Military Veterans and Patriots

Tag: eviction

  • A New Economic Crisis Looms

    A New Economic Crisis Looms

    I’m sure most of you are aware of the sharply rising prices for consumer goods. Everything from food to fuel to lumber has risen in price over the last few months.

    This boys and girls is called inflation and it can be laid directly at the feet of the Biden administration. A quick and dirty explanation of inflation is this: there are too many dollars chasing too few goods and sevices. In other words, the Fed is printing too much new money.

    The consumer price index, a measurement of how much the cost increases or decreases in a specific period, has had its highest yearly increase since 2008. The amount paid for goods and services have gone up by 5% this year.

    Unfortunately, inflation isn’t the only thing we need to worry about. As many as 8 million households are on the brink of eviction/foreclosure. This is due to covid related loan forebearance and a rental eviction moratorium for federally subsidized housing.

    According to a new Harvard study, more than 2 million homes are in eminent danger of facing foreclosure. Most lenders have been blocked from filing suit to force payment or start foreclosure proceedings due to the pandemic. Now, with the lifting of restrictions, those actions will start ot go forward again, putting all those homeowners who are in default at risk of losing their homes.

    The rental situation is worse, with the federal government — based on dubious legal authority — imposing an eviction “moratorium” during the pandemic, allowing renters to stop paying their rent safe in the knowledge that their landlords couldn’t do anything about it. Census data puts the number of renters behind on their rent around 6 million.

    The CDC-issued order halting some evictions, and federal limitations on foreclosures for federally-backed housing, both expire on June 30.

    With the caveat that I am not a home finance/rental market expert here’s what I see coming. At first there will be a trickle of evictions/foreclosures. Those will be the ones that were chronically in default prior to the pandemic. That trickle will gain velocity as people who decided to skip a few payments during the pandemic start to realize that they can’t catch up, and they get evicted/ foreclosed. Finally, I expect a full on mortgage crisis as banks and lenders start to realize they can file and process claims for foreclosure in much the same way as they did before.

  • Judge Vacates Eviction Moratorium

    Judge Vacates Eviction Moratorium

    First a little history on the eviction moratorium.

    Back on March 13, 2020, President Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency and two weeks later, he signed the CARES Act into law. The CARES Act included a 120-day eviction moratorium with respect to rental properties that participated in federal assistance programs or were subject to federally-backed loans. 

    In August, he directed the HHS and CDC to look into whether or not a continuing moratorium would slow the spread of the chinese coronavirus. Come September, the CDC issued a public health order that banned all evictions nation-wide.

    This week a Federal judge struck down that eviction moratorium. Judge Dabney Friedrich, from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is the first to set aside the moratorium on a nationwide basis.

    The long and short of it is that the CDC does not have the authority to issue such orders under the law that authorizes the agency. You can read the full decision below:

    This case isn’t the first one where the CDC lost. It is however the first that applies nationally. U.S. District Court Judge J. Philip Calabrese in Ohio decided in March that the CDC lacked the legal authority to issue the nationwide freeze as did federal Judge J. Campbell Barker in the Eastern District of Texas.

    It should be noted that this decision does not affect any of the state or local eviction bans that are in place now, but you can bet that this case, and the other two mentioned above will weigh heavily on those cases.

    Like most of the covid diktats issued, the eviction moratorium was nothing but a power grab by unelected bureaucrats. It’s past time for the courts to rein them in. Hopefully this becomes a trend . . . .