Hillary Chura with The Christian Science Monitor reports on the hardships being felt by some housing providers grappling with the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
The peril for Americans who cannot pay rent because of COVID-19 is well established. Less apparent is the financial ruin that faces millions of mom and pop landlords who live rent check to rent check and need the income to pay bills.
Take Tina Brown. She’s a landlord in the Bronx, one of the five New York boroughs, and just as the lockdown set in, she lost the two-family house where she’d been living because her tenants had stopped paying rent years earlier. She’d like to move into her family’s other building. But she can’t because that tenant likewise stopped paying rent last year and cannot be put out because of the state’s eviction moratorium. Until things change, Ms. Brown is sleeping on her sister’s floor.
According to an analysis of government figures, the country has 10 million to 11 million private landlords, and they own 48% of all U.S. rental units. For the past five months, they have been struggling along with their tenants. Unlike millions of Americans and small businesses that received federal pandemic aid, small landlords have largely fallen through the cracks.
Read more here.
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