The risk of being forced to house someone for free by government edict? Who doesn’t love unfunded mandates.
Rent seeking with someone else's money? Yeah, that's risky.
Was it empty though? There is a shortage in housing and it's pretty rare to have an empty rental in this market. You're injecting conditions that don't really exist to make your point.
This point is enough.
If it is empty then someone who is willing to pay can rent it.
These numbers might be off but you get the idea.
That's the difference.
Your second point sort of invalidates the first. You argue that the government isn’t the source of the harm, then justify the government action as a prudent balancing of harms.
I think the point most are making is that they were trying to solve a much larger problem, but didn’t think the problem through particularly well.
No it doesn't. The pandemic caused the harm, the government acted to mitigate the worst effects of it. You seem to be of the opinion that the "worst effects" are the landlords losing out on rent, but the worst effects are millions of people ending up homeless during a pandemic, which is what the government prevented. Even if it was clumsy, I tend to think landlords would have been worse off anyways if there had been mass homelessness and higher body counts. You can't collect rent if your renters are dead or your own head is in a basket.
I'd be personally ok with the government bailing out smaller landlords (just because), but the largest percentage of these defaults are going to affect private equity firms who have bought an outrageous amount of the housing stock. We need to stop socializing risk and privatizing profits, and this would be a good place to start.
Student loans are cheaper precisely because they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Rent is cheaper because of eviction. Now that we've seen the government unilaterally discharge rent through moratorium, you can expect to see that risk profile baked into an increased monthly payment.