Redbank Village in South Portland | Beacon
Reposted from the Maine Beacon
Spencer Jacob wants to form a tenants union at Redbank Village, a neighborhood of modest duplexes built as workforce housing in the 1940s in South Portland. But other Redbank renters, many of whom are living on the edge of eviction and unable to afford higher rent elsewhere, are fearful.
“I guess some neighbors are kind of afraid to talk about that,” Jacob said. “People are definitely afraid of joining the Portland tent city.”
In a seemingly perpetual game of sweeping unhoused people from one spot to another, Portland officials announced last week that the city will clear dozens of tents along Commercial Street on Tuesday. This follows sweeps in other parts of the city where encampments have cropped up this year.
News of yet another sweep comes as the U.S. has seen a dramatic 12% increase in homelessness, its highest reported level, due to soaring rents nationwide and a decline in pandemic rental assistance and eviction protections.
The threat of becoming part of that statistic is not lost on low-income renters trying to organize their neighbors to fight for safe and affordable housing.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Jacob said. “People can complain about the rent going up and up, or they can take an uncomfortable action and band together and say that they’re not going to take any more rent hikes.”
Jacob, 26, moved to Maine from New Hampshire to take an IT job at WEX in Portland. But with over half of his paycheck going towards rent, he said he will likely not renew his lease when it expires in June and instead return to New Hampshire to stay with family.
“I always heard you should never pay more in rent than what you earn in a week,” he said, “but that’s pretty much useless advice these days given that you can’t find that rent anywhere.”
Jacob is far from alone. In Maine, 72% of renters with very low incomes experience housing cost burdens, allocating at least 30% of their earnings to housing expenses. Among them, 52% face severe cost burdens, with housing consuming at least half of their income.
In 2023, the rent-to-income ratio crossed 30% for the first time in the U.S. in more than 20 years, according to Moody’s, meaning that the typical American renter now spends more than 30% of their income on rent and can be classified as rent-burdened.
Actions taken by local officials and state lawmakers have thus far been too small to address the crisis that renters find themselves in, Jacob said. That’s why he feels strongly that renters must get organized.
“It just comes down to the amount of people willing to stick their neck out,” he said. “If I walk into the property management office and say, ‘these are my conditions,’ they’re going to tell me to go take a walk. But if, say, three-quarters of their renters say that, that’s a lot more pressure.”
Nationally, tenants unions, which advocate for the collective rights of renters, often at the local level, are on the rise. According to the Associated Press, this level of tenant organizing has been unseen since the 1970s, “when inflation and momentum from the Civil Rights Movement led to rent strikes across the country and new policies like rent control.”
Tenant movements have already led to reforms in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, among many other expensive, renter-heavy cities.
At least two tenants unions formed in Portland during the pandemic and another recently formed in Brunswick.
Jacob hopes a similar organization at Redbank Village could empower renters there, a disproportionate number of whom are immigrants and people of color. It could give them a collective voice, he said, and a base of people who could push for local and statewide policies like expanding rent relief, capping rent increases, limiting the fees landlords can assess, and creating a public housing developer to build affordable housing where the private real estate market has fallen short.
Such policy ideas have seen pushback from landlords and real estate groups and Jacob believes that an organized base of renters could ensure lawmakers don’t bow to industry pressure.
“I think that renters need to start talking to each other more,” he said. “We need to start forming communities again.”
Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 