I have mixed feelings about the covid rent relief programs, but, I have helped several tenants apply.

One tenant is a waitress who has paid on time for the past 7 years - in my most expensive house. When covid hit, her restaurant closed permanently and she was unemployed.

She has been making partial rent payments, but, continued to fall further behind on her rent.

She just went back to work last month at another restaurant.

I helped her apply for the rent relief program - she is not computer literate.

I got the rent relief check in the mail yesterday and she is now paid up through the end of July!

For some of my tenants, they have used the rent relief program to get a free ride.

Glad to hear a story of how things went well for a change. : )

She continued to make an effort and communicated with you, and you helped her to get the help she needed to get back on her feet.

I too am glad to hear you got paid....two months in advance too is nice!

The concerns I have though are what is the final outcome of all this? For you, individually, I'm curious if there are any stipulations like you can't evict for 6 months going forward if she falls behind again, or if you can't raise rent or charge late fees.

For society as a whole, my concern is these "relief" funds are just piling more on the already unsustainable national debt. It would be different if we were running budget surpluses or had very low levels of debt, but according to the figures we are now at the highest level of national debt to GDP ratio ever...even worse than WW2 when we were fighting a war on three fronts with over 2 million "added" service members in uniform who would go off the federal payrolls once the war was over. Today, there is no war, and no end in sight to the spending.

Every dollar we print is another handful of snow tossed on the mountain top....the avalanche will fall, eventually. So while I am glad to see the Govt trying (somewhat ineptly as usual) to fix the damage they caused, the cure appears worse in the long-run than the disease.

What we should have done is given out accurate information to the most vulnerable, encouraged them to stay put, and brought them the resources they needed to weather the storm in their homes, and let the other 95% of us go about our normal businesses. That would have kept the economy humming, which in turn would have provided the goods and services needed to help the vulnerable, and the vast majority of people would have have few to no problems.

But instead we used a sledgehammer to drive a penny nail. We will be dealing with the consequences for a long time.

I cannot evict the tenant for the time covered by the payment.

The program paid her rent through July.

I can start the eviction process in August.

In this case, the stimulus money was well spent. I am happy she got the aid.

For most of my other tenants, the stimulus money only encourages them to be more dependent on the government handouts.