As ‘professor’ Howard Hill would say, “Well, ya got trouble, my friend, right here, I say, trouble right here in River City,” and that trouble is a looming crisis of epic proportions. Anyone who has been paying attention to what is happening in this world is aware of the current unemployment rates, the ending of the “bonus” of $600 a week from the government and the fear that is brewing across the country. The trouble that we’ve got brewing in our happy little burg is a potential onslaught of homelessness, the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Depression, if even then.
Here’s what is happening and what I think we need to do about it.
Approximately 28 million Americans are unemployed right now and falling behind in their payments on rent and mortgages. In the month of June approximately 32% of homeowners didn’t make their full mortgage payment. That’s bad — really, really bad. Now some of them are actually taking advantage of a perceived ability to be in forbearance and hoard their cash so that they can do other things with it. These people are in a financial position that allows them to make the ‘catch up’ payments that are going to come due when the forbearance ends. Most are not that lucky, and are just playing with fire.
For the tenants who are thinking that they can avoid paying their rent during this forbearance period, they have a rude awakening coming. While the eviction process is on hold in Santa Monica (we have a moratorium until Sept. 30, on evictions) this is not a period of “Free Rent” or “Cancelled Rent.” The protesters who want to “Cancel Rent” are living in a dream world of some Utopian fantasy that completely ignores any semblance of reality and basic social economies. It may look and sound like a happy little way to make life okay for those tenants to just “cancel rent” but someone else is left holding the debt that monthly rents pay.
I realize that many social activists have an innate hatred of landlords and property owners, just on principle. But that’s an inane position to take and it has no grounding in practicality. Landlords and property owners provide needed services that allow our society to function, and the rent that they collect is the lifeblood of keeping everything flowing. Contrary to the social justice warriors who think owners are just social vampires, the truth is property owners are like the Red Cross — they gather the much-needed blood from those who can afford to give and move it to places where it’s needed like banks and vendors, who in turn use it to keep companies and services engaged.
Here’s how it goes: I pay my rent. My landlord then pays the building’s gardener, the plumber, the HVAC guy, the utilities. He has some of the rent money to feed his kids by shopping at the grocery store, which employs clerks and stockers, who then pay their rent, and their landlords pay their gardeners, plumbers and utilities, and the ripple effect of my rent keeps hundreds of people financially alive.
What we have brewing is this: if renters don’t pay their rent, then landlords can’t pay their service providers and their mortgages. So, the flow of money gets interrupted, then the banks start to get nervous and pull back their credit for the landlords, who then have to start eviction proceedings.
The tenants who thought they could get ‘caught up’ are now months behind and realize they can’t make rent, because the jobs aren’t there, and now they’re faced with losing their homes. This means that two things are going to happen: 1) people are going to consolidate and start sharing housing on an even greater scale, which will actually increase the rate of infections of COVID19 and that creates its own set of problems, or 2) they will become homeless.
This is bad news for Santa Monica. We can expect to see our population of homeless increase by an unknown factor, but if it doubles, I will not be surprised. We need to be planning for this as a probability today because it will be here before we know it. We have to remember that the moratoriums will not last forever, and in some states, they are already expiring, which means those people will be looking at a winter of homelessness. Our capacity to handle the problems associated with this coming tsunami will not be enough, so we have to work in partnership with our neighboring cities.
We will need to provide additional street cleaning, bathroom facilities and emergency housing in order to avoid outbreaks of other diseases that are associated with an increased homeless population. We know what we are facing, a very tragic winter, and now is when we have to prepare for it.
David Pisarra is a Los Angeles Divorce and Child Custody Lawyer specializing in Father’s and Men’s Rights with the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He can be reached at dpisarra@pisarra.com or 310/664-9969. You can follow him on Twitter @davidpisarra
