@1:

You really are a horrible person.

@3 Sweden has more COVID-19 deaths per capita than the US or Brazil. Even the other Scandinavian countries have barred travel from Sweden.

There's a reason you're not hearing "whatabout Sweden" much from the right-wing lunatic fringe anymore.

How in the hell can you say "reopening the economy will work" when the US tried that very tactic in several states not that long ago and we saw a huge rise in cases?

Worried we'll lose our top spot in Covid deaths if we don't add new mistakes to the pile?

Or did you step into your wardrobe and f*ck off to Narnia for the past two months?

The truth is scarier. There is no wave of mass evictions coming, because we pre-evicted the working poor from 2008-2020 with artificially low supply and high prices. Fewer people than you think will fall off the back now. If you look at rent payments, they aren’t that much worse than last year at this time, despite skyrocketing unemployment. Its winner take all, and the losers already lost. Can you have a functioning society or even just an economy based solely on the winners? We’re about to find out. My money is on no, and we are in for a violent 2021.

@6 The spike in rents over the past couple-few decades was highly regionalized; housing cost relative to income today is still much lower in places where it hasn't been raining tech or financial services funny-money-- i.e., most of the country.

And those places are falling behind in rent payments today. The economic contraction of COVID-19 isn't affecting regions proportionately to real estate prices, it's hitting low-level service-sector jobs hardest, and those jobs are everywhere, and the people who hold (or held) those jobs are the 50% of working Americans who have no savings whatsoever, who don't have friends or family flush enough to spot them $400 in an emergency.

Like everything else in the US in this crisis, the response and the fallout is going to be regional. Some places will indeed see a lot more people than usual tossed out onto the street with their belongings in a heap, as is already happening in New Orleans. Other places won't. This is going to be a story about differences in local politics and local policy.

@9 Must admit I wasn't expecting such a spectacularly sullen defense of Sweden's failed COVID-19 policy. Well done. Very convincing.

The eviction process in WA sounds pretty similar to OR, which I'm more familiar with as I've assisted several people with navigating that system. I find mass evictions to be unlikely. Aside from @1's shitty closing sentence, the overall post holds a lot of merit.

At least one eviction hearing is needed to initiate a full-on, legal eviction. Tenants receiving an eviction notice can "willingly" leave prior to the eviction date in order to avoid having an actual eviction on their rental record. Having an eviction makes it hard, if not impossible, to get another decent rental for several years. A lot of property management companies flat out deny any applicant that has an eviction on their record in the past 3-5 years.

Anyhow, if it does go to a court hearing, most judges I've worked with are aiming to avoid eviction. 1st hearings are usually only open-and-shut if the tenant doesn't show at all (not uncommon) or if the cause for eviction is pretty blatant and difficult to defend. But when it boils down to minor (if repeated) lease violations or simply financial issues, many judges will aim to craft an agreement that tenant and landlord can agree to and everyone signs it. This often involves some kind of payment plan. Now, if the tenant then botches that, they're breaking this new contract set by the court and they're likely be out on their ass pretty quickly.

So whether it's after the 1st court hearing or after later hearings, once the judge says it's time for a tenant to leave, they can do so willingly or...not. If not, that's when sheriffs get called in.

So there are lots of points in the system where the process can get stalled/paused, possibly leading to a better resolution than eviction. That's for "normal times".

These days...well, usually when events are more widespread and impactful, there's better possibility for "the system" to start developing alternate solutions. Will that happen here? I have no idea. But what I do know is that sheriffs, judges, and plenty of other elected officials (city leaders, county commissioners, mayors) don't want to be painted as uncaring and indifferent to what could be many, MANY constituents and the loved ones of those constituents, because that could easily result in said officials getting kicked the f*ck out of their own offices come next round of elections.

It's also just kind of flat out untenable to evict so many. Where are they gonna go? Some will find friends/families to take them in, sure, but a lot (and I mean A LOT) won't. Homeless services all across this county weren't doing well with pre-Covid populations as it was. No way is any place ready for these new numbers. We're talking 21st century Hoovervilles being the norm.

I don't see all local/regional leadership being so short-sighted. I definitely see national leadership continuing to be that short-sighted AND to just keep telling states to "handle things themselves", furthering their abdication of duties.

Maybe I'm being optimistic, but I just don't see it happening. A poster above said you'll see some areas be worse off than others and some differences will be quite noticeable based on regional differences, but I don't see power-holders being foolish enough to try and "let them eat cake" their way outta this scenario on a large scale. Various county and state leaders will work on alternatives and share ideas and hobble along until new national leadership takes over and actually starts, ya know...leading.

But the whole process will suck. Lots of suffering will occur which could have been mitigated to some degree, yes...but I just don't see 10% of the national population becoming houseless. Mostly because evicting all those people would be way more costly and damaging then just letting them stay where they are until this country, to some degree, un-f*cks itself in the coming months.

@ 11,

Way back in The Time Before, I’d be inclined to agree with you, now however, recall that in Tr666p’s AmeriKKKa of total indifference to suffering and mass death, the sadistic cruelty IS the point.

Its just that if 10 million families were actually evicted, that would also result in 10 million vacancies with no obvious source of mover-inners waiting in the wings. I'm no formally trained economist, but seems like that should produce a collapse in rental prices, right?

Your typical mom & pop small time landlord, who isn't carrying debt (like people renting out a house they inherited from a deceased parent) should be able to weather this ok. But landlords carrying a lot of debt have a bank to deal with on the other end.

The RepubliKKKans want all those people to be evicted, so that they can’t vote their kleptocratic, nation-ruining asses out of office by mail.

That’s also the reason they’re hellbent on destroying the Post Office.

i can't wait for all the commenters here who vilify the homeless to ramp up their postings as the homeless population explodes. Of course they might change their tune when their parents lose their homes and they're all evicted and foreclosed on and they have no more basements in which to live.

Next month, when Americans start sending in their ballots for early voting, they're going to look around and ask the question that Ronald Reagan famously posed in 1980: Are you better off than you were four years ago? And for anyone who isn't a GOP dead ender, they're going to know who is responsible for their misery—the guy in the Oval Office who was too incompetent to contain a pandemic on the front end and too indifferent to assist struggling Americans on the backend of his manmade disaster.

On November 3rd, Trump and Republicans will finally feel the pain they just heaped on the American people.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/10/1968250/-Trump-will-suffer-for-blowing-up-the-relief-deal-He-s-just-too-dumb-to-know-it

@23 Yeah I guess things are going pretty great for the kind of guy who never gets a haircut, doesn't go to the gym, feels uncomfortable in bars, and didn't have a social life outside the internet to begin with.