Looming mass evictions in the U.S. is the news topic I can't stop thinking about, but I don't have any good context posts ready to hand other than the tweet with the percentages. I truly don't know what to expect.

1 Jesus that's grim.

Watch this dam eating an island. You'll feel better. Then tell me why the UAE has a Mars probe.

1: Lots of good comments in that thread. Here's one. Not to toot my own horn, but it reminded me of this - mortgages all the way down.

4 Yup, the second wave of evictees will be the landlords.

I just had to throw out the entire pot of morning coffee and start over, for reasons far too stupid to go into. I'm not convinced the day can only get better from here. I'll try watching the dam video, but I'm afraid it's going to look too much like what just happened with the coffee.

In this house we believe this is the best reply tweet.

3: At first I thought it must be to fulfill the prophecy in the Doom videogame, but that turns out to be the UAC.

3.last: ummm... to collect video to feed into a "ski Olympus Mons" VR? No wait, that's why I have a Mars probe.

Anyone following the tech antitrust hearing? I never watch these things, but maybe I'll put it on this time.

There must be a bingo card somewhere. "Lawmakers demand to know which of you is blocking conservatives from Twitter" must be on the bingo card.

6.2 is great.

Anybody here want to contribute to the Florida Supreme Court Election 2000 Memory Project?

Here's your chance!

https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/2cdd00ba14e542eaaf03985d761e33d4

What about my Suburban Lifestyle Dream?

I'm not so worked up about the specter of "mass evictions". The tweet shows numbers "facing eviction," which means "behind on the rent." Evictions are a small percentage of late rent-payers. Falling behind on rent is especially popular when, as has been the case since late March, there is a nationwide moratorium on evictions. As that ends, lots of people will find a way to catch up on their rent, at least enough to stave off eviction.

Rational landlords* don't evict unless they reasonably expect to find a different tenant who can pay rent. In bad economic times, evictions become less likely because the landlords don't expect to find a good replacement tenant, and they are willing to defer legal action, sometimes in exchange for partial payments.

*A subset of all landlords but a significant subset.

13: I agree with all your points, but I think that will still leave a whole lot of evictions.

There is not a nationwide eviction moratorium. The federal measure was for renters receiving federal rental assistance or those whose building's mortgage is federally backed (that last very nontransparent to renters), in sum estimated to cover less than half of renting households. State or local bans can be more expansive but most are not.

Maybe we can be a little less "enlightened market self-interest will sort it out" sanguine when there are now 18 million people unemployed nationwide, official definition? Just because landlords might not find another tenant doesn't mean they won't start evicting. They won't necessarily make those enlightened calculations about replacement tenants you describe if it threatens their sovereign dignitude - or if they fear not evicting would "reward" nonpayment by those for whom it's merely difficult, rather than impossible, to pay.

13: Out of curiosity, what would cause you to get "worked up about the specter of 'mass evictions'"? That is a memorable phrase. I realize that my "I can't stop thinking about x" sounds like it might be synonymous with "I am so worked up about the specter of x," but it's not really what I was getting at. I'm not trying to perform some terrible kind of affective slacktivism; I mean I keep thinking about it. I wonder how invisible the process is going to be in different places, both in terms of media coverage and in terms of what you see on the street. We were in west Berkeley this weekend running errands and there was a traffic bottleneck around the recycling center/municipal dump: long lines of pickup trucks and other vehicles carrying debris, furniture, etc. I wondered if that was correlated with move-in/move-out weekends in general. (Many leases end in midsummer.)

There are many possible outcomes besides evictions in response to this pressure: people will choose to move, to downsize, to move in with relatives, to attempt to take in subletters. Landlords may try to liquidate.

15.1: True, but the moratorium affected enough people to be relevant to interpreting data about late rent payments. And it's a higher percentage at the lower end of the income scale.

15.2: Like I said, not all landlords are rational. but the tendency for landlords to allow more time to catch up on rent during periods of disaster or recessions is well known and has been qunaitfied.

It's mostly not enlightened self-interest that is keeping the lowest quintile solvent, it's some excellent (if imperfect) progressive economic programs created by the House and miraculously not vetoed by the Senate of the President. Between the eviction restrictions, the $1200 one time payments that may become two time payments soon, and the $600 weekly increase in unemployment benefits that may yet be partly extended, the bottom of the economic ladder has suffered much less in this recession than in past recessions, even taking into account that some people fell between the cracks of these programs and didn't benefit. This is highly relevant to the ongoing negotiations over whether these programs should be extended, and how they can be improved. It's also relevant to whether the Democratic Party is worth voting for.

Banned analogy: Saying that everyone behind on their rent is "facing eviction" is like saying that everyone testing positive for covid is facing death: not completely false, but obfuscatory, and alarmist.

I'm worried that the idea that people will "catch up" gets harder to credit the longer the lag. Realistically, somebody paying a third of their income in rent isn't going to be able to pay current rent and pay down more than a couple of months back rent.

Between the eviction restrictions, the $1200 one time payments that may become two time payments soon, and the $600 weekly increase in unemployment benefits that may yet be partly extended, the bottom of the economic ladder has suffered much less in this recession than in past recessions

I agree, but the Republicans' desire to end the $600 is in my understanding a large part of the reason people are sounding the alarm on evictions.

Tech antitrust update: a) Bezos is getting murdered (this will have no effect, though, he's not meaningfully a natural person), b) Republicans are still using their time to demand to know why their campaign emails are in the spam filter on Gmail.

Sensenbrenner, R-WI (a wonderful surname I encountered in several places growing up), playing devil's advocate, is at least able to talk (in an ancient, croaking, cheese-ravaged voice) about the matter at hand.

I am completely unsure whether some déformation professionelle is making me respond with "oh come on, that's fair play!" to a lot of these questions, or if at least some of it is fair play.

For my "commerce/signing-up" account, my spam folder is about half Trump stuff.

17 before reading 16. In answer to 16, yes, "not get worked up" was a response to "can't stop thinking about." My misinterpretation. All I'm saying is, don't think about 30% of everyone being evicted, because it won't happen.

So I tried to find some useful statistics, and came up short, The "Housing Pulse Survey" by the U.S. Census is the source of the data tweeted, and that apparently only stated in April 202 as a response to covid, so there's no historical data to compare.

Interesting study of eviction rates between 2000 and 2016 at https://evictionlab.org/national-estimates/ . The rate was in the 3.00 - 3.07% range 2003-07, and 3.11% in 2008, suggesting that recessions don't cause a huge increase, followed by a gradual and steady decline to 2.34% in 2016. Of course unemployment is much higher now than it was in 2008. Make of it what you will.

Thanks for that! Curious thing in the data: biggest increase in "renter occupied households" is between 2000 (19,327,822) and 2001 (27,438,838), which has got to be an anomaly. (By contrast, +3M or so between 2007 and 2012.)

2000 and my roommates are too much.

I never get election spam. Maybe Google is throwing it away, not just putting it in the Spam category?

The Democrat who took over after the spam guy said gently that yes, her election messages and those of many other Democrats were showing up in the spam filter too. I guess no one knows how to break it to Republicans that their constituents are human and abuse the "Report spam" button.

This is the strangest piece of theater.

Were any of the politicians brave and/or self-aware enough to say "of course, advertising, political or otherwise, is spam, that's what it means"?

Immediate revulsion from everyone whose job is basically advertising, but what joy for the rest of us.

The one comment that caught my eye is the one where eviction ---> change of address ----> have to reregister to vote. I guess it's not by and large the voting demographic, but still.

I personally think that the change of address requirement does more to inhibit voting than other restrictions that get far more attention. Texas lost a lawsuit because you can update your license online, but you can't update your voter registration online, which is a violation of the moter-voter law, but they are very talented feet-draggers, so that will get fixed approximately never.

I keep wondering how you report on this issue. Can you get eviction stats in real time? Do you zero in on cases to stand in for the wider problem in a nebulous way? Will there be visible effects like much larger tent cities in this area? I'm sure these questions have answers, even obvious answers, but I also know tons of media orgs have laid off a bunch of staff in the past few months; I don't know how many resources are available to cover the issue at a level beyond comment 1's link.

One more irrelevant comment before I give this thread back to the people:

Weighing the full cost of what has been stolen from Iraq is not easy. Deals are done in cash, documents are hard to come by and the government's statistics are often unreliable. Still, the available information suggests that Iraq may have had more of its national wealth illicitly drained abroad than any other nation. One Iraqi elder statesman with long experience in finance recently assembled a confidential assessment for the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, based on conversations with bankers, investigators and contacts in a variety of foreign countries. He concluded that $125 billion to $150 billion is held by Iraqis overseas, most of it "illegitimately acquired." He noted that other estimates run as high as $300 billion. Some $10 billion in stolen money, he estimated, is invested in London real estate alone. A full reckoning would extend well beyond the financial bill to the damage inflicted on Iraq's culture and society -- a point I often heard older Iraqis make with great sadness during the years I lived there.

This thread is now nationalized.