Cancel Rent Movement

[Rev. Rye]

You wanna know where the Cancel Rent movement came from? Maybe from the economic ruin left by the current pandemic.

While I can’t be sure about the long-term feasibility of such a plan, bear in mind that we’re living in a pandemic, and because people don’t want it to spread like wildfire, people are staying home. Even as lockdowns are easing, they’re still staying at home. And often, this means they can’t go to their jobs. And many of these people were living paycheck to paycheck before it, and now that the paychecks aren’t coming in and many of their former jobs don’t even exist anymore, their position is even more unstable. I highly doubt there’s a really “good” option. We can either A) just force them to go back to work (if their job’s still there) and expose them to the deadly virus; B) keep business going for the renters as usual, ultimately creating mass evictions and a massive rise in homelessness; or C) temporarily suspend rent (and hopefully find ways to subsidize the owners to tide them over) so that these people at least have a roof over their heads.

I don’t know how viable a long-term abolition of rent would be and I’ll withhold my support for it until some municipality can demonstrate that it can be pulled off, but in the short term, it’s probably the best thing we can do.