people are making.
Your "hard data" has been drawn from the pool of all studies using a political filter, meaning it has sampling bias and is no longer hard data. I am guessing that is the lowest IFR number you can find, therefore its reasonable to assume that the true one is decently higher.
Here is an example of your hand waving:
> Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age.
If one is not thinking critically, this can sound reasonable. But rather this is a huge back door because nobody dies "of COVID" - it's always going to be some other medical condition caused by COVID. In the short time frame involved, there aren't going to be too many people who test positive for COVID then die of unrelated causes. On the longer term, we can simply look at excess deaths.
> I'm not American but this strange "we Americans uniquely suck" narrative just seems silly.
For one, the fact that Americans haven't been able to do basic things like wear N95 masks starting in February. For two, the death toll. The differences between countries are easily explained with culture. Japan had no formal shutdown but yet stayed in control because Japanese citizens did the right thing anyway. Many Americans seem hell bent on doing the exact opposite, in some simulation of rebelling.
In general, it seems like you're skating as close as possible to calling the topic a hoax, without directly doing so.
I don't think I understand your second paragraph. Of course some people die of COVID, or just isn't equal to the number reported for COVID deaths, which is "died with" and not "died of". That's not hand waving, it's well understood fact.
In the short term there are definitely lots of people who test positive then die of something else, as virtually all covid deaths are of the old where it's often very hard to say what exactly they died of, and there can be many causes. Excess deaths are certainly not all COVID and there was an article today in the British press urging governments to focus on the new problem of large amounts of excess deaths in the home that aren't linked to covid in any way, but rather seem to be people who are struggling to get medical treatment for other things.
N95 masks couldn't possibly have been used by all Americans in February for the same reason they can't be used now, the manufacturing capacity isn't there. That's why around the world people are using cloth masks which aren't proven to stop much of anything.
As for Japanese people doing the right thing anyway, well, I don't want to get into national stereotyping.
Unfortunately that is what happens when science gets dragged into politics. One team finds a list of studies showing things one way, the other team makes a list of refutations, and they're passed around as talking points. I'd rather just say I don't know without in-depth literature research, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and not attempt to draw strong emotionally-appealing conclusions such as "same or lower than flu".
> I don't think I understand your second paragraph. Of course some people die of COVID
Nobody dies of COVID, just like nobody dies of cancer. There is always some immediate acute condition that causes the death. And so saying that someone who tested positive then died of unrelated old person stuff is just another way of massaging numbers. While this scenario can happen, I don't think it's prevalent.
> N95 masks couldn't possibly have been used by all Americans in February for the same reason they can't be used now
I deliberately set the bar high, because if we had aimed there, we would have the manufacturing capacity by now. Saying we're unprepared now because we didn't do the work before isn't very interesting. Rather, take it as a call to start doing the work now so we're prepared in the future.
> That's why around the world people are using cloth masks which aren't proven to stop much of anything.
Ah, more offhanded FUD to justify inaction. We get it, you don't want to have to do anything. As I said, "skating as close as possible to calling the topic a hoax".
I think some people do die of COVID, same as they can die of flu. It's just very rare and not equal to the reported death rate.
Re: science and politics. I've linked you to a couple of meta-reviews, done by people who searched the literature. You appear to be working backwards from a desired conclusion: that is, you deem "same or lower than flu" as emotionally appealing and therefore inherently likely to be wrong. But how is that logical? The correctness of an argument isn't based on whether the outcomes are emotionally satisfying or not.
At any rate, I do hope you go and perform your own literature review or research, to find out what's really happening. Because right now you seem to be one of the people covered by the poll, who were significantly over-estimating the true dangers.
Re: N95 masks. You're still making incorrect claims. N95 masks are built from a form of meltblown fiber. The machines that can create this kind of material are very niche and hard to construct. Each one has a fixed production capacity and the sort of manufacturers that make them work on them one at a time, with most stuff done by hand. Demand isn't high enough for them to be mass produced. That places hard limits on how fast material manufacture can be scaled up. People did look at this in February and realised there was no physical way to scale up N95 mask production on any kind of short timescale. The machinery just isn't there.
Rather, take it as a call to start doing the work now so we're prepared in the future.
There is a sad story related to this. The US only really has one mask company. He didn't ramp up production even during the midst of COVID times because in the past he's learned the hard way that governments panic over mild diseases, order lots of masks, so they scale up and hire new workers - then by the time the mask production is scaled up the panic is over and governments stop buying, leaving them nearly bankrupt. So he just didn't do it again.
Fundamentally, governments are too incompetent and panic prone to manage disease. It's been proven over and over. They even burn people who can make medical equipment, such that they don't want to help again.
At any rate, N95 masks are inappropriate for the general population. You can get things like this:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/driver-crash-passed-wearing-n95-ma...
Ah, more offhanded FUD to justify inaction
It's not FUD. Cloth masks can't stop viruses, they're far too small. They only stop liquid droplets, but they also saturate within hours and need to be thrown away. Most people aren't doing that, it's been studied. Again, go do your own research.
I can only hope you come to your senses, regardless of whether the biological risk is exaggerated or not.
I'm distinguishing in a way I think you aren't - to me, exactly because this stuff is so hard, and so many things have bad side effects, it shouldn't be done by governments. That doesn't mean nothing should be done by anyone. When things are done by non-governmental actors, the rest of us have the option of ignoring them if we think they're wrong (usually). When a government does something wrong, everyone is stuffed. And exactly because there's no feedback loop for the vast majority of government employees, except politicians, and even then only weakly, they tend to do things wrong a lot.
One day I think you'll come to understand this perspective. But first you need to realise that doing nothing is not only an option but often, the best option. The assumption that "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done" is a political cliché for a reason.
You misunderstood the data. Half of all restaurants that temporarily closed went on to permanently close. >98% of restaurants stayed open, less than 1% permanently closed.
As a German, it is really hard to feel sorry for you guys over there..
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/trump-approves-plan-to-withd...
As a German i also can say: been there, done that :)
How is it hard to feel sorry for us? We didn't _all_ bring this on ourselves. Certainly not the majority of us.
But we all know how that played out..
//-------------------
Long version for HN moderators:
In the current climate, I believe, the outcome suggested in the title of the article, could be largely avoided, if suitable monetary policies are timely introduced, via responsible bipartisan legislation.
That's because it's not. "could be evicted over the next four months" is the phrasing in the article, and its wildly unlikely.
Look at the posts at /r/realestate. They show the Redfin/Zillow statistics and people selling their houses for more than last year in every major metro area I've been interested in. There's also a lot of concern that lack of construction during covid will lead to a shortage.
If there's going to be 11M households evicted, why are real estate prices doing better than ever? Because all of America is clueless except this one brilliant Fast Company journalist?
1) Home buyers are more likely to be younger people and older people are more likely to be home sellers. Younger people (buyers) are more likely to be active now and willing to move.
2) People are rethinking the small studio apartment they were quarantined in and are looking for better or larger places to WFH in.
3) Money is usually a chief concern for sellers but with the mortgage forbearance and deferral options why would anyone bother to sell their appreciating asset that they can keep and live almost for free in?
4) Interest rates dropped to near 0% and will remain there for about 2 years. That substantially boosted home prices.
5) Some people living in apartments felt that it was hard to social distance there so they bought a house with land and separation.
6) Substantially more free time to browse houses for some people now!
7) The inflation rate is increasing. Fed target is to overshoot 2% to get to 3% or more annual inflation.
8) Old people aren’t interested in moving out to nursing homes and end-of-life care facilities now where cases are perceived to be more concentrated and undesirable.
9) The Census is happening this year and the government would prefer if people move around less to keep their numbers accurate.
10) Homes containing unevictable tenants can’t be freed up for the housing market to consume. Even all the bad tenants that mistreat and mishandle their landlord’s rental homes get to keep mishandling their home while you have to keep looking for an unoccupied affordable home.
There is a massive shortage of homes in certain parts of this country so existing homes keep getting bid up and up. Even if some of these reasons disappear, the others will still remain.
On the first home I offered 5k over asking price when there were 10 other offers and was bid out by 1 other guy. The second home I offered 10k over asking price and narrowly beat out the 10 other offers. With that many offers, the housing supply could double in my area and housing prices would still keep going up. It’s a very hot market and I don’t see it shifting anytime soon. Not at least until we see the Momths of Inventory metric (which is a leading indicator for home price direction) increase to over 6 months and that might not happen until next year or beyond.
They also didn't do shit to fight the virus itself and instead actively sought to spread it as much as possible.
Uh, what? The US is $26 trillion in debt.
We also are bailing people out anyway- the extra federal unemployment made unemployment benefits worth more than workers' average pay.
> Two months the Senate has been sitting on the next corona bill
Because the first bill doesn't expire until the end of this month.
> They also didn't do shit to fight the virus itself and instead actively sought to spread it as much as possible.
It's the people that chose to not wear masks. It's the people that chose to go to events and go on vacation.
We had no problem bailing out a ton of businesses that didn't need it, so clearly there is no shortage of money. Also, making more money from unemployment during a pandemic is a feature, not a bug. People need to stay at home. That's the whole, entire goal.
> Because the first bill doesn't expire until the end of this month.
The checks have stopped. Unless you think they can get the bill passed and checks sent and delivered by this Friday, then there will be a gap that most people can't cover. So the Senate has indeed decided not to care as they are quite aware this is the case and have had two months to deal with it, yet refused to. So it's irrelevant when "the bill" expires when people aren't getting anymore money already and there's no plan for them to get any in the near future.
> It's the people that chose to not wear masks. It's the people that chose to go to events and go on vacation.
I agree. But the government has the biggest responsibility. And they haven't done anything but sabotage the process.
How can this be happening in a developed country?
So I suppose that it is very unevenly distributed so that most people are blissfully unaware that it is happening.
May I ask which city?
https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNzRhYjg2NzAtMGE1MC00N...