ATHENS – While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard at workers who lost income through either temporary layoffs during an early lockdown or have seen their companies close, landlords are not heeding a call by the government to cut rents.

The New Democracy administration asked them to cut rents by some 30 percent but hasn't seen it happen, leading the government to consider making it mandatory, said the business newspaper Naftemporiki.

It said the rent cuts under consideration would be both in areas where there have been second lockdowns as well as those almost at that level, which would include the prefecture of Attica and the capital Athens.

A review of sites offering properties for rent show almost no reductions to correspond with the crisis despite the desperate situation in which people have been put and more empty storefronts echoing the bad days of a near decade-long economic and austerity crisis, just as Greece was beginning to recover from the worst of it.