 Hundreds and thousands of people are going to lose their homes, they will die. Let's be honest, for a cruel and desperate hope of maximizing profits. Stop evictions at all costs. They brought living room furniture into the streets saying this is what the city would look like as thousands face eviction. Their demand canceled the rent. A lot of folks have had to choose whether to eat or to pay rent. The federal government in many cities and states have enacted a series of temporary measures halting residential evictions in the United States. Evictions were leading to unnecessary cases of COVID and unnecessary deaths from COVID. Dubbed the tenant movement's giant killer by one industry trade magazine, Sia Weaver is a rising star in New York politics. So this is life-saving and that's the most important thing. The cancel rent movement, Weaver told the New York Times, is also about literally rising up for real transformation in the housing market. In New York, that transformation is underway and it's having a devastating impact on landlords. The eviction moratorium isn't just benefiting the poor, it's allowing bad actors to stop paying their rent without consequence. Meanwhile, many small landlords are seeing their life savings disappear because they have no choice but to maintain their buildings at a loss. One landlord who's been hurt by the eviction moratorium is Chow Huai Gao, who works at a nail salon and saved for 20 years to buy a house in Queens. In March of last year, a squatter moved in. This person who didn't respond to our interview request is a dropout from an elite private university and he has never paid rent. Because of the eviction moratorium, there's no legal mechanism through which Gao can retake possession of his property. Meanwhile, his bills are mounting. So in my story, one landlord says, this is really a straightforward issue. It's robbery. He's paying heat taxes and a mortgage, so someone else and someone else is living rent-free and he has absolutely no recourse. Do you agree with that characterization? Is this robbery? No, I don't think it's robbery and we're also not saying that the landlord can never collect a rent. That's not what an eviction moratorium does. It's simply a pause. So no, I don't agree with that. I think it's deeply misleading. But practically speaking, this landlord will be very lucky. I mean, just the way the housing court runs. If he is able to collect back rent in terms of the cost of hiring lawyers, the delays that come in housing court. You don't have to be in the business of being a landlord. Those are part of the costs of being a landlord that should be understood as part of the deal and it is. But owners say having almost no legal recourse when their tenants don't pay their rent is not something they consider to be part of the deal when investing in real estate. Landlord groups around the country have sued on the grounds that halting the judicial process that allows them to retake their property violates their due process rights and that the national moratorium is an unconstitutional expansion of federal power. Gao is part of an association of about 200 Chinese immigrant landlords with tenants who have stopped paying rent. This landlord worked as a housekeeper at a hotel that recently closed down. She says her tenants stopped paying rent over the summer and is demanding a $12,000 cash payment to move out. I think it's really critical that mom and pop landlords are prioritized for aid right now. At the same time everyone has taken a haircut. They don't have a God-given right to collect rent. Just like hotels don't have a God-given right to profit off of the tourism industry and bars and restaurants don't have a God-given right to like serve people dinner and wine, you know. Weaver says she feels for these landlords but tenants are worse off. And we know as a matter of statistical fact that renters are far less likely to have wealth and renters are far less likely to have anything in saving. I know that there's some examples like the ones that you're raising and you know for and I feel for that person and and want them to get the resources that they need from the state. The media has predicted a huge wave of evictions in the United States if the moratoriums are lifted. And a New York tenant activist dragged furniture out into the streets to dramatize the potential impact. But in New York before COVID only about one out of 10 eviction filings ended in a city marshal or sheriff physically removing a tenant from a dwelling. However because there existed a process through which landlords can enforce their contracts and get tenants who weren't paying their rent to come to the negotiating table or move out they had legal recourse. One problem with the eviction moratorium is that in practice it's not only impacting those in need it's also allowing tenants who can afford their rent to take advantage of their landlords. You can pay you can live here you can pay money and then you'll find the apartment move out. Wan who asked that we only use her last name owns a house in Queens and works as a home health aide caring for an elderly couple. Her husband is a waiter at this restaurant in Chinatown though he's barely been able to work since the pandemic. She says that her tenant owes her more than $80,000 in back rent. Every month I need to pay the money where the money can pay. I only the way I keep walking walking walking but I just want the government open the court. Wan says that if her tenants were unemployed or financially distressed she'd be willing to work with them. These people know money I can help for all okay pay later or something but these people know the people have money. Reason wasn't able to reach her tenants for comment so we're not using their names in this story but we did find that the father who has a criminal record is currently employed in the construction industry and while his girlfriend's mother and children live in Wan's apartment he and his girlfriend are renting a second apartment in this house in Queens Village where they've also stopped paying rent and owe $12,000 to the couple that owns the house who are also Chinese immigrants but it's not only immigrant landlords who are being taken advantage of. Sharon Redhead who's the owner of a building in Brooklyn told the New York Daily News that some of her tenants who are out of work have kept up with their rent while others with jobs aren't paying any rent at all. Clarence Hammer is the owner of a two-family home with a tenant who isn't paying rent but is subletting rooms at a profit. The New York Post told the story of 88-year-old Harlem landlord David Housen suffering from Alzheimer's with a tenant who hasn't paid a dime since 2016. We're completely destitute, his daughter told the Post. The idea that there's a handful of renters who are maybe working and saying like oh I have the money and I'm just not going to pay right now all of the data is showing that that's an aberration. The data that shows people who are borrowing to pay rent. The data that shows that people that renters 40% of renters are behind on their housing costs compared to 6% of property owners who are behind on their housing costs. Like the data is just with us. Weaver is referring to census data that doesn't single out landlords but that does show that renters are more financially distressed than people who own their own homes and newspapers have recounted the stories of many tenants in crisis such as Dibba Gay whose wife recently died of heart disease and who lost his job stocking groceries. I don't want to lose my house too. He told the Times. And Halima Abdul Wahab who says she and her two children are at risk of homelessness. I'm at a job where I don't make that much but I just try to maintain as much as I can. She said rent is not the only thing that has to be paid every month. But these individuals can be helped with the type of direct aid that the government has been providing since the early days of the pandemic through interest-free loans, stimulus checks and a substantial increase in unemployment benefits. Cities and states have also spent billions in federal money on rent relief programs. These programs bring their own set of problems and trade-offs and those funded by philanthropy have proven more effective than government-financed ones. But if tenants are receiving the aid they need, owners should still be able to turn to the courts if they don't pay their rent. Weaver says this approach fails to help populations that are hard to reach with direct aid like undocumented immigrants. Her organization helped to draft a proposed state law under which the government would cover missing rent no matter the recent tenants hadn't paid and with strings attached for landlords to accept the money. Because we think it'll get the money out the fastest, right? The landlords have rent ledgers, they have operating statements, they have rent rolls. But there's another reason Weaver and her political allies want to make landlords dependent on federal subsidies. Emergency policies enacted in times of crisis are prone to becoming permanent which some members of the cancel rent movement say is the goal. We need to think about the role that exclusion and profit which are the sort of characteristics of the private property market have played and think about different systems and structures that we could put into place that would help more people be housed. Weaver would like to see the entire real estate industry restructured in a model akin to public housing but for rich people too. In public housing, people are paying 30% of their income. What I am envisioning is a world in which the housing is owned by a collective and people are paying 30% of their income in order to live in their housing. If your income is zero, you pay zero. If your income is $500,000 a year, you're paying 30% of that. And the government is providing the sort of, the government is the sort of owner or not even the owner, the government doesn't have to be the owner, but the government is what's making sure all of that sort of works in cash flows. The debt to GDP ratio right now is the highest since World War II. Trump left us with an additional $7.8 trillion in debt and Biden's agenda would add $11 trillion on top of what we're already spending over the next 10 years. So how can the federal government also afford to start subsidizing rental housing costs? The federal government prints money. The federal government can provide money for those. So it's by printing money? Sure. America is beautiful. Nobody pays rent. This is not beautiful. Okay? This is ugly. Gao, his wife and two daughters are living in a one-room studio, unable to move into the building they own. And they're afraid to contact the person squatting there out of fear that they'll be sued for harassment. When Gao and other immigrant landlords decided to come to the United States to create a better life, this is not the American Dream they thought they were buying into.