Landlords are unsympathetic figures in the eyes of many struggling tenants, but they’re emerging as a new economic problem for Congress and the White House.
Washington’s pandemic response is battering the finances of independent landlords, most of whom haven’t received federal rental aid designed to keep them whole during a nearly year-long eviction ban that has forced some property owners to house tenants for free.
The distress is acute for so-called mom-and-pop landlords — those who own fewer than 10 properties, which typically have between one and four units. They supply about half the housing stock in the country, and they’re more likely than corporate property managers to have lower-income tenants who’ve fallen behind on their rent as a result of Covid-19. About 30 percent have household incomes below $90,000 a year.
Many are growing increasingly angry with the government’s handling of housing safeguards, as they continue to pay utilities and mortgages but face state and local bottlenecks when trying to tap into $46.5 billion in rental aid allocated by Congress to offset losses from the eviction ban imposed last September. As of the end of June, just $3 billion of the funds had been disbursed. Landlords have lost billions of dollars a month under the ban.
“We’re doing everything the right way,” said Matthew Haines, a Dallas property owner. “But we’re drowning.”
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Roughly 23 percent of small landlords leasing single-family rentals had sold at least one property as of February, according to a survey by the National Rental Home Council. Six months later, the renewed moratorium and the continued logjam in aid disbursal mean many more may not be able to hold on.
Some 6.5 million renter households are behind on rent, according to the most recent U.S. Census survey. Nearly 59 percent of those households live in properties with between one and four units, 72 percent of which are run by mom-and-pop landlords, according to an analysis of government data by the National Association of Realtors.
“The majority of rental housing in most major cities is provided by individuals,” said Dean Hunter, CEO of the Small Multifamily Owners Association and a landlord in Washington. “The problem is in this case the government regulated individuals as if they are multinational organizations. It made no sense.”
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“Yes, the small landlords are at a disadvantage, but guess what, they know how to go to the bank, they know how to get a loan, ” House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said July 30 as she rallied support for extending the eviction ban. “They know how to deal with hard times. … I believe that they can hang on until [aid] flows smoothly, and I do not believe that the [renter] families, many of whom have three and four children, have that opportunity.”
Even if they can wait out the sluggish aid, though, some landlords may never recover the money they’ve lost over the past year and a half.
“The eviction moratorium is protecting some renters who aren’t eligible for aid or who will move out before it can arrive, so the landlords will never see that money,” said Jay Parsons, a rental housing economist at property management software provider RealPage.
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With a nearly year-long eviction ban in place, small landlords are growing increasingly angry with the government's slow handling of rental aidhttps://t.co/YuR0NT1S7F
— POLITICO (@politico) August 14, 2021
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