@1:

OTOH, if we allow landlords to evict everyone who hasn't been able to pay rent during a global pandemic, that'll just give the concern trolls more fodder for bitching about all the dirty, filthy homeless people, amiright?

@ace -- "... if tenants can't/won't pay rent then landlords should be excused from mortgages and property taxes."

perhaps not Excused
but to not factor in their plight as
well seems morally incorrect to me.

decent Shelter
NEEDS to be a
Human Right pronto.

Comte, you make an Excellent Point as well
concern trolls Need concerning shit too
not that I'm all that Worried about it
& here's to the Day they run out.

@3 - All of these programs need some sort of means-testing. Neither landlords nor tenants should be blanketly excused from paying mortgages or rents. Many people (I believe it is the majority) are still able to pay.

A whole lot of renters in Seattle are tech workers or others whose jobs are continuing and who can (and generally are) continuing to pay rent. Because they are, their landlords are not in a squeeze either. Let's concentrate any relief at the segment of the population that needs it.

The more people who are excused from their obligations, the greater the impact on the economy and the longer it is going to take to unwind the damage. That will ultimately hurt all of us.

Whose turn is it to re-rip mistral a new one? I'm a little busy today...

Honestly this just feels like one of Kshama's proposals that will go nowhere in council and then she'll use that rejection to again denigrate her colleagues on the council as corporate shills and rail against the evil big business as part of her recall defense strategy. That's if she even bothers to introduce the legislation. Remember when she was going to put forth legislation to remove Durkan from office? Still waiting on that one.

btw I don't think Kshama even wrote this. If she did I think its amusing she refers to herself in the third person. I hope the Stranger is getting properly compensated for being the PR firm for Socialist Alternative.

At some point the federal and state and county and city will expire the eviction exclusion.

We need a way for people to start paying back the rent they will still owe, in addition to future rent.

Even the new federal minimum wage of $15 won't fix that.

I'd recommend a program allowing you to pay 10% extra per month on the base rent until you catch up.

@4 -- "Let's concentrate any relief at the
segment of the population that needs it."

bingo. means-testing the $2K
gets the nod as well but
whatabout Logistics...

A moratorium on evictions is a good idea right now, but at some point the city and state need to stop putting all of the risk and costs on landlords. Even those with the deepest pockets won't be able to afford this for years on end, and I don't expect this problem will be resolved by the end of this year. How about extending the moratorium until the end of the year and setting up a program allowing landlords to use lost rent, or maybe half of it, against future property taxes and utility bills? If the city council thinks this is urgently needed, why aren't they willing to pick up part of the tab?

Perhaps sophisticated investors could buy outstanding rent debt and consolidate and market it as high-yield junk bonds, then profit on both sides selling rent default swaps on the resulting securities. What could go wrong?

Landlord's want to keep their tenants in place. Finding new tenants is expensive both in the time a property is vacant and the time and effort to repair a property to be rented between tenancy. Landlords are like anyone else: imagine going to work everyday and not getting paid. A solution to avoiding evictions is to focus relief to landlords by providing funding to tenants' rent obligations.

@12 - Agree in principle on means-testing the stimulus checks but I think the need to do it ASAP probably meant there was no time.

@15 - yes. No one wants to turn over a whole bunch of tenants. It's not like landlords evict people for the hell of it. But there is a limit to how much income landlords can lose without starting to go under. And as a fun fact, when the property gets foreclosed, the tenants probably get tossed out anyway.

Why are we not addressing this like other areas of the economy? People need food. As much a human right as shelter in anyone's view (maybe more). Do we tell grocery stores to stop making people pay for food during the pandemic? We do not. We give out stimulus checks to help people continue to buy food. As a result, we avoid disruption of a large sector of the economy. Rent should be the same. Assistance should go to those who need it so they can pay their rent. That way we avoid creating a web of foreclosures and ultimate loss of housing that will take years to unwind.

Having said that, a sensible approach like this is not compatible with what the likes of Sawant really want, which is to make owning rental housing so unprofitable that no one wants to do it, and thereby crash housing prices. Once real estate is worth nothing, everyone can afford to buy a house and voila! Problem solved. Never mind what that would do to the middle class, most of whom have their home as their major asset. But you didn't need to use your home equity for retirement, or to pay for college, or anything at all, did you?

For the better part of a year, The Stranger has been blegging readers for financial support, with the justification we here in Seattle need The Stranger's reporting.

Then, The Stranger simply gives space to Socialist Alternative's propaganda, no questions asked. As this entire comment thread recounts, the "solution" Socialist Alternative pushed via The Stranger wouldn't even come close to solving the problem. It's just more of Socialist Alternative's bitter anti-capitalist boilerplate, which The Stranger published without regard to the harm any attempted implementation of it would do to real persons, and real civic institutions, in Seattle.