It's good for basically everyone, except banks, when the lenders ultimately write down these losses. It frees the market from mental hurdles that discourage leasing activity and will lower rents more quickly. Lower commercial rents are a benefit to the other 99.95% of economic activity.
The only thing I find really inexplicable is those few submarkets where vacancies are high and rising, net absorption is negative, and they are still expanding the inventory by 2% or more annually. That's truly baffling but maybe those investors have reason for optimism.
Commercial and residential buildings have different building codes. It would take years/decades to get approval and actually retrofit buildings. Cities like San Francisco chose to suppress residential housing and focused on commercial buildings because it was cheaper and required less infrastructure and made the city more money through payroll taxes. I'm glad they are being punished for their poor long term planning. Hopefully other cities learn from their mistakes and start to allow mixed use zoning, etc.
There is a reason your hand hurts with pain after you touch a hot object. This teaches you not to do it again. This is just part of the grand experiment of the US--sometimes cities fail so other cities can learn/avoid the same mistakes.
Manhattan's real estate laws are pretty different from the rest of the country. They already allow more mixed use real estate than anywhere else in the country. I think it's a bigger hurdle for a place like California and especially San Francisco to overcome (even more so quickly).
Zoning is one issue but the big problem is converting commercial buildings to residential is often just as expensive as building new residential from scratch.
I don’t understand the push to convert to residential. Absent proximity to jobs, who’s clamoring to live downtown in just about any city?
Maybe downtown SF is still “cool” (for whatever value and age group you want to assign that to) and I just don’t know the Bay Area as well as my own city.
> About 23% of office space in the United States was vacant or available for sublet at the end of November, according to Avison Young, a real estate services firm, compared with 16% before the pandemic
Can you expand on this please? I know next to nothing about how this market operates, so it's very unclear if a 7% difference in supply nothing or absolutely disturbing.
Landlord walks away, bank eats the loss, FDIC steps in if the bank mismanaged the risk and fails. Is FDIC going to fail? Obviously not, the government and central bank will not fail.
If the insolvency already exists, are you advocating to pretend it doesn’t? There are too many banks in the US anyway. If community or regional banks fail, replace them with postal banking or FedAccounts if you’re concerned about lack of deposit account options.
This is Accelerationism and I don't think it will actually lead to a better outcome--almost certainly will just lead to fewer/larger banks and not postal banking. I cannot see a slight chance of postal banking ever happening in the US when we can't even agree on other more fundamental things. Just look at who spends the most on lobbying. Congress isn't going to bite the hand that feeds them. So good luck.
It's a 50% rise in vacancy rate, which is literally not nothing.
It has impacted the market for office building construction. Offices are starting to feel like malls: they exist and serve a function, but aren't strictly necessary.
Speaking of malls, I went shopping at a couple malls and they have seemingly picked up on traffic. I wonder if they were there the same reason I was? (I needed to get out of the house)
This sounds like its more about interest rates than it is people working from home, not that that'll stop anyone from trying to bring you back into the office anyway.
I distinctly remember stories on NPR during the crisis that browbeat homeowners who did this or thinking about doing this, claiming it was “unethical”. It’s the same story with companies that ask for loyalty then lay off with pleas towards efficiency. It’s always business, whenever someone plays towards my emotions in financial deals I want to shake them.
> 17% of all homeowners in the 2008 mortgage crisis walked away strategically
That is a quite misleading restatement of the facts. 2 of 144 million homes in the US were foreclosed in 2008, and 17% of those were deemed "strategic". That's 0.2% of homes.
> I distinctly remember stories on NPR during the crisis that browbeat homeowners who did this or thinking about doing this, claiming it was “unethical”.
Whatever one thinks of the rest of the book, everyone should internalize the part of Graeber’s Debt in which he explains that connecting moral duty to personal debt under impersonal capitalism (if not, perhaps, to debt owed someone you know) is grade-A bullshit.
It’s just business. Make the move that is best for you, period. Sometimes that’s default! It’s probably nice for lenders if people believe there’s some moral duty attached, but that moral duty is only ever gonna go one way, so don’t fall for it. They’re not doing you a favor. It’s business. They make profit because there’s risk.
> It’s probably nice for lenders if people believe there’s some moral duty attached
And this leads to immoral decisions on the part of lenders/creditors/debt collectors, the most obnoxious of this is hospitals etc., leaning on (if not extremely heavily implying legal responsibility to) families of people who have passed away to assume responsibility for their medical debt, because their loved one wouldn't have wanted to shirk it, or some such bullshit.
Totally. I’ve known credit card companies to pull the same shit—deceased was the only one on the account, call and try to get relatives to assume the debt, implying that they have to, and trying to shame them into it if that doesn’t work. I bet it works often.
Companies are trying. For many, return to office is impossible as it’s prevented by costs of living too high near offices, a spouse whose job requires a certain location, and children enrolled in school in a different location than office.
But why? Companies have never been more profitable and we've been working remotely for 3+ years now. What is the point in return to office if it isn't necessary, means less working hours available for employees (I can't work during my commute), and it costs companies more for real estate? I just don't see the point unless you're someone like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and you have large real estate holdings you're worried about taking a loss on? But even then that seems small in the grand scheme of things, so I really don't get it.
Not 100% sure, but we know that the management of companies were never concerned with the efficiency of their workers. If they were we wouldn't have open plan offices for software developers, fluorescent lights, pointless meetings, etc.
It's possible to coast by looking for superficial signs your team is busy when everyone is in the office.
In fact, that same effect goes all the way up: You'll find higher management sometimes look for idiotic signs in their reports, such as whether they see them walking the floor. So then of course a lot of managers will be walking the floors and using looking for signs people are busy as a management technique. One of the few times I've ever gotten dinged in performance reviews was in one of my early roles managing a team when I was told I wasn't being seen being visible enough. There were no issues with productivity or deliverables, or staff retention or anything else - I wasn't seen engaging in the rituals that were expected. So after that I made an effort to walk around the office now and again, and all was well and nothing gained, except my reviews improved.
Once teams of managers who bought into this approach are suddenly remote these people are forced to learn how to actually manage for outcomes, and that is a big step change in difficulty and effort.
In other words, expect the most resistance in organizations where managers have not been used to managing remote staff members and so have never been forced to learn or get used to the skills.
I find it arguably easier now to see what people are actually contributing in a remote environment. In the office, people can just 'look busy' and take meetings and then go to lunch/gym and just disappear for hours. In a remote environment, you have more metrics like how many tickets resolved/responded to, hours worked, meetings taken, what deliverables were completed.
It is definetly being forced. We MUST return! Apes working together in the same location? STRONG!
I think it's one of the dumbest things ever to happen in corporate America and once this whole thing blows over everyone will say: of course it didn't work. But because shareholders something somethimg it was their duty to attempt it.
Well, because that change is impossible to reverse. No matter how hard they try to bring back work in the office, remote companies have a significant cost & recruitment advantage against their competititors which won't go away.
The economic incentives will push toward remote being the norm for most office jobs, whether they like it or not.
> When this happens, the landlord stops paying the mortgage on the office building or declines to refinance it. The bank or investors who made the loan then repossess the building. ...
> Some of the biggest names in commercial real estate, like Brookfield and Blackstone, have defaulted...
Does doing this have any impact on their creditworthiness? Or are they too big to, well, not lend to?
Epistemic status: just some guy, override this if you get specialist info.
Lenders are going to take this into account. I imagine that commercial real estate lenders are realists though, and expect their debtors to exercise their right to walk away from deals that go south. So lenders may consider it primarily a reflection of the state of commercial real estate, and secondarily a reflection of those companies' ability to operate in a bad market, and a fairly minor update on how the debtor will behave in future deals (because they already expect this behavior).
Home mortgage borrowers defaulting is more unusual and may say more about the person, given that a high proportion of the population will hold onto their home even if the value of the home drops and the mortgage gets underwater. This expectation gets priced into the terms of the home loan. So an individual who's shown that they're willing to exercise the default option if the market turns has a different risk profile.
You can always just spin up a new entity if that's a problem, provided you have enough collateral to secure a loan. Credit rating really only is a people thing.
"But there is a difference: Big property companies can keep doing business after they default and are even considered savvy for jettisoning distressed buildings. But homeowners who stopped paying their mortgages suffered a huge hit to their credit ratings and had to find somewhere else to live."
If you own 100 houses and you lose one you still have 99 houses. If you sold it at a loss because it was costing you too much to keep then you made a smart decision.
It's worse than than that. Mere homeowners were publicly chided as being "immoral" for not paying their underwater mortgage.
The owners of capital look out for themselves. Seriously, there is more class consciousness among the obscenely wealthy, than there is among the plebes.
And it's always been this way. Just look at how the legal system is handling the current politicians who have court cases. Me and you, we'd be in jail.
Financial bail outs are one thing, but corporate lawbreaking is treated different by the courts, however, I think things are starting to change. Elon is going to cause a shift change and corporate America is a little worried.
A bit of this is like things being described in unlike manner, a bit is fundamentally different situations (needs and relative scale.) A person needs at least one home, and rarely has more than one. If they shed one because they can't afford the mortgage—whether or not that is a good financial decision—they still need a new one.
A commercial landlord that sheds their Nth property still has N-1, and can continue working as a commercial landlord without a problem.
Also, a homeowner that does a deed in lieu, short sale, been foreclosed on, etc., on a home loan has probably had forgiven or defaulted on a lot greater share of either their income/revenue or total debt than a commercial landlord that sheds the Nth property for similar reasons.
But generally, not dragging out an unmanageable loan and cutting the bleeding via short sale or deed in lieu where practical is considered prudent for individual borrowers with home loans.
Does it hurt your credit? Sure. But that's a temporary thing, and wirth shedding the drag on your finances for in many cases.
Suppose there was death penalty for this type of behaviour. If you default of $100M of debt you are executed, no limited liability shroud, no bankruptcy, no backsies, no do-overs -- just cold steel. Your head in a bucket, and your family destitute in the streets.
This type of behaviour would cease to exist almost immediately.
This is an interesting story. With simple supply and demand, we have massive oversupply for office real estate and significantly reduced demand - prices should drop, right?
Except we have the bag holders, the landlords who retained leases and the banks who own the mortgages, they are going to fight tooth and nail to maintain the value of their assets, and they have deep pockets.
I've seen one story where the writer made the argument that this is why we've been seeing "you must return to the office" stories - big business must have line go up, line must never go down.
We'll see what happens but I sure hope there are no government bail-outs for this sector. Investment involves the risk of the asset depreciating.
> Investment involves the risk of the asset depreciating.
The problem is that investors who have been working in the business since 2010 have no idea what a real economic recession looks like bc the fed keeps on swooping in to save the day. Asa result, a lot of investors levered up their books.
The investment business is not a free market bc the downside risk is no longer present.
Think the fact that the leases are coming due over the next few years rather than all at once will prevent a bailout? Might just be a slow decline like old factories in Chicago that sat vacant for a while and then got snapped up for commercial space since they were so cheap.
That sounds like the sort of soft landing that I think everyone is hoping for. Stuff I've been reading has described landlords leaving buildings empty rather than lower prices and rent to smaller tenants, that sort of artificial propping up seems like it could precipitate a crash.
Let's keep in mind there are entire store fronts and even entire buildings vacant for +10 years (!!) in NYC where the rent or asking price not only didn't went down but up. (!!!)
AFAIK the bet was to buy these assets almost totally leveraged and then wait for the ocasional fool or rich sheik or hot hip company to buy/rent them.
If nobody buys them in years that's not the end of the World because the bank/investment fund is the one on the hook ( at least most of it ) and the city obviously doesn't want the prices to go down because that 100 Billion dollar budget needs these taxes.
Everybody knows it will blow some day, in the mean time everybody fights to keep alive until the hopeful payday comes... and the prices keep ridiculously high and "half" of comercial real estate is vacant. Is this post-modern "capitalism"?
Just some food for thought. I was paying attention to this more closely earlier in the year.
Here's the stock ticker for HPP. HPP is the predominate commercial REIT for the SF Bay Area: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NYSE-HPP/ They're down ~75% from ATH in 2020, but up 75% since ATL six months ago.
Also, keep in mind that commercial loans get divided into short-term/long-term groupings. A long duration for a short-term loan is 3 years and a short duration for a long-term loan is 5 years. So, there's this sweet spot between 3-5 years after economically-disruptive events where underwater loans created at the peak of the market start to get called. We're a couple of months away from the three-year anniversary of shutdown.
IMHO, the next two years will be very rocky for SF as devaluations become real and start to significantly undermine city taxes, but the last six months have implied that fear was overstated and/or early in late 2022.
I’ve been walking the streets of San Francisco since day one of lockdown watching the unmitigated unidirectional closure of almost everything. And while the slow 4 year plus timeline has normalized most people to what’s happening, my long arc observation is that things are only going to get worse. The ball is about to drop now with the major revaluations lining up as high interest forces more walkways.
The impact on city revenue will be significant right when problem think SF is pulling out of things. And the city knows it. They’ve projected it clearly but no one will listen.
I'd bet a lot more people would be willing to go into offices if they... had offices. Surely not everyone as there are other reasons not to want to go in to an office.
But a private room with a door and not having to hear/see/sit next to colleagues within arms reach would be a huge benefit. Open floor plans were just a race to the bottom ... well the bottom got hit now offices are empty. You can't just force folks to come in and accept the awful conditions because people will just say no now.
These huge landlords can leave units empty for years rather than drop prices. They need to be cut off from their near endless lines of credit that keeps distorting the commercial real estate market.
Only then will prices correct. It’s killing small businesses in the US. A modest retail business or restaurant can’t afford the $20,000 a month they want for a tiny unit.
Their control of the market is having harmful downstream effects on society.
Yes, they've used the monthly rent price as leverage in other financial decisions, so if it was to fall as supply/demand suggests it should, they're left over-exposed. So better to eat the 1x loss than lose the 5x multiple.
We’ve had a slew of “we need to end remote work to support downtown businesses” pieces in the local news, but almost every time there is an article about a business closing there will be a paragraph tucked in at the bottom that their landlord had refused to negotiate on a massive rent increase.
I think the answer has to be a punitive vacancy tax: like if a commercial restaurant space is idle for 3 months, the tax rate for every property with the same commercial owner goes up every month. These properties being idle has ripple effects throughout a neighborhood which shouldn’t take years to recover.
I think a vacancy tax would be useful for the residential market as well--at least in New York, there are many luxury apartments sitting empty, because they are bought as investments and/or money-laundering efforts; the owner may never intend to live in them.
This has a negative impact on a city, both in driving up prices for the actual residents, and in distorting the texture of a neighborhood.
If you want to have multiple homes that sit unoccupied for most of the year, you should definitely pay a punitive vacancy tax.
Are there such laws on the books anywhere? It seems like it would be hard to thread the needle to avoid people skirting the law. Can you host a pop up bar for one night to qualify for occupancy for six months? Rent to your brother? Airbnb listing that does poorly?
Vancouver has vacancy tax laws, they don't seem to do much in practice. I think vacant units are highly visible, but are actually a small part of the market in practice.
Presumably the government already knows where you live for what percentage of the year through your tax returns?
A vacancy tax should also apply to landlords to encourage them to rent out units at actual market rate (rather than pretend market rate is something different for tax purposes).
As with many things, there are but the quality of implementation and enforcement varies wildly. We have some laws here but under a mayor who gets a lot of donations from the commercial real estate industry enforcement is … unmotivated.
i think one of the problem is the value of commercial properties is directly linked to their rent. hence why so many would rather keep their property empty than negotiate down the rent as it would instantly devalue their property. they'd rather stay in their inflated bubble.
> But there is a difference: Big property companies can keep doing business after they default and are even considered savvy for jettisoning distressed buildings. But homeowners who stopped paying their mortgages suffered a huge hit to their credit ratings
If the terms of a contract say I can hand over the property to the bank and walk away liability free, then I shouldn't take any kind of reputational hit (credit rating) for doing so.
It's kinda sad that lawmakers and courts haven't done anything to rectify that.
87 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadThe only thing I find really inexplicable is those few submarkets where vacancies are high and rising, net absorption is negative, and they are still expanding the inventory by 2% or more annually. That's truly baffling but maybe those investors have reason for optimism.
This is a cold take. You shouldn't celebrate people getting hurt.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/nyc-s-big...
Maybe downtown SF is still “cool” (for whatever value and age group you want to assign that to) and I just don’t know the Bay Area as well as my own city.
Wow it’s literally nothing
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176513695/does-the-u-s-have-...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/357...
I wouldn't say that. Why are there bank runs on failing banks that are FDIC insured? Do people not trust it?
It has impacted the market for office building construction. Offices are starting to feel like malls: they exist and serve a function, but aren't strictly necessary.
I distinctly remember stories on NPR during the crisis that browbeat homeowners who did this or thinking about doing this, claiming it was “unethical”. It’s the same story with companies that ask for loyalty then lay off with pleas towards efficiency. It’s always business, whenever someone plays towards my emotions in financial deals I want to shake them.
That is a quite misleading restatement of the facts. 2 of 144 million homes in the US were foreclosed in 2008, and 17% of those were deemed "strategic". That's 0.2% of homes.
Whatever one thinks of the rest of the book, everyone should internalize the part of Graeber’s Debt in which he explains that connecting moral duty to personal debt under impersonal capitalism (if not, perhaps, to debt owed someone you know) is grade-A bullshit.
It’s just business. Make the move that is best for you, period. Sometimes that’s default! It’s probably nice for lenders if people believe there’s some moral duty attached, but that moral duty is only ever gonna go one way, so don’t fall for it. They’re not doing you a favor. It’s business. They make profit because there’s risk.
And this leads to immoral decisions on the part of lenders/creditors/debt collectors, the most obnoxious of this is hospitals etc., leaning on (if not extremely heavily implying legal responsibility to) families of people who have passed away to assume responsibility for their medical debt, because their loved one wouldn't have wanted to shirk it, or some such bullshit.
It's possible to coast by looking for superficial signs your team is busy when everyone is in the office.
In fact, that same effect goes all the way up: You'll find higher management sometimes look for idiotic signs in their reports, such as whether they see them walking the floor. So then of course a lot of managers will be walking the floors and using looking for signs people are busy as a management technique. One of the few times I've ever gotten dinged in performance reviews was in one of my early roles managing a team when I was told I wasn't being seen being visible enough. There were no issues with productivity or deliverables, or staff retention or anything else - I wasn't seen engaging in the rituals that were expected. So after that I made an effort to walk around the office now and again, and all was well and nothing gained, except my reviews improved.
Once teams of managers who bought into this approach are suddenly remote these people are forced to learn how to actually manage for outcomes, and that is a big step change in difficulty and effort.
In other words, expect the most resistance in organizations where managers have not been used to managing remote staff members and so have never been forced to learn or get used to the skills.
I think it's one of the dumbest things ever to happen in corporate America and once this whole thing blows over everyone will say: of course it didn't work. But because shareholders something somethimg it was their duty to attempt it.
The economic incentives will push toward remote being the norm for most office jobs, whether they like it or not.
> Some of the biggest names in commercial real estate, like Brookfield and Blackstone, have defaulted...
Does doing this have any impact on their creditworthiness? Or are they too big to, well, not lend to?
Lenders are going to take this into account. I imagine that commercial real estate lenders are realists though, and expect their debtors to exercise their right to walk away from deals that go south. So lenders may consider it primarily a reflection of the state of commercial real estate, and secondarily a reflection of those companies' ability to operate in a bad market, and a fairly minor update on how the debtor will behave in future deals (because they already expect this behavior).
Home mortgage borrowers defaulting is more unusual and may say more about the person, given that a high proportion of the population will hold onto their home even if the value of the home drops and the mortgage gets underwater. This expectation gets priced into the terms of the home loan. So an individual who's shown that they're willing to exercise the default option if the market turns has a different risk profile.
ELI5: Why?
The bank takes the knock,carries on as if it's business as usual in an effort to prop up their own revenue.
Too big to fail I guess.
The bank also has rights on the property after it goes into default. They don't lose all their money.
The owners of capital look out for themselves. Seriously, there is more class consciousness among the obscenely wealthy, than there is among the plebes.
Financial bail outs are one thing, but corporate lawbreaking is treated different by the courts, however, I think things are starting to change. Elon is going to cause a shift change and corporate America is a little worried.
A bit of this is like things being described in unlike manner, a bit is fundamentally different situations (needs and relative scale.) A person needs at least one home, and rarely has more than one. If they shed one because they can't afford the mortgage—whether or not that is a good financial decision—they still need a new one.
A commercial landlord that sheds their Nth property still has N-1, and can continue working as a commercial landlord without a problem.
Also, a homeowner that does a deed in lieu, short sale, been foreclosed on, etc., on a home loan has probably had forgiven or defaulted on a lot greater share of either their income/revenue or total debt than a commercial landlord that sheds the Nth property for similar reasons.
But generally, not dragging out an unmanageable loan and cutting the bleeding via short sale or deed in lieu where practical is considered prudent for individual borrowers with home loans.
Does it hurt your credit? Sure. But that's a temporary thing, and wirth shedding the drag on your finances for in many cases.
Homeowners who stop paying mortgages do not have access to cash, so there is no utility in doing business with them.
Suppose there was death penalty for this type of behaviour. If you default of $100M of debt you are executed, no limited liability shroud, no bankruptcy, no backsies, no do-overs -- just cold steel. Your head in a bucket, and your family destitute in the streets.
This type of behaviour would cease to exist almost immediately.
Except we have the bag holders, the landlords who retained leases and the banks who own the mortgages, they are going to fight tooth and nail to maintain the value of their assets, and they have deep pockets.
I've seen one story where the writer made the argument that this is why we've been seeing "you must return to the office" stories - big business must have line go up, line must never go down.
We'll see what happens but I sure hope there are no government bail-outs for this sector. Investment involves the risk of the asset depreciating.
The problem is that investors who have been working in the business since 2010 have no idea what a real economic recession looks like bc the fed keeps on swooping in to save the day. Asa result, a lot of investors levered up their books.
The investment business is not a free market bc the downside risk is no longer present.
AFAIK the bet was to buy these assets almost totally leveraged and then wait for the ocasional fool or rich sheik or hot hip company to buy/rent them.
If nobody buys them in years that's not the end of the World because the bank/investment fund is the one on the hook ( at least most of it ) and the city obviously doesn't want the prices to go down because that 100 Billion dollar budget needs these taxes.
Everybody knows it will blow some day, in the mean time everybody fights to keep alive until the hopeful payday comes... and the prices keep ridiculously high and "half" of comercial real estate is vacant. Is this post-modern "capitalism"?
Here's the stock ticker for HPP. HPP is the predominate commercial REIT for the SF Bay Area: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NYSE-HPP/ They're down ~75% from ATH in 2020, but up 75% since ATL six months ago.
Also, keep in mind that commercial loans get divided into short-term/long-term groupings. A long duration for a short-term loan is 3 years and a short duration for a long-term loan is 5 years. So, there's this sweet spot between 3-5 years after economically-disruptive events where underwater loans created at the peak of the market start to get called. We're a couple of months away from the three-year anniversary of shutdown.
IMHO, the next two years will be very rocky for SF as devaluations become real and start to significantly undermine city taxes, but the last six months have implied that fear was overstated and/or early in late 2022.
It'll be interesting to see what happens next!
The impact on city revenue will be significant right when problem think SF is pulling out of things. And the city knows it. They’ve projected it clearly but no one will listen.
But a private room with a door and not having to hear/see/sit next to colleagues within arms reach would be a huge benefit. Open floor plans were just a race to the bottom ... well the bottom got hit now offices are empty. You can't just force folks to come in and accept the awful conditions because people will just say no now.
Only then will prices correct. It’s killing small businesses in the US. A modest retail business or restaurant can’t afford the $20,000 a month they want for a tiny unit.
Their control of the market is having harmful downstream effects on society.
I think the answer has to be a punitive vacancy tax: like if a commercial restaurant space is idle for 3 months, the tax rate for every property with the same commercial owner goes up every month. These properties being idle has ripple effects throughout a neighborhood which shouldn’t take years to recover.
This has a negative impact on a city, both in driving up prices for the actual residents, and in distorting the texture of a neighborhood.
If you want to have multiple homes that sit unoccupied for most of the year, you should definitely pay a punitive vacancy tax.
(Unless court challenges were successful, not sure the status and there’s always court challenges to everything)
A vacancy tax should also apply to landlords to encourage them to rent out units at actual market rate (rather than pretend market rate is something different for tax purposes).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
If the terms of a contract say I can hand over the property to the bank and walk away liability free, then I shouldn't take any kind of reputational hit (credit rating) for doing so.
It's kinda sad that lawmakers and courts haven't done anything to rectify that.