For the app - try it and find out. They’re adding new court related APIs daily.
For pro bono help - Anything I can do to help. I am a legal compliance expert. This skill-set and the legal data I have available to me generally reaches across silly things like borders.
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I think that may be the most-liked comment I’ve ever seen on BBS… I mean, I’m sure there are plenty that go into three figures, but I don’t remember right now. I just checked the first three (i.e. oldest) links on #NeedsMoreLikes, for example, and they’re nowhere near this. And they’re around for years - this is less than a day old. Like, wow.
Edit: added a pic.
AL let me help you. https://donotpay.com Get a refund… are you in the US? I used this recently to get $770 from alaska airlines for the same reason - too risky to fly! They wanted to give me store credit, so the AG of their home state and I teamed up to get my money back. Took about 1 week and 1 very hastily written letter. I dunno about you but $2900 would buy me groceries until July.
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The CARES act doesn’t apply where I am, in the UK. There is rent relief here, but people have been evicted simply because they are front-line responders.
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There was something to be learned. Government will bail you out if you are rich enough.
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Not asking for sympathy (precautionary clarification). Please don’t explain to me why I don’t deserve sympathy. You will of course be right, but for many reasons you don’t even know as well as the ones you do.
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I had an apartment in NYC when I left for the Boston suburbs for various reasons. Bad real estate market and couldn’t sell it. So I rented it out to some very nice tenants. They are leaving now to buy a 4 unit building and rent out 3 units. I have to find a new tenant in a CV19 market. Great! But just one of those things. Some you win some you lose.I only mention cos there are all sorts of reasons why people end up landlords. Its not always to extract your and your children’s blood for payment.
The economy is a diverse system and all of it is interconnected. I would agree that rentiers in general are generally a privileged bunch and should be subject to regulation and extra taxes. However companies like AirBnB are just as much rentiers as the apartment owners. As are popular musicians or actors. Same with Amazon and Google etc. A rentier extracts economic rent. Economic rent is that which is not required to produce the product. Everything else is subjective morality. And you are, of course free to engage in subjective morality. I think badly of fat people, which is ironic cos I am fat too.
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Not asking for sympathy.
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Landlords bills are not more important than tenants. But we operate within a system of laws that make commerce possible. If the tenants dont pay them, then some landlords wont be able to pay too. And yes, most real estate is collateral for loans. If we dont build enough social housing its inevitable that there will be a need for a private housing. If there is a shortage of housing, rentiers will be able to extract high rents. Thats one of the problems with UBI - who do you think will end up being in a position to charge more for their goods and services if people have more money? Rentiers. Its definitional.
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I feel a little tinge of sympathy for the owners of restaurant space. That kind of retail space went from being worth something, to being worth very much much less in the blink of an eye. That means there will be some poor souls who recently bought such space, who just got wiped out. Still, these things happen! And the restaurateur also got wiped out. If he bought his own space he got totally ducked. So lets hope they were all renting eh?
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My guess is that this event is gonna end up being the catalyst of a new Great Depression. Real estate is gonna collapse in value so governments need to do something to maintain the status quo. Hence ridiculous give-aways to rich people. The best I can hope for is stagflation.
I mention only cos while I totally get that you have no sympathy for landlords (and who would?) - especially after the longest real estate bull market in history, but in whats coming a lot of people are going to be much worse off. I wonder whether we should have sympathy for even the newly impoverished middle class? After all, there are gonna be a SHITLOAD of really poor people who probably do deserve our sympathy.
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Fred, I want to help. Our local sovereigns have outlawed evictions until the lockdown is over. I feel like there is some people-power to wield in this situation, and at least some international precedence. I want the names (or some form of personally identifiable information) of the evictors. Simply because they are front line respondents does not seem like the landlords are on the correct side of sanity or decency. I assume the tenants will file under 34.1 1b for purposes of discovery, testimony and appeal, and get the action withdrawn, or at the very least have the issue publicly documented. Are they given windows to leave, or having their stuff thrown out? I have many questions.
It’s not as if sympathy is a scarce and limited resource.
I feel for the landlord, because they are weighing options based on preconceived and (now) antiquated notions. What most people need to realize is that a new world order is coming, in which the petro-dollar and its backing currencies are fast becoming valueless. Their livelihoods and tax bills are mounting, and their only means of meeting those demands are hedged on the jobs their tenants may not have any more. Do you let the place to a work-from-home tech worker, or do you exercise your … right … to handle the property in the way that best suits you? Personally, I would call the tax authority and mortgage authority and tell them to freeze the accounts, offering to physically defend the property from an acquisition onslaught. Not everyone has the balls to do that though. We either agree to pick up the pieces, together, or grapple over the rubble. I hope it doesn’t come to blows, I hope that honest negotiation takes place. This is a matter with no modern precedence, and should be treated as such. Creative solutions can be attained, and homogenized to fit that square peg into that round hole for at least a little while…
I have a friend who is in commercial real estate. He builds shopping malls and retail centers around the country. It’s a business that has been under pressure for a long time but Covid might just be the final nail in the coffin. Recently he was explaining the current state of affairs from his perspective as a landlord and the uncertain future he’s facing.
His tenants are major retail chains and restaurants, and the lawyers are scouring the lease agreements looking for every loophole under the sun to get out of paying rent - Force majeure, act of god, financial hardship - basically any clause they can find to break the contract. His revenue has dropped to practically zero because his tenants cannot pay the rent - yet he still has huge bills to pay.
Now the interesting part is his bankers are willing to extend loan terms and restructure payments as needed since a little bit of something is much better than 100% of zero if he goes bankrupt. Money deferred is still better than none at all. The problem, as my friend describes it, is there is a swarm of vultures out there just waiting to swoop in and pick apart the carcass of his business that he and his father built over the past 50 years. He needs his tenants to stay solvent and for their businesses to open back up pretty soon or the whole thing will collapse.
I don’t expect a tremendous amount of sympathy since my friend is of the reviled rentier capitalist class who speculates on real estate so maybe he deserves to get wiped out. However, he has spent his whole life working to build a business that provides a product that (until recently), people wanted/needed. He not a evil villain.
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