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“Amid the coronavirus pandemic, nearly one-third of apartment renters in the U.S. didn’t make their April payments, according to numbers from the National Multifamily Housing Council and a group of real-estate data providers.
By the numbers: 69% of tenants paid some rent between April 1-5, down from 81% in the first week of March and 82% in April 2019.
The data comes from 13.4 million apartments analyzed by several real-estate data firms. People who only paid a portion of their rent were included among those who paid. The data does not count single-family homes, and the apartments tallied exclude public housing and subsidized affordable housing.
Why it matters: The numbers shed new light on the economic hardships the COVID-19 outbreak has brought on Americans. The due dates for most rental payments came the same week as a record 6.6 million people filed for unemployment — a number that eclipsed the 3.3 million who filed the preceding week.
The impact: Some renters will be temporarily protected from eviction for unpaid rent by a collection of federal and local laws.
But, but, but: Many real-estate analysts speculate that unpaid rent could snowball to cause commercial mortgage defaults, terminating investments in bonds backed by those mortgages, the Wall Street Journal notes.”
– Axios, Roughly one-third of U.S. apartment renters didn’t make April payments.
“”The higher rate of people failing to pay rent was anticipated, given the 6.6 million new applications for unemployment benefits” last week, The Wall Street Journal notes. Many of the renters are protected from eviction by a patchwork of federal and local coronavirus emergency measures, but fewer than a third of U.S. rental units are financed through government-backed mortgages and thus eligible for the deferred mortgage payments authorized by Congress last month.
The data on unpaid rent is based on 13.4 million higher-end rental units, and it does not include single-family homes or public or subsidized housing. Real estate analysts and financial interests are concerned that a rise in unpaid rent could have adverse affects on the wider real estate market and mortgage-backed investments.”
– The Week, 1 in 3 renters have paid no rent in April, trade group frets.
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World News is a poster project by Ihanktonwan Dakota artist David Bernie that promotes issues and stories worldwide.
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