The fallout from the pandemic response just keeps coming in. Every day the news gets worse. Unending inflation. Government debt. Cancer from lack of early detection. Learning losses. Suicides. Depression and substance abuse. Crime and anomie enveloping cities. International trade falling apart. Church attendance has gone down dramatically. Distrust of everyone spreading wildly. Administrative overreach. Vaccine injury and death.
Let’s just state this plainly. March 2020 was a turning point in U.S. history if not the history of the world. We flipped a switch from civilization to barbarism. We have yet to turn back.
Every bit of this was foreseen. We were warned, even as early as 2006, when the great epidemiologist Donald A. Henderson said that if lockdowns were ever deployed in the name of virus control, the result would be to turn a manageable pandemic into a catastrophe. He was certainly correct, but also anyone could foresee that nothing good comes from imprisoning an entire population.
What we did not anticipate was the full scale of the crisis, which has shocked me. There are certain features of the fallout that I could not have foreseen. For example, who could have imagined the collapse of the vast industry surrounding nuptials?
People are not getting married the way they used to because they did not date for two years. For that matter, weddings were banned for a time. As a result, we are seeing the collapse of dress makers, photographers, venues, and jewelers who cannot sell engagement rings on the scale they did just a few years ago.
“The data so far this year are up roughly 11 percent from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007. The next highest increase was a 2.7 percent jump in 2019, excluding an artificially high increase last year caused by pandemic counting interruptions. This year’s surge reflects a host of pressures around the U.S. such as rising housing costs, lack of affordable rental units and the nation’s continuing opioid crisis.”
Let’s talk about the rent moratorium. It was passed with the Trump-backed CARES Act of March 2020. It did not say to renters: do not pay. It said to rental property owners: you cannot evict for non-payment.
This sent a mixed message. People who fell on hard times knew that they could delay payments or maybe forget them entirely. Hey, if the government can make everyone rich with stimulus payments even while no one was working, the difference between fantasy and reality is no longer clear. Many mom-and-pop properties were suddenly starved for revenue. There was nothing they could do to end squatting. It was sheer robbery.
The CDC involved itself later, claiming a justification that having people without housing roaming the streets would spread coronavirus. So we had the nation’s top public-health bureaucracy massively violating property rights and invading the economic sphere. The whole thing was evil. So too, by the way, was the division of the workforce into essential and nonessential, which denied people the right to earn a living!
The Supreme Court later found that to be too invasive for any constitutional justification. It was a 4-5 decision, which is terrifying. That implies that 4 of 9 Supreme Court justices are essentially socialists. Still, it was repealed, thanks to a slim court majority. Eventually everyone had to cough up back rent and the moratorium was gone. Thank goodness because in this country, we are supposed to respect property rights.
The result was a generation of landlords who became very fearful. They didn’t want any renters who would think twice of robbing the property owners again. They only wanted tenants who would pay regardless. That meant getting rid of economically marginal tenants. So only the well-to-do could get properties starting in 2021. That has continued to this day.
Thus, a surprising contributing factor is the tightening of standards for lease approval. After Trump’s rental moratorium, owners and renters cannot afford to take risks on lease holders. They have implemented very strict standards, and with shortages in housing, they are able to pick and choose on whom to take risks.
As a result, the typical rental contract requires a full credit report, proof of many months of an income stream, an employer letter, and a full history of previous rental records. If you cannot provide that, in addition to all the usual government IDs and bank information, you are completely out of luck. You are living on the streets.
This is a massive problem for millions of people. Imagine losing your job in your current city and being unable to move back home with mom or dad or siblings. You go to a new city with every anticipation of being able to provide for yourself with a server job or driving for a ride-share company. But the income stream as reported doesn’t meet the standards. Plus you don’t have a long employment record there.
You just now landed the job. You try to get a place to live but truly no one will accept you because you don’t have the income track record to prove that you can pay. You do have some savings but those don’t count. They need to see evidence of a steady, moderately paying job. You cannot provide that.
What are you going to do? You sleep in your car until it is impounded. You turn to drink, drugs, or something else worse. You decline fast and end up in a shelter. Your health and life completely fall apart. This is not just the fate of crazy people. This could be anyone. It could be you. Truly, vast numbers of people are one step away from homelessness.
Imagine that same scenario with an entire family.
Yes, many of the homeless people are troubled in other ways. This has been true traditionally. But it is more and more true that normal, average, middle-class Americans who are ready and willing to work are vulnerable too. This is a moral and practical outrage. It’s also the culmination of decades of building restrictions and zoning laws that have restricted housing increasingly to the well-to-do and privileged.
Have you ever talked to a real estate developer? They face a level of bureaucracy that is beyond belief. The land-use restrictions are overwhelming at all levels of government. Just getting through them requires tremendous labor, capital, and intellectual resources. By the time they get their approvals, the costs of new developments are sky-high and so they can only rent to rich people in order for the ordeal to make sense.
As a result, government sweeps in to build public housing or subsidize developers to set aside units for the economically disadvantaged. This creates unsustainable mixes of populations and makes life difficult for everyone involved.
No question about it: the nation’s shortage of affordable housing is entirely a result of government interventions. Rather than repeal the interventions, governments embark on ever more and create even more problems. In the end, millions are now vulnerable to the ultimate life disaster of not having a place to rest their heads at night.
An 11 percent rise in homelessness is a national tragedy. And there is every reason to believe that this will get much worse. The lockdowns were indeed a turning point. The tragedies are everywhere around us.
