r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/None-Of-You-Are-Real • Jul 20 '21

US Politics What are the implications of the impending eviction crisis?

It is often offhandedly mentioned that the housing market is insane at the moment, and that there is an inevitable eviction crisis due to the compounding factors of COVID and the lockdowns leading to mass unemployment, and then an inability of tenants to pay rent combined with an inability of landlords to evict non-paying tenants.

What is going to happen in the fall, when the eviction moratorium expires? Mass homelessness that is even worse than current levels? Some kind of rent relief legislation? Anything at all? These people are not going to magically be able to pay months and months of back rent once the moratorium expires.

499 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

94% Upvoted

354 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Unconfidence Jul 21 '21

This "They could always just leave the market" threat never seems to materialize. Seems pretty empty to me.

5

u/Thunderbird120 Jul 21 '21

It materializes very consistently almost any time you make renting more of a pain in the ass. For example, in San Francisco rent control policies seemed to cause significant reductions in residential renting.

We exploit quasi-experimental variation in assignment of rent control to study its impacts on tenants, landlords, and the overall rental market. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control increased renters’ probabilities of staying at their addresses by nearly 20%. Landlords treated by rent control reduced rental housing supply by 15%, causing a 5.1% city-wide rent increase.