“I had never woken up with panic attacks before this year,” said Haines, 53, owner and manager of 253 rental units in the Dallas area through his company Tangent Group. “It’s all because we can’t control and run our business.”
He cares about providing for his family, keeping his employees and whether he has to sell the buildings and single-family homes he owns, which have been his livelihood for 27 years, he said.
The CDC said evicting people could harm public health and interfere with efforts to curb the pandemic.
Haines said he doesn’t want to evict all his tenants who didn’t pay. But it makes a distinction between those who cannot pay and those who cannot. Only the latter, he said, wants to get out of his buildings.
“We’re not expelling people who can’t pay,” he said. “We eliminate people who refuse to pay.”
He said he currently has about eight people out of 253 units who refuse to pay. Haines said he believes these tenants have the means to pay or that they could receive rental assistance, but they have not applied for it. “They haven’t paid between six months and a year. Finally, we could do something about it.”
Haines said homeowners like him have done what was asked of them, taking on the burden of housing millions of people who lost income during the pandemic and were left behind in rent.
“But every time we think maybe we can get to the other side, they move the goal posts and change the rules,” he said. “I want to run my business. I want to feed my family. I can only do so for so long in these conditions before we end up in a situation where we are failing financially.”
Whiplash for owners
When Dawn Pfaff, a landlord with properties in New York and Florida, heard a federal eviction ban return after it expired last month, she said it filled her with “fear.”
Pfaff said he believes allowing one person to live on another person’s property for six to a year for free, while another person has to pay taxes, insurance and maintenance, is a violation of the law and is unconstitutional.
But most U.S. homeowners are like her, homeowners called “mom and pop” with a handful of properties that have rents to enter or to fund retirement.
“I haven’t bought shares and I don’t have many retirements saved,” said Pfaff, who also works as a real estate agent and runs other property-related businesses. “Our whole plan is to get our mortgages repaid and live on rents as our retirement income.”
“There are as many people as me who have tenants who can’t afford it,” Pfaff said. “And they have their hands tied.”
News of the last eviction moratorium just days after the previous one had expired was a “whiplash” for homeowners, according to Greg Brown, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Apartment Association, an industrial group of owners.
“We were disappointed to see that we were going back after we agreed it was over,” he said. “We now have a completely new metric and the owners are asking how they are following this and trying to figure out how to comply with it.”
There are, he said, some places where judges interpret the moratorium differently. In Franklin County, Ohio, for example, judges they announced that they would not apply the new rule banning evictions.
But, Brown said, there are substantial penalties for breaking the order. “Owners won’t risk having to deal with it.”
With the updated eviction moratorium, many homeowners are likely, according to Brown, to run the figures by losing an additional two-month rent.
“They’re figuring out how to cover 60 more days,” he said. “What is the new math how much can they get for rent help?”
Unable to pay vs. he refuses to pay
When the pandemic hit, Haines knew it would be a blow to low-income residents of his units, where a one-bedroom apartment rents between $ 800 and $ 900 a month, Haines said. He said he withdrew late fees and moved everyone to a monthly contract, seeking to ease the burden of breaking a contract if they could no longer afford the rent.
But when local moratoriums on eviction were followed by the national ban, he found few people were leaving.
He said he is doing what he can. Haines currently has 24 tenants left behind, 17 of whom owe more than $ 1,000. Late rates are still lowered for those working to get rental assistance and tenants who are still struggling can stay on a monthly contract without the standard 10% to 20% premium for doing so, he said.
“She’s behind about $ 6,800,” he said. “But I won’t kick her out for it. We’ll get it with her.”
The biggest issue, he said, is tenants refusing to pay.
“We have not filed the expulsion of anyone working with us,” he said. But it has evicted residents who violated the terms of the lease.
Like the resident he said, he earns $ 80,000 a year, which is within the $ 99,000 individual income limit to be eligible for the CDC eviction moratorium. But when the moratorium went into effect, Haines said the tenant sublet a portion of the apartment while she lived there, withdrawing $ 1,500 a month for herself and withholding the rent from Haines.
Since the moratorium only protects tenants from eviction for non-payment of rent, Haines was able to withdraw it for what he described as a breach of the terms of his lease.
There are also residents who refuse to apply for rental assistance, he said. To be protected by the CDC moratorium, tenants must sign a statement that they have made a good faith effort to pay for and seek government assistance.
He has also seen at least two residents manipulate the rental assistance program by asking for help money at various addresses, with inaccurate contact information, or arranging for checks to go directly to them without delivering the subsequent rent. And he said he is still not able to evict them.
But compared to other independent rental owners, Haines is considered lucky so far. He and his wife have been conservative with their finances. However, hiring deficiencies have hampered their ability to save for retirement and they have needed to inject money to make sure they don’t have to lay off any of their ten employees.
This year’s losses have also forced Haines to change his selection criteria for new residents by looking more closely at the previous rental payment history, which he said hurts the same people (lower incomes) that the government says it is trying to help. ”
Haines said as long as his residents are willing to work with him, he will do his best to keep them housed.
“I won’t rip people off trying to do the right thing,” he said of his residents. “We can keep it for a couple more months, but we shouldn’t do it.”