Tag: rent

Unions and Tenant Organizations Are Natural Allies / by Fran Quigley

Demonstrators hold signs during a KC Tenants rally outside the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 30, 2020. (Chase Castor / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Across the US, labor unions are starting to ally with tenant organizers around affordable housing and tenant protection campaigns. The efforts reflect a growing sense of shared interests — and shared corporate enemies

Reposted from Jacobin

Hope Vaughn was a tenant union organizer before she knew there was a tenant union. When her New Haven, Connecticut, landlord Ocean Management refused to address the rodents and mold in her apartment and the standing, rancid water in the building basement, Vaughn’s response was obvious to her. After more than a dozen years as a long-term care certified nursing assistant member of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199 NE, she had no intention of fighting back alone. She began knocking on her neighbors’ doors and gathering signatures on a petition demanding repairs and a cleanup.

“My union experience taught me that it may be easy for a landlord to ignore one tenant’s complaints, but even powerful people in high places are forced to listen when a lot of us come together,” Vaughn says. “There is strength in numbers.”

Then one day, Vaughn overheard someone else outside a neighbor’s door, asking the same questions she had been posing about the bad conditions in the building. A tenant union organizer was making the rounds. Vaughn joined on the spot, and soon became vice president of the Quinnipiac Avenue Tenant Union. She was part of the team elected by fellow tenants that last year negotiated an agreement with Ocean Management to rescind eviction notices to sixteen residents and enter into Connecticut’s first-ever agreement to collectively bargain with tenants.

The public rallies in support of those tenants were bolstered by a big union presence, and every member of the tenant negotiating team had labor-union experience. “Tenants and workers have one thing in common: they have a rich person who is oppressing them,” says Dave Richardson, a longtime Carpenters Union member who joined Vaughn on the tenants’ negotiating team. “The contractor and the landlord are both committed to giving as little as possible.”

Labor Unions Fight for Affordable Housing and Tenants’ Rights

The Connecticut partnership is just one of the ways that labor unions across the country are turning their attention to housing. The Chicago Teachers Union’s current bargaining proposal includes the city and the Board of Education creating ten thousand affordable housing units with a priority for Chicago Public Schools students and families, along with identifying unused city and board property that can be transformed into public housing. Multiple unions played core roles in supporting Los Angeles’s successful mansion tax ballot measure in 2022, which is expected to yield $600 million a year for affordable housing and eviction prevention.

In Tacoma, Washington, United Food and Commercial Workers’ canvassing, phone-banking, and funding helped push through a November 2023 ban on cold-weather evictions and school-year evictions of households with students or teachers. Collective bargaining rights for tenants in San Francisco and Minnesota rent–control legislation both passed thanks to campaigns that featured active union involvement. Unions like American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299 in California are demanding that both worker pension funds and employers divest from rent-gouging corporate landlords.

Labor attention to housing is on the upswing, but it also has plenty of precedent. The landmark National Housing Act of 1937 was pushed by the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) Labor Housing Conference. During the twentieth century, unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America built cooperative housing for workers.

“There is an obvious reason why housing should be part of the labor agenda,” says Stephen Lerner, the architect of the SEIU Justice for Janitors campaign and senior fellow at Bargaining for the Common Good, a partnership between unions and community organizations. “Even if we negotiate a great wage increase for our members, they are losing ground if rent goes up by twice that amount.”

This is not an idle concern. Since 1985, rent hikes have outpaced wage increases by a whopping 325 percent. So it is no wonder that, when unions ask their members about their priorities, housing dominates the answers. “Regardless of if you’re a janitor or a nurse or a health care worker or a home care worker, everyone overwhelmingly said the number one issue was housing affordability,” David Huerta, the president of California SEIU State Council told Vox last year, describing a member survey. “We have members sleeping in their cars, who have big families sleeping in one-bedrooms, who are traveling hours and hours to get to work because they can’t afford to live near their jobs.”

When unions turn their attention to housing, they often find familiar names and faces on the other side of the struggle. “Increasingly, the same people who own the housing are the ones who are screwing over workers,” Lerner says. He and others cite the example of Blackstone, the private-equity firm that is the nation’s largest landlord, employs well over a half million workers, and is notorious for hiking rents and opposing rent control. “When you look to see who the members of the ruling class are, who are the ones with deep political and legislative influence, they are in real estate, especially in urban cities,” Lerner says.

“They Get It, Because They Are Living It”

One of the most promising examples of labor-tenant partnership is the success won by Vaughn, Richardson, and their fellow members of the Connecticut Tenants Union. Rob Baril, president of SEIU Local 1199 NE, points out that the union’s long-term care workers in Connecticut often struggle to make ends meet in a state where it can cost $90,000 a year to cover the high cost of living. “We won 33 percent raises in 2020, but that can quickly get eroded by inflation, especially the cost of housing,” he says.

So 1199 began collaborating with the tenants union, not just with organizing help and rally turnout but also with financial support. “Our members were very ready to have some of their dues money going to support tenant organizing,” Baril says. “They get it, because they are living it. Even if they individually are not getting crushed by housing costs, they know many coworkers who are.”

Hannah Srajer, president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, says the collaboration with Local 1199 has helped the tenants create a labor-inspired organizing methodology that prioritizes democratically elected committees, majority-based membership, and strike readiness. “A lot of people in labor know how to fight, they know how to win material gains for their members, and they know how to build lasting organizations,” Srajer says. “We are starting to do all that in tenant unions.”

Tara Raghuveer of KC Tenants and the national Tenant Union Federation agrees. “Labor has figured out not only how to build power but to exercise power, in a way that the tenant movement is still learning how to do,” she says. “For example, the strike power is a profound one. A labor strike and a rent strike are not identical, but there are a lot of lessons to be learned from organizers who have taken shops out on strike.”

Beyond alliances with tenant unions, there is deep labor support for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would dramatically increase the stock of social housing. This support makes sense for labor on multiple levels. A massive investment in social housing would help workers meet their housing needs while at the same time creating union jobs in the building of those homes. Those social-housing construction jobs can endure during the economic downturns when jobs in the for-profit construction industry traditionally dry up.

For anyone familiar with housing successes in other nations, a growing labor-tenant alliance is exciting stuff. Organized labor played a big role in the creation of social housing in places like Sweden, where workers have come together to form a cooperative that builds and manages housing, while a National Tenants Union bargains for tenant rights and lower rents. The labor movement also played a major role in Vienna’s historic commitment to building and maintaining social housing.

Labor and tenants coming together will help both movements grow, Connecticut Tenants Union’s Srajer says. “A lot of our members are working low-wage jobs where they need a workplace union,” she says. “We are all fighting against corporate greed in the end. The same guys who are buying up whole neighborhoods, jacking up rents and no-cause evicting folks are the ones bankrolling the nursing homes that underpay and mistreat their workers.”

SEIU Local 1199 NE’s Baril agrees. “We have to construct a twenty-first century, integrated movement for working-class rights. That obviously has to include the ability to have shelter fit for human beings to live in,” he says. “Tenant unions are going to be the tip of the spear for that effort, but some of the resources needed are going to have to come from labor unions. Us doing that is not charity. That is self-interest.”

Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

US Affordable Housing Policy Works for Wall Street and Rich Developers, Not Renters / by Algernon Austin

A reveler roller skates with a sign reading, “Scream If Your Rent Is Too Damn High” at the 2022 Halloween Parade on October 31, 2022 in New York City | (Photo: Rob Kim/Getty Images)

Current policy doesn’t make sense if the goal is to provide affordable housing; if the goal is to create market conditions beneficial to real estate developers and investors, it appears to be working quite well

Reposted from Common Dreams

Affordable rental housing policy fails to provide sufficient affordable rental housing decade after decade, yet policymakers continue to do largely the same things. A researcher at the Joint Center for Housing Studies recently observed that in 1960, about 45% of renters in the bottom income quintile spent more than 50% of their income on housing costs. Today, it is about 65%. Renters below the official poverty line spend on average 78% of their income on housing. At what point will policymakers admit that their policies have failed renters?

It Doesn’t Make Sense: The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit

Affordable rental housing policy now primarily relies on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). LIHTC seems like a rather bad idea if one is interested in addressing the affordable rental housing crisis. LIHTC has a number of problems, but two of them should be considered fatal flaws. First, LIHTC is not very good at providing low-income rental housing. The Joint Center for Housing Studies states, “LIHTC does not necessarily protect a renter from cost burdens” and that “lower-income renters living in LIHTC units often require additional subsidies to make this housing affordable.” The primary policy to create affordable rental housing does not do a very good job at creating affordable rental housing, yet policymakers rely on it more and more.

The second major problem is that LIHTC rentals typically convert to market rate after 30 years (in some cases 15 years). This transition rate might be reasonable if there were an adequate supply of affordable rental housing, but there isn’t. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition estimates that the United States has a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes for the lowest-income renters. The Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that the country lost 2.1 million rental units for these lowest-income renters between 2012 and 2022. Affordable rentals are too scarce to allow them to be converted to market-rate housing.

The current estimate is that 325,000 LIHTC rental units will transition to market rate by 2029. LIHTC creates a rental housing bucket with a hole in the bottom. Since more and more of our affordable rental housing is created by LIHTC, the amount of affordable rentals lost to market conversion will increase over time. The United States already does not build enough affordable rental housing to keep up with demand, but policymakers have created a system that will lead to accelerating losses of affordable rental housing over time. This doesn’t make sense.

Affordable Rental Policy Is Working Well for Corporations and Investors

Current affordable rental housing policy doesn’t make sense if the goal is to provide affordable housing. If the goal is to create market conditions beneficial to real estate developers and investors, it appears to be working quite well.

Public housing, especially when adequately funded, is a far more effective method of providing affordable rental housing than LIHTC. The rate of cost-burdened renters is quite low in public housing—much lower than in LIHTC housing. Because of this fact, there are very long waiting lists and tremendous demand for public housing.

From the private real estate industry’s perspective, public housing is a serious threat. “From the beginning, the real estate industry bitterly fought public housing of any kind,” Richard Rothstein stated in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Rothstein adds that the industry later lobbied to structure public housing so that it would be underfunded. Today, after the passing of the Faircloth Amendment, Congress has prohibited the increase in the number of public housing units built by the federal government in spite of the fact that people are, in some cases, waiting for decades to get into public housing.

In addition to investors receiving more and more via tax credits from the LIHTC program, the Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that corporate owners make up a growing share of the rental housing market. (The corporate share of rental properties ranging from 5 to 24 units nearly doubled between 2001 and 2021.) More private equity firms have also moved into the rental housing market. While more and more renters are being cost-burdened, it appears that more corporations and investors are making good profits.

It is possible to create affordable rental housing policies that work well for renters. There are good social housing models in Europe and Asia. Social housing is nonprofit housing. In the European models, it is not restricted to just the lowest income households, which tends to provide it with a stronger political and economic base. The good news is that U.S. city and state governments are beginning to explore these models. In Congress, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), and Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), and other members of Congress have recognized the need to repeal the Faircloth Amendment. Once that amendment is gone, the federal government can move toward constructing affordable, quality social housing.

Algernon Austin is a Senior Research Fellow at CEPR. Austin has conducted research and writing on issues of race and racial inequality for over 20 years. His primary focus has been on the intersection of race and the economy.

Landlords Are Forcing Tenants to Pay Junk Fees / by Emma Rindlisbacher

A “for rent” sign posted in front of an apartment building on June 2, 2021, in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

In the midst of a dire affordable housing crisis, landlords are also charging residents junk fees — which can include “benefits” that are not in tenants’ best interests, application and pest fees, and basic services to keep apartments habitable

Reposted from Jacobin

Deca Property Management, which manages roughly fourteen hundred residential and commercial properties in the St Louis, Missouri, area, says its tenants “know we’re here to help.” In the company’s newer lease contracts, that help includes a mandatory monthly payment of $45.95 for a “resident benefits package” that includes a fee to Deca for reporting whether they’ve paid their rent to various credit bureaus. In effect, tenants are paying for the privilege of their landlord hurting their credit scores.

This so-called benefit package is just one example of a menagerie of junk fees that landlords across the country are charging their tenants, according to a Lever analysis of approximately four hundred court records from eviction and other civil cases. These fees significantly increase the costs of renting an apartment, experts say, and can be for services that landlords are legally required to perform as well as “benefits” that are not in tenants’ best interests.

Practically anything can be a reason for landlords to charge a tenant a fee. Have a low credit score? That could cost you a “risk mitigation fee.” Live in an apartment infested with bedbugs? That could leave you with a pest fee. Even applying to rent an apartment can set potential tenants back hundreds of dollars in application fees, which tenants pay despite no guarantee that they will ever be allowed to rent the apartment.

The Biden administration has taken limited steps to try to rein In tenant junk fees and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently proposed a rule requiring the disclosure of mandatory fees in the total price of any product or service, including housing.

In response, landlord lobbying groups have claimed that the problem the FTC is trying to regulate doesn’t exist in their industry.

“Housing providers do not charge ‘junk fees,’” wrote the National Association of Residential Property Managers, a lobbying group for the property management industry, in a comment responding to the proposed fee-disclosure rule. Rather, the lobbyists claimed that landlords charge fees for “legitimate business reasons and to help cover the costs of concierge-type services.”

Experts disagree. “Rent is already sky high in most places,” said Ariel Nelson, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “There’s already an affordable housing crisis. And then people have to pay these junk fees on top of their rent.”

The Credit Report Catch-22

Fees for reporting rental payment statuses to credit bureaus, such as the benefit package fee charged by Deca Property Management, are particularly pernicious because the actions of credit bureaus can make it harder to rent anywhere else.

By including rental payments in credit reports, landlords make it much harder for tenants to get back on their feet if they have trouble paying rent on time or get evicted. That’s because landlords typically check credit reports before allowing a tenant to move into an apartment. And because the United States is in the midst of an affordable housing shortage, landlords can afford to turn away tenants who have evictions or late fees on their credit report.

These credit reporting fees are becoming easier than ever to charge tenants, thanks to the help of tech startups.

Deca’s resident benefit package program is run by a tech startup called Second Nature, according to a flier advertising the benefit package. Along with a competing startup called CredHub, Second Nature says it can administer a benefits package at no cost to the landlord. These benefit packages include services that ostensibly could be helpful, such as identity theft protection or “concierge” services that help tenants set up their utilities when they move into a new apartment.

But both companies’ benefit packages also include a service that reports rent payments to credit agencies. Deca describes this as “credit building” in its flier and says that by reporting rental payments, tenants could see “average increases of 23 to 42 points” in their credit scores.

An analysis of several court cases where Deca filed to evict their tenants suggests these reports don’t always benefit renters. Even when tenants are late on their payments, Deca continues to charge the fees for their “resident benefit package,” according to copies of “rental ledgers” filed as part of Deca eviction cases reviewed by the Lever. Presumably, Deca continues to report tenants’ payment histories to the credit bureaus.

Deca’s resident benefit package fee is mandatory, and that appears to be by design. While Second Nature, the company that Deca uses to administer the benefit package, merely recommends that landlords make their benefit package a mandatory fee, CredHub says its credit reporting feature is mandatory.

“Allowing residents to opt out defeats much of the purpose of credit reporting, especially with regards to reducing delinquency,” CredHub’s website reads. “Naturally, the residents that opt out are the ones who are least likely to pay on time.”

“It’s really concerning that this is mandatory,” said Nelson about the benefit package. “Some of these things could be . . . things that people don’t want.”

Risky Fees

Landlords are able to make money off tenants even when they refuse to rent to them. One of the most common types of fees — application fees — are charged to tenants before they even move into an apartment. According to the Council of Economic Advisers, landlords collected an estimated $276 million in application fees from tenants in 2023. These application fees can range from $25 to $350 per tenant.

Application fees add up when tenants apply to multiple apartments. Some states have taken action to limit application fees: application fees are prohibited in Massachusetts, and a new law in Rhode Island allows tenants to supply their own credit and background reports in lieu of paying an application fee. But many states don’t regulate application fees at all. Even when states do regulate the fees, landlords often ignore the laws with little to no consequences.

In practice, landlords can charge an application fee even if they don’t intend to rent to the person applying for the apartment. Landlords don’t always disclose rental prerequisites to applicants, such as not having a criminal background or having a certain credit score, according to a report from the National Consumer Law Center.

Even when landlords are willing to rent to tenants with less desirable credit scores or criminal records, they are able to collect additional fees. Some landlords, such as AMOSO Realty, a property management company in Missouri, charge a “risk mitigation” fee for tenants with low credit scores, according to documents filed as part of an eviction proceeding. (AMOSO Realty also charges its tenants a mandatory resident benefit package fee that costs $75 a month, which includes credit reporting for rental payments.)

In a copy of an AMOSO lease filed as part of an eviction case, the risk mitigation fee was justified as a way to compensate the landlord for the increased “risk” of renting to someone with a low credit score.

“Broker’s experience has shown that tenants with credit scores below the optimal amount are more likely to pay late or otherwise default on their lease obligations, creating a higher workload and more risk for Broker,” read the lease. “Therefore, Tenant does have to pay a monthly Risk Mitigation Admin Fee in the amount of $50.00 due on the same date as the monthly rent.”

Fees, Fees, and More Fees

For many landlords, fees are an opportunity to transfer the costs of owning and maintaining an apartment building from themselves to their tenants. Some of the more common types of fees seen in the Lever’s analysis of eviction-related court records include monthly fees for basic services to keep a building habitable, like fees for pest control or trash removal.

In Colorado, for example, a tenant named Nichole Collins sued her landlord, Greystar, for charging mandatory monthly fees for services such as trash removal that Greystar is required to provide under Colorado law. Greystar is the largest apartment management company in the United States, the lawsuit said, and its fees are not disclosed as part of the monthly rent that the company quotes prospective tenants.

Then there are the fees landlords charge tenants after they are evicted or move out. Molly Gordon, a Louisiana attorney at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services who represents tenants in eviction and other lawsuits, said such fees assessed to her clients are often excessive.

“We see a wide range of bogus fees assessed to tenants after move-out, ranging from a $5 ‘photo documentation fee,’ to hundreds of dollars for ‘trash removal,’ to thousands of dollars of ‘lease breakage’ fees after a family was evicted,” Gordon explained. “Tenants are regularly charged for normal wear and tear or problems that were caused by the landlord’s own deferred maintenance.”

According to the Lever’s analysis of court records, in some cases, fees assessed to tenants don’t appear to correspond with the actual cost of cleaning or repairing an apartment.

For example, according to a lease agreement filed in an eviction case, SFR Investments, a landlord that owns property in Florida, says that it will charge a “minimum” of $85, plus $75 an hour in labor costs, to repair a clogged toilet. A different landlord named AGPM charged a tenant in Tallahassee $100 because “Two bags of garbage [were] removed from [the] front-door,” according to a copy of that resident’s rental ledger.

If these fees are not paid, landlords can send the fees to collections, meaning the unpaid balance will show up on a tenant’s credit score, which can cause future landlords to reject the tenant’s housing application.

“You could end up with the debt-collection item on your credit report for seven years,” explained Nelson at the National Consumer Law Center. “When you have all these issues with credit reports, it means that getting housing in the future can be really difficult because a lot of landlords will automatically deny housing to someone who has rental debt.”

“One of the hardest barriers to overcome when renters are searching for new housing is an unpaid balance to a prior landlord,” said Gordon. “When a landlord reviews an applicant’s rental history and it looks like they owe another landlord money, that almost always leads to a rejection.”

Rental debt is a significant part of the debt collection industry. According to one industry survey of 113 debt collection agencies, 33 percent of those agencies collected rental debt in 2022. According to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau complaint database, in 2023 consumers filed approximately a thousand complaints related to rental debt collection. Some collection agencies, such as IQ Data International and Fabco Group, focus exclusively on rental debt.

Washington-based IQ Data International, in particular, has been the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging that the company attempted to collect rental debt related to nonexistent damages. In one November 2023 lawsuit, a tenant sued IQ Data as well as his former landlord, alleging that after moving out and being “advised that there was nothing wrong with the apartment,” he received a bill for $4,500 for charges that included “carpet replacement” and “paint.”

A different 2022 lawsuit alleged that after a tenant used a provision of Florida law to break her apartment lease because the landlord would not address “pervasive mold damage,” IQ Data attempted to collect $2,465.80 from the tenant.

An “Incendiary Term”

The Biden administration has taken several limited steps to address tenant junk fees. In July 2023, the administration announced that it had secured commitments from three apartment search websites to add features that would provide more transparency about the fees that landlords charge. The administration also published what are essentially several strongly worded letters encouraging landlords to rein in junk fees, including an open letter from Housing and Urban Development secretary Marcia Fudge and a proposed “blueprint for a renters bill of rights” that the administration describes as nonbinding.

Most consequentially, in October 2023, the FTC proposed a rule that would require businesses across a wide range of industries to disclose any junk fees they charge to consumers and require that all fees be included in the total price of a product or service.

Landlord industry groups have fought back. In a series of comments about the proposed rule, trade groups like the National Multifamily Housing Council and the National Apartment Association asked that landlords be exempted from the new rule. These organizations claimed that the property managers they represent “work tirelessly to provide consumers with housing that is affordable” and that “the rental housing industry is not generally plagued with many of the consumer protection and deceptive and unfair trade practices that are prevalent” in other industries regarding unexpected fees.

The two trade groups also claimed that the FTC’s proposed rule would be “duplicative” because states also regulate rental housing. Both trade groups spent a combined $11 million in 2023 lobbying Congress and various federal agencies including the FTC, according to their lobbying disclosures.

A spokesperson for the National Apartment Association told the Lever that “Layering additional regulations will . . . harm the affordability and availability of rental housing.”

A spokesperson for the National Multifamily Housing Council told the Lever that “Fees for service in rental housing are sometimes misunderstood” and that “generally, fees in rental housing are not comparable to fees in other industries.”

The New Jersey Apartment Association repeated the National Association of Residential Property Managers’ claim that landlords don’t charge junk fees, noting that the FTC “lacks any statistical basis for its claim that ‘junk fees’ are a problem in the residential rental sector.” Nicholas Kikis, a spokesperson for the association told the Lever that he believed that “the term ‘Junk Fees’ is an incendiary term” and that when landlords charge fees, it “improve[s] affordability.”

“Selecting an apartment is a big decision for most renters, and I believe that most give their choice in housing enough consideration to not be surprised by the fees that they will ultimately be charged,” Kikis added.

Nelson of the National Consumer Law Center said regulators should go beyond the proposed rule to crack down on rental junk fees. She added that excessive fees make up a significant portion of tenants’ rent payments, and that a combination of new laws and aggressive enforcement is needed to rein in such costs.

“At both the federal level and the state level there should be enforcement actions,” Nelson said. “In addition to private enforcement, we also need government actors to be investigating and bringing actions against big violators.”

Emma Rindlisbacher is a researcher and journalist.

Tenants Are Forcing Bay Area Landlords to the Bargaining Table / by Mathilde Lind Gustavussen

Aerial view of Berkeley, California, Thursday, March 16, 2023. (Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / East Bay Times via Getty Images)

San Francisco’s groundbreaking Union at Home legislation encourages tenants to organize in their buildings the way employees organize at work. Housing activists in Berkeley are hoping their city will follow suit — but landlords are pushing back.

Reposted from Jacobin

On February 13, 2024, eight tenants met with three representatives from their new corporate landlord in a conference room at the office of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco (HRC). The parties, who were joined by organizers from HRC, convened for a joint bargaining session over issues brought forward by tenants at two buildings belonging to an extensive portfolio that their landlord had recently acquired: 434 Leavenworth Street and 709 Geary Street.

Imagine a labor contract negotiation, but instead of bosses and workers, the two sides are tenants and landlords. In the private US housing market, such face-to-face negotiating sessions are rare. This one, however, which lasted for two hours, resulted in huge wins for the tenants.

Tenants left the negotiation having scored victories on issues ranging from improved language access, transparency of maintenance contracts, firing of a building manager, resolving of code and maintenance issues, lowering of monthly rents to their July 2022 and May 2023 levels (when the landlord was first notified of the buildings’ respective habitability issues), and a 90 percent rent refund for all tenants from those dates totaling more than $1 million across the two buildings.

Prior to the bargaining session, the Geary Street and Leavenworth Street tenants had spent over a year maximizing their leverage. They had formed tenants associations in their buildings, built strike-ready majorities, and launched majority rent strikes in October 2023 alongside other members of the citywide Veritas Tenants Association (VTA) against their then landlord, Veritas Investments, Inc. — which had just defaulted on a nearly $1 billion–dollar loan on two separate portfolios backed by more than 2,450 rent-stabilized units — demanding a say in the terms of sale of their homes.

The Geary Street and Leavenworth Street strikers utilized the protections granted by California Civil Code 1942.4, which prohibits landlords from collecting rents, raising rents, or issuing three-day “pay-or-quit” notices if buildings violate specific health or safety codes and those issues are not abated within thirty-five days of inspection and notification by a public officer. When Brookfield Properties and Ballast Investments won an auction for the majority of Veritas’s delinquent loan and subsequently assumed ownership of the larger portfolio, they inherited the outstanding habitability issues, the rent strike, and tenants prepared to leverage their power at the point of transfer to change the terms and conditions of their housing.

In doing so, the tenants also exercised the recently secured rights and protections granted by San Francisco’s “Union at Home Ordinance,” which was passed in 2022 and has the potential to make collective bargaining sessions like the one that took place in February at the HRC office more common. Union at Home, which was spearheaded by Supervisor Aaron Peskin and formulated with input from the VTA, HRC, and other tenant and labor groups, is the first of its kind in the private US housing market — similar legislation was passed for US Department of Housing and Urban Development–subsidized housing in 2000 — and guarantees tenants’ right to organize while obligating landlords to bargain with tenants associations.

Specifically, the ordinance grants the legal right to certify a tenants association in buildings with more than five units provided a majority of residents sign on (50 percent plus one unit). It also enshrines the right to hold tenant meetings, door-knock, distribute literature, and invite nonresident advocates or guests into the building for organizing purposes. Furthermore, it requires landlords to attend quarterly meetings if requested and to meet and confer with tenants associations “in good faith.”

All of these practices, designated “organizing activities,” are rendered an official “housing service” on par with electricity, water, or trash removal. If a landlord fails to comply or interferes with any organizing activities — for instance, refuses to negotiate in good faith — tenants can petition San Francisco’s Rent Board, which oversees and implements the Rent Ordinance, for rent reductions due to a decrease in housing services. While under the ordinance tenants associations are building-specific, tenants can continue to organize and build leverage with other tenants in the same landlord portfolio or citywide, and even pursue joint negotiations as the Geary Street and Leavenworth Street tenants did.

San Francisco is one of the nation’s least affordable cities, with state-imposed restrictions on municipal rent regulation due to California’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act and proliferating corporate landlord ownership and “corporate landlord practices” among landlords both big and small. In this climate, novel pro-tenant legislation can help mediate the severe power imbalance between tenant and landlord, which has been further skewed by rental-housing financialization. It does so by establishing a right to organize enforced not by the state, which has repeatedly failed to pass adequate or enforce existing tenant rights and protections, but by tenants themselves, using rent as a point of leverage. The Union at Home legislation places agency with tenants as opposed to public officials or lawyers, while imposing demands on landlords and making the penalty for violating the ordinance financial, as opposed to legal.

Brad Hirn, who is a lead organizer with HRC and has assisted the VTA tenants in their negotiations, told Jacobin:

The ordinance doesn’t automatically bestow upon tenants a victory: it provides a framework for tenants to think about how to organize a majority of their neighbors, and it imposes the obligation on the landlord to bargain in good faith. So it doesn’t guarantee concessions, just as labor law doesn’t guarantee concessions or workplace bargaining. But it’s meant to help tenants think about how to build power, and this law gets us on more equal terms with the landlord. It doesn’t do the work for us, but it creates the footing for us to have a stronger position.

License to Organize

Naturally, issues around landlordism, rent regulation limitations, and insufficient tenant rights and protections aren’t limited to San Francisco. And other tenants have noticed the potential of this type of legislation. Across the bay in Berkeley, a coalition is currently collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would expand tenant protections, reduce rent increase allowances, and enshrine the right to organize, modeled on San Francisco’s Union at Home Ordinance.

Leah Simon-Weisberg, executive director of the California Center for Movement Legal Services and chair of the Berkeley Rent Board, spoke to Jacobin about the ballot initiative’s potential, saying:

In California, there’s a lot we can’t legislate because of Costa-Hawkins, and there’s a lot we can’t negotiate in the contracts, which creates this general insecurity for people because they don’t have any power over so many aspects of their tenancy. And it occurred to us that with right to organize, we can have fairer contracts and get things this way that we can’t get otherwise.

Indeed, according to a report developed by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, San Francisco tenants across fifty buildings formed tenants associations in the first year after Union at Home took effect — accounting for more than one thousand units — and brought forward a range of issues for negotiation. These included repairs and repair timelines, rent increases and “passthroughs,” language access for non-English speakers, habitability issues, eviction filings, utility charges, communication protocols, and issues surrounding large-scale construction projects.

At another formerly Veritas-owned building also lost during the default, tenants are taking part in the rent strike and recently held a second negotiating session with their new landlord, Prado Group. They have put forward a proposal for rent refunds, lowering monthly rents, and a written commitment to engage with the San Francisco Community Land Trust on selling the building when funding becomes available, positioning decommodification as a demand in the collective bargaining process.

By obligating landlords to negotiate, the ordinance formalizes and enshrines the right to bargain collectively and leverage the power built through organizing and/or withholding rent — with the potential for transformative victories. Where governments and policies have failed to limit unfettered landlord power, or in some cases directly restrict governments’ ability to do so, this type of legislation can help tenants redress the unequal power dynamics of the housing sector, provided they organize, and enable the negotiation of leases, rights, and rents not permissible under Costa-Hawkins. The threat this poses to landlords is clear, as the reaction of Berkeley’s real estate lobby to the new ballot initiative shows.

Union Support and Landlord Pushback

The Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act campaign began in the spring of 2023, just after the historic University of California (UC) academic workers strike. With the vast majority of the strikers rent-burdened — spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent — and many unable to live in the cities where they work and study, rent was a central issue and negotiating point during the strike. Iris Rosenblum-Sellers, student worker head steward of United Auto Workers (UAW) 4811 at UC Berkeley, told Jacobin:

Coming out of the strike we were at a point of higher member engagement, with a lot more members willing to take action. So it became credible that we could be a political force in the cities where the UC campuses are located. And we were inspired by San Francisco’s right-to-organize measure, and saw this as a way to build institutional power in our homes and buildings in the same way that we as workers have built institutional power at UC.

UAW 4811 members brought the idea for the ballot measure to the Berkeley Rent Board, and the parties began building a broad coalition around the initiative, which included Service Employees International (SEIU) 1021, East Bay Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Berkeley Tenants Union, Cal Young Democratic Socialists of America, the Cal Berkeley Democrats, the Berkeley People’s Alliance, the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, the East Bay Tenants Union, Tenants Together, and the California Center for Movement Legal Services.

The involvement of UAW 4811 and SEIU 1021 in the campaign reflects broader trends of rising rents and other housing issues becoming increasingly central among organized labor, along with collaboration between tenant and labor groups on specific campaigns and policy proposals. Other recent examples include union leaders backing a proposal for new public housing construction in Rhode Island, a coalition of union and faith groups supporting a rent control proposal in Minneapolis, and the Chicago Teachers Union demanding that the city partner with the board of education to build housing for the families of up to fifteen thousand unhoused students as part of their next contract, resembling a demand put forth by the Boston Teachers Union who won a similar measure in its 2021–2024 contract.

In Berkeley, the coalition members are currently collecting signatures for the measure. If it qualifies for the ballot and is passed in the November 2024 election, it would not only enshrine the right to organize, but would also update the rent stabilization ordinance by reducing allowed annual rent increases. Furthermore, it would expand eviction and tenant protections, and would eliminate rent-stabilization exemptions such as the one that exists for “golden duplexes” that were owner-occupied on December 31, 1979, and where an owner still resides in one of the units.

Meanwhile, the right to organize and the obligation imposed on landlords to negotiate would enjoy broader coverage than its San Francisco counterpart. In Berkeley, tenants of buildings with only two units would be covered by the right to organize, as would tenants of nonprofit housing. Moreover, tenants in “new construction” units (multifamily buildings built after 1980), which aren’t rent-controlled due to Costa-Hawkins, would have the right to sue if their landlord refuses to confer in good faith.

The backers of the proposal hope the act will promote a surge in tenant organizing and bargaining across the city, expanding and strengthening the city’s tenant movement. “Ultimately, this is only going to be as strong as the organizing,” Simon-Weisberg insists. “To get 50 percent of the tenants on board with anything — that’s some pretty awesome organizing. That in itself is going to change things. But if we had even just ten buildings in Berkeley, which had mostly students and had tenant associations, that could radically change things.”

Unsurprisingly, there has been pushback from landlords in both San Francisco and Berkeley. In San Francisco, some landlords have stalled, refused to negotiate in good faith or altogether, or agreed to implement small changes while refusing to discuss more substantive issues, forcing tenants to pursue mediation and arbitration through the Rent Board.

In response, the Board of Supervisors passed an amended version of Union at Home in October 2023, which strengthened the language around good faith negotiation and included accommodations for monolingual tenants. In Berkeley, meanwhile, the Berkeley Property Owners Association has begun collecting signatures for its own ballot measure — the “Renters Relief & Homeowners Protection Act” — aimed at weakening the Rent Board, reducing tenant and habitability protections, and further deregulating rent control. Seemingly in an attempt to confuse voters, the measure also includes a watered-down version of the right to organize, which requires a two-thirds majority to establish a tenants association, doesn’t make organizing a “housing service,” and limits the definition of “good faith,” while preventing the Rent Board from defining it further.

The countercampaign by the landlord lobby is well funded and craftily misleading, and underscores the need for legislation that recalibrates the power imbalance between tenant and landlord. But Rosenblum-Sellers is not discouraged, telling Jacobin:

It’s no surprise that wealthy interest groups representing landlords don’t want to see our power increased and their power diminished. But I’m confident we’re going to win. We have the organizing game, and just like there was a huge appetite for a contract campaign around eradicating the rent burden for UAW members at UC Berkeley and getting our wages to match the cost of living, I think there’s a lot of appetite in the City of Berkeley for transformational progressive policies like this one.

Mathilde Lind Gustavussen is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Free University of Berlin.

How Socialists Won Historic Tenant Protections in Tacoma / An interview with Ann Dorn and Ty Moore

Tacoma, Washington, May 13, 2023. (Wikimedia Commons)

Last fall, democratic socialists in Tacoma, Washington, led a victorious campaign to establish robust protections for the city’s renters. Jacobin spoke with two campaign leaders about the effort.

Reposted from Jacobin

Last November, voters in Tacoma, Washington, approved Initiative 1, a ballot measure that established significant protections for the city’s renters. Also known as the “Tenant Bill of Rights,” among other things the measure requires landlords to provide tenants with rental relocation assistance in the event of large rent hikes, and prohibits evictions during the cold winter months and evictions of students, teachers, and their families during the school year.

The campaign for the Tenant Bill of Rights was spearheaded by the Tacoma chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), in coalition with United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 and other groups. Jacobin contributor Sara Wexler spoke with two lead organizers about the effort, including the coalition behind it and how they overcame a well-funded opposition campaign by the landlord lobby.

SARA WEXLER

Last November, Initiative 1 was voted on and passed in Tacoma. Can you explain what Initiative 1 is?

ANN DORN

Initiative 1 is also known as the “Tenant Bill of Rights,” which was the popular title we gave it. It is a local ordinance that enacted the most progressive tenant protections in our entire state.

There are two protections to highlight. One is rental relocation assistance. If a landlord raises rent by over 5 percent in Tacoma, they’re required to offer relocation assistance to the tenant. It’s a minimum of two months of rent; it can be more under certain circumstances.

The other important piece of this initiative was that we banned cold-weather evictions and evictions of children and educators during the school year. Those are the big highlights. The initiative did a couple other things as well — [for instance] we also capped late fees and move-in deposits.

SARA WEXLER

What is the significance of the Tenant Bill of Rights passing in Tacoma?

TY MOORE

I think it put Tacoma for All and the main recognized force behind it, Tacoma DSA, on the political map — moving us from the margins of politics to the center of Tacoma politics. We are already in close dialogue with labor and community allies about future ballot initiatives around a workers’ bill of rights we’re likely to run. A Tacoma DSA candidate, Devin Rydel Kelly, is running a serious campaign for state house.If a landlord raises rent by over 5 percent in Tacoma, they’re now required to offer relocation assistance to the tenant. It’s a minimum of two months of rent.

For a lot of the people in the leadership of this campaign — who see this [as part of] the fight to build a sustained, working-class political alternative in this city, this victory opened up a lot of new doors for us. I think it’s recognized as such by our opponents and our allies alike, which is why the opposition fought so ferociously against us and why the city council worked so hard to undermine us. I think they did not want to see the Left, socialists, and the labor movement score such a significant victory.

SARA WEXLER

What organizations and individuals were involved in the Tacoma for All campaign and how did they contribute?

ANN DORN

The coalition brought together a number of community groups and organizations. There were folks in Tacoma who work on social justice issues; we had other political and environmentally focused groups. We reached forty major endorsers, and that includes local politicians and prominent community members and people who have taken a stand for positions in Tacoma before.

TY MOORE

Before we decided to pull the trigger on the initiative, we went to our strongest ally in the labor movement, UFCW Local 367, which represents eight thousand grocery workers in the region. The union had supported some of our tenant organizing work before because a lot of its members were facing housing crises; they were sleeping in their cars, sleeping on coworkers’ couches. Members were coming to the union for help.

So UFCW was invested and had a whole-worker organizing approach on this issue. So it bought in early, and it was through UFCW’s early support that we were able to also get the Pierce County Central Labor Council on board and a number of other unions donating, endorsing, and so on.

An exciting moment to show the breadth of our coalition came in the summer beforehand. The city council was trying to cut across us; it voted in July to put forward a competing ballot initiative, a watered-down version. When you looked at who was supporting theirs versus who was supporting ours, they had the Chamber of Commerce, the landlord organizations, and a few individuals associated with housing issues. But we had almost every housing justice organization in town endorsing ours; we had lots of labor unions, we had most progressive-leaning organizations.

A majority of the city council didn’t support it, but we had support in state legislatures and other more left politicians. So in some ways, we were successful at politically isolating the mayor and the majority of the city council. We were proud to have built what effectively was a socialist-led but genuinely broad united front against big business and the landlord lobby.

SARA WEXLER

What was Tacoma DSA’s role in this?

ANN DORN

This effort was born in DSA. It quickly became a community coalition, but there was always a lot of DSA presence and leadership inside of the coalition. It certainly started with the chapter, but it reflected issues that were important to the entire community.

TY MOORE

The Rental Housing Association, one of the main landlord opposition groups, did polling where they asked, “What would you think if socialists from Seattle were trying to impose rent control policies from California?” That obviously wasn’t true. Tacoma DSA is made up of Tacoma residents, people who lived here — a lot of people with many years in the movement. But our opposition certainly tried to seize on DSA’s acknowledged leading role to demonize and undermine us. It didn’t work.

SARA WEXLER

What were the issues renters in Tacoma were dealing with prior to the campaign?

ANN DORN

We had the highest rate of evictions in Washington State when we looked at recent data. Folks were getting kicked out of their houses right and left. Rent increased 43 percent in the last five years.

If you look at where progressive tenant legislation is passing, it’s usually in places with similar conditions: where rent has gone up significantly and tenants are cost-burdened, and they’re also experiencing the slow violence of the state when it comes to evictions and losing your home.

That’s something that happened to me personally. It’s part of the reason I’m so passionate about fighting for housing justice. I know what it’s like to be homeless and a single mom with a child, and a lot of other people here were going through that.

SARA WEXLER

You mentioned some of the opposition groups. Who was the opposition to this campaign, and what was their strategy?

ANN DORN

The folks with the deepest pockets were the Rental Housing Association of Washington and the Multifamily Housing Association. They were major opposition at one point during the campaign.

We actually debated the executive director of the Rental Housing Association. Myself and one of our other steering committee members did this very public debate — I think it was attended by over 150 people. About half the room were landlords; the other half of the room were our supporters. That brought the opposition into clear focus for us.

There were moments during that debate when they asked, “Are you from Seattle?” [And they were saying,] “You’re socialists,” which is something we proudly owned.

TY MOORE

The funny part of that was that the director, Sean Flynn, doesn’t even live in Tacoma. The Rental Housing Association’s office is in Seattle. He lives in a suburb of Seattle, and he’s coming down to Tacoma to call us out as outside agitators. It was pretty scandalous.

The majority of landlords in Tacoma don’t live in Tacoma. Ninety percent of the money that flowed into this race came from statewide and even national groups; the National Association of Realtors dumped $200,000.

The opposition campaign broke all records of previous spending in any previous Tacoma election. It was quite the campaign. We raised $130,000, but they raised almost four times that.

There was also a homegrown opposition. The Tacoma City Council, long before the landlord lobby reared its head, was operating behind the scenes. The council took the lead and tried first to co-opt us. We had five meetings with the mayor, city staff, or different city council members where they tried to give us a seat at the table and negotiate a compromise. We accepted the negotiations; we took it seriously and engaged.

They wanted us to not turn in the signatures to trigger the ballot initiative. That was their ask of us. But in the end, as the deadline approached to do that, their offer was extremely weak on eviction protections and had nothing on the tenant relocation assistance, the two biggest-ticket items that we were proposing.

They couldn’t co-opt us. Then when they tried to put their ballot initiative forward, but they did it sloppily, and we were able to take them to court and force their initiative off the ballot by the end of August because of a legal mistake they made. That’s when the landlord lobby swooped in at the last minute with this massive funding against us.

SARA WEXLER

Why do you think you were able to win, despite the massive spending against the campaign?

ANN DORN

The material conditions in our county had become pretty extreme. With a high rate of eviction and the significant increase in rents, and then you combine that with other economic factors and other pressures that working families are facing, like inflation and groceries costing more — you’ve got a situation where something’s got to give.

That’s part of the reason that we were able to win. The other part is the success of our coalition and the power of being backed by the labor movement locally. That made a huge difference for us, both in getting folks to vote and the donations that we received as a result of union support.

I would like to see more of that nationwide, unions backing housing justice. Because you fight for these gains at the bargaining table like higher wages, but workers often win and then turn around and that’s all eaten up by increased rents.

TY MOORE

When you look across the country, you see tenant laws being passed, particularly in big urban centers like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and so on, where the extremes of wealth inequality are highest and where housing prices have gone highest. But I think Tacoma is emblematic of a rising trend nationally over the last few years, where traditionally more affordable, working-class cities are suddenly experiencing massive investments from outside real estate moguls.

During the course of the campaign, we had an activist and her family facing eviction, and we found out her massive apartment complex was owned by two San Francisco private equity billionaires. And we found one of them bragging on a podcast about his philosophy. Basically they buy apartment buildings that poor people live in, renovate them, push the poor people out, add a few things, and then rent them to richer people.

That business model, I think, has moved on an aggressive scale into a lot of traditionally blue-collar, more affordable areas over the last few years. So Tacoma experienced this rapid shift from being a city that prided itself as “grit city,” as an affordable blue-collar city, to increasingly finding working-class residents feeling squeezed and pushed out. I think that sense of change fueled a lot of our support as well.

SARA WEXLER

Since the bill passed, what has Tacoma for All been doing? What has the response been from the community and from the opposition — namely the landlords and city council?

ANN DORN

Tacoma for All has been engaging in lots of tenant education and getting information out to folks about their new rights. That’s not something we’re counting on the city doing; in fact, it has signaled that it doesn’t want to tell tenants about their new rights. They’re not undertaking any effort at this point to educate renters.

Like most tenant rights in Washington, some of the protections in the bill have to be accessed through the court system. So there is a huge need for education and letting folks know. We’ve had teams canvassing every weekend this past month. We’re planning “know your rights” workshops, and we’re going to keep on making sure that people understand the new protections and that we can develop materials that will support them in accessing those.

TY MOORE

Beyond tenant rights, Tacoma for All is thinking about what we do next to continue building working-class political power in our city. In alliance with UFCW 367, we’re looking at putting a workers’ bill of rights ballot initiative in 2025. That would raise the minimum wage from $16.25 an hour — that’s a statewide minimum wage — to around $20 an hour, which is what Seattle and a number of suburbs of Seattle enjoy. Alongside that, [it would include] a fair scheduling provision, increased mandatory sick days, and a number of other workers’ rights. What we’re excited about is that corresponds in terms of timing and issues to the contract battle that UFCW 367 is about to wage for their eight thousand grocery workers.

The number-one issue for them is guaranteed hours and wages. Whether it’s at the bargaining table with Kroger and the big grocery monopolies or through the legislative process, we’re going to fight hard to make sure UFCW members and all workers enjoy a basic standard of economic stability and stable working hours with predictable schedules.

The union itself is gearing up for a potential strike. It believes that Kroger and the grocery monopolies are not going to give guaranteed hours without a strike. We want to use the fight for a ballot measure on these issues to mobilize mass solidarity for the grocery workers.

Ann Dorn is cochair of Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America. She served on the steering committee of the Tacoma for All campaign.

Ty Moore is on the steering committee of Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America. He was the campaign manager for Tacoma for All.

Sara Wexler is a member of UAW Local 2710 and a PhD student at Columbia University.

Maine businesses back rent relief bill to help them retain workers / by Dan Neumann

Photo by Getty

Reposted from the Maine Beacon

Late last week, 58 Maine businesses including bars and restaurants, a dental practice, a solar energy company, providers of childcare, counseling, and behavioral home health services, and a car mechanic, sent a letter to Gov. Janet Mills and the members of the legislature’s Joint Select Committee on Housing asking them to prioritize rent relief in the legislature and the budget this year. 

The call came as a bill to create a statewide rent relief program similar to the one called for in the business owners’ letter had its work session on Friday in that committee. The bill was tabled but not before several Republican members of the Housing Committee voiced concerns about placing burdens on landlords.

Rep. Cheryl Golek (D-Harpswell) introduced LD 1710, “An Act to Establish the Maine Rental Assistance and Guarantee Program and Amend the Laws Regarding Tenants and the Municipal General Assistance Program,” last year. Housing advocates and many renters backed the bill, while landlords and their allies fiercely opposed it, and the bill was put on hold until this year. Landlords repeated many of the same arguments in Friday’s session. 

The signers of the business letter said high rents hurt their ability to “attract and retain workers, put pressure on local governments and tax bases…and hurt customer spending as family budgets are squeezed.” 

Photo via the Maine Beacon

But business owners’ calls for rent relief also emphasized that it’s the right thing to do: In a statement, signer Phil Coupe, Employee-Owner of ReVision energy, said rent relief “helps maintain housing for families who are living on the edge of barely being able to afford their apartment and homelessness.” 

LD 1710 would help Mainers who make around 30% of the annual median income or less (for a family of three, that’s around $28,000 a year) if they do not get Section 8 federal rent assistance. LD 1710 is the only bill before the legislature this session that would provide sustained help for these renters with very low incomes, allowing them to afford new or existing affordable housing that would otherwise be out of reach, and would reduce evictions and homelessness. The majority of individuals who access rental assistance need help for an average of three years or less. 

The letter highlights gaps in Maine’s housing policies that rent relief could fill with targeted and fast support. “The investments your administration has made to support building affordable housing and the unhoused are well placed, but we can see that Maine continues to have huge unmet housing needs. According to a Maine Center for Economic Policy analysis, nearly one-in-three Maine workers who rent a home or apartment pays more than one-third of their income toward housing.”

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.

California Just Passed the First State Social Housing Legislation in the US / by Richard Marcantonio

Hundreds of renters gathered at the state capitol in Sacramento, California, on April 24, 2023, to voice their support for SB 555 and stronger tenant protections. (Courtesy of Anya Svanoe)

Reposted from Jacobin

Earlier this month, California passed a bill requiring the state to produce a study and recommendations on expanding the state’s social housing sector. Organizers hope it will be the first step in providing de-commodified shelter on a large scale.

On October 7, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 555, the Stable Affordable Housing Act of 2023. The legislation commits the state of California to producing a study on the prospects for creating “a robust sector of social housing that offers below-market rents affordable to households of all income levels who are unable to afford market rents and that is permanently shielded from the speculative market.”

Introduced by Sen. Aisha Wahab, the bill emerged from five years of discussions among tenant organizations, unions, and other members of the Housing Now! coalition.

SB 555 embeds a definition of social housing in state law and sets in motion a public process “to identify tools to help achieve the state’s goals for lower and moderate-income housing by creating social housing through both new production and preservation of existing units.” The resulting California Social Housing Study, to be completed in 2026, will include recommendations to the state legislature for creating social housing at the scale needed.

The legislation is the first of its kind at the state level. It reflects a growing view that private, for-profit development is failing to address the state’s worsening housing crisis — and suggests an alternative, de-commodified vision of housing based on democratic control and meeting human needs for shelter.

A Statewide Vision for Social Housing

As rents continue to soar across the state, evictions surge, and the unhoused population swells, Californians have debated what the root of the problem is. Many have focused on the failure of cities to permit new housing construction and of the private market to build enough housing.

But tenant advocates note that market-rate housing construction has proceeded apace — between 2013 and 2022, California overproduced market-rate housing by more than two hundred thousand homes, 43 percent more than its official target; by contrast, housing production lagged the state’s target for the lowest-income households by 50 percent. Even more damning for the supply-side diagnosis, much of the high-rent housing produced is lying vacant, held for its value not as shelter, but as investment vehicles. A 2020 report found that Los Angeles, for instance, had more than one vacant residential unit for every unhoused person.

When policymakers attribute the shortage of affordable housing to a lack of supply on the market, they are led to propose solutions that prioritize building more market-rate housing. That view leads some “YIMBY” (Yes in My Backyard) advocates to view social housing “mostly as a countercyclical project, because we [understand] if another recession like 2008 happens, rates of private home construction would plummet.” But understanding that the problem is to a large extent rooted in speculation points to a very different solution: creating a sector of housing that is shielded from the market, to serve those whose needs for shelter profit-driven investors and corporate landlords will not meet even as the market supply of housing increases.

With the passage of SB 555, the state of California has officially embraced the view that speculation is a major source of the housing crisis:

The private housing market has failed to meet the needs of the vast majority of California residents, who are unable to afford market rents. Increasingly, housing speculation and financialization in the rental market is driving rents higher, even as new market-rate housing is produced.

Given the extent to which housing has been commodified — diverted from its role in meeting human needs into an investment vehicle — the bill proposes a bold vision for ending the crisis: meeting the state’s target of building 1.4 million units of below-market-rate housing by 2030 through creating social housing that is “permanently shielded from the speculative market.”

Since its birth in “Red Vienna” in the wake of World War I, countries from Chile to Finland to Singapore have developed a variety of models of and approaches to social housing. SB 555 defines social housing not on the basis of any specific policy model, but in terms of who owns it, who can live in it, and the rights and protections its residents have.

Specifically, the bill defines social housing as housing that…

  1. is “owned and managed by a public agency, a local authority, a limited-equity housing cooperative, or a mission-driven nonprofit entity solely for the benefit of residents and households unable to afford market rent”
  2. accommodates a mix of households, from those with the lowest incomes to “moderate-income households unable to afford market rent”
  3. provides its residents with strong protections against eviction, unaffordable rent increases, and other abuses
  4. is permanently protected from privatization
  5. provides residents with “the right to participate directly and meaningfully in decision-making affecting the operation and management” of their homes.

The bill tasks the state’s housing department with running a public process culminating in a California Social Housing Study, including recommendations to the legislature, to be completed by December 31, 2026. The study will examine “the range of models for creating social housing that are currently in practice, or that public agencies or mission-driven nonprofit entities plan to implement both inside and outside California” with the aim of making recommendations to the legislature on how to scale up social housing within the state.

“Our vision for social housing gained ready acceptance by members of the legislature who are looking for real solutions to the growing homelessness crisis,” said Andrés Ramos with Public Advocates, one of the organizations that helped draft the bill. “With social housing, keeping people affordably in their homes is baked into the cake.”

Building the Movement for Social Housing

The organizations that led the push for SB 555 were Housing Now!, Tenants Together, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and Public Advocates Inc., but the coalition that passed the bill was much larger. It included over eighty tenant organizing groups, community land trusts, faith groups, housing and climate policy organizations, and labor unions. The sole recorded opposition came from the California Association of Realtors, along with the City of Huntington Beach.

Importantly, the last few years have seen large segments of organized labor come around to the idea of social housing. The cost of housing in California has been an issue in strikes, including the Oakland teachers‘ strike in 2019, this year’s Los Angeles school workers’ strike, the University of California academic workers‘ strike in 2022, and the Los Angeles hotel workers’ ongoing strike, among others. (One of the iconic images from the United Auto Workers strike at University of California, Berkeley, was a banner proclaiming “End Rent Burden.”) The California Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, supported SB 555, as did a number of statewide labor councils and unions.

Many of these labor organizations and others came together this year with ACCE, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), and AFSCME 3299 to form California Common Good, a group attempting to get unions organized around “common good” housing demands. Organizers are focusing on the rising cost of rent. As one union leader said at the group’s kick-off meeting in January, “What we win at the bargaining table, our members give back to their landlords.” With the push for social housing, unions hope to build affordable homes that serve primarily to give working-class people shelter rather than line the pockets of landlords and real estate developers.

Tenant organizing is also at an all-time high in California. “More and more local tenant organizing groups are connecting the long-term fight for social housing to their immediate struggles for protection against eviction and unaffordable rent hikes,” said Shanti Singh of Tenants Together. On April 24, hundreds of tenants from all over the state converged on the state capitol in Sacramento to demand “housing as a human right.” Chanting “Tener un techo/Es un derecho” (having a roof is a right) as they marched around the statehouse, they afterward made visits with dozens of legislators to voice their support for SB 555 and several other bills (including a bill to close loopholes in a 2019 tenant protection law, which the governor also signed).

The coalition of supporters also included groups that have worked to pass ballot measures to fund social housing at the local level. In particular, the United to House LA coalition passed at the ballot a transfer tax on high-end real estate sales. The measure will dedicate 22.5 percent of revenues to “alternative models of permanently affordable housing,” using a definition very similar to SB 555’s. San Francisco, Oakland, and other California cities have also taken steps to promote social housing at the ballot.

SB 555 did not pass without some compromises. It originally set a ten-year goal of 1.2 million new units of social housing and called for a concrete social housing plan, rather than just a study. The timeline for the study’s completion was also delayed by two years.

The Road Ahead

In the coming year, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) will begin the public process to implement SB 555 by creating the first-ever California Social Housing Study. Organizers hope the state’s assessment of social housing will not only bolster local social housing campaigns, but also feed into the national movement for social housing. “California’s study — and the organizing behind it — promises to boost the push for social housing in states across the U.S., and ultimately at the federal level,” said Andreina Kniss of the Alliance for Housing Justice.

But the leadership of Housing Now!’s social housing campaign sees strategic value in the passage of this legislation that goes beyond the study and legislative recommendations themselves. By committing itself to identifying “tools to help achieve the state’s goals for lower and moderate-income housing by creating social housing through both new production and preservation of existing units,” California has officially started down a path they hope will eventually lead to the provision of democratically controlled housing as a basic human right.

This commitment has symbolic value, which organizers hope to use to further popularize the idea of social housing. The public process also offers the opportunity to organize tenants and workers across the state, as the law requires HCD to “enlist in the development of the study broad participation of residents unable to afford market rents.”

A priority for organizers moving forward will be connecting the statewide campaign for social housing to local campaigns, especially those that heighten the visibility of housing speculation by targeting the speculators themselves. In San Francisco, members of the Veritas Tenants Association, with support from Housing Rights Committee, are on a rent strike against the city’s largest private landlord. ACCE itself has organized tenants in San Diego properties owned by Blackstone, which is also a target of AFSCME 3299 and other unions who are demanding that the University of California divest their pension funds from the private equity giant.

Organizers believe that bringing attention to these market players will not only drive a wedge between them and corporate politicians, but also heighten the popular demand to remove housing from the control of real estate speculators.

“In the end, passage of the state bill is just a tool for building the power it will take to challenge the dominance of real estate and financial capital in our homes and communities,” said Amy Schur of ACCE. “The impetus for transformative change will come from local organizing that unites millions of residents and workers around this demand.”

Richard Marcantonio is a managing attorney at Public Advocates, a racial and economic justice advocacy organization based on San Francisco, where his work focuses on social housing and public transit. He is an occasional contributor to Labor Notes.

Richard Marcantonio is a managing attorney at Public Advocates, a racial and economic justice advocacy organization based on San Francisco, where his work focuses on social housing and public transit. He is an occasional contributor to Labor Notes.

The Housing Crisis Is Class War / Sahar Raza

Tenants of a low-rent apartment building in Toronto, Canada, protesting evictions, July 16, 2022. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Republished from The Monitor / Posted in Jacobin on June 18, 2023

Review of the The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan (Between the Lines, 2023).

A new book on the housing crisis in Canada poses the idea that the housing crisis is simply a result of the housing market working in exactly the way it was designed. To break this paradigm, the tenant class must organize and build political power.

What if there is no housing crisis, but a housing market working exactly as designed?

Ricardo Tranjan’s The Tenant Class rests on this premise, effortlessly dismantling apolitical narratives of Canada’s housing system to reveal an intentionally obscured class struggle between exploited tenants and extractive landlords — most of whom wouldn’t have it any other way.

In this timely and refreshing manifesto, Tranjan takes aim at Canada’s structurally inequitable and increasingly deregulated rental market, which prevents, rather than promotes, housing security, affordability, and adequacy among tenants.

He draws parallels between exploitative labor relations and the exploitative rental market to describe how property-owning landlords amass wealth on the backs of tenants — all thanks to government complicity dating back to the dispossession of indigenous lands and creation of property rights.

He then uses historical and contemporary tenant organizing stories — alongside his own professional and lived experiences as a political economist, policy researcher, and child of turbulent 1980s Brazil — to argue that the only solution is a struggle: the tenant class must organize to build political power and demand a more equitable, regulated, and largely nonmarket housing system.

Which Side Are You On?

To create the conditions for social change, Tranjan also calls on progressive researchers and allies to practically feed and support on-the-ground movements. After all, “it takes political power to go up against the landlord class and force governments to rein in markets,” and part of building that power involves addressing the cultural marginalization of the tenant class.

But more than that, it requires that the rest of society sees and names the class struggle within Canada’s housing system for what it is. To this end, Tranjan advances a simple and unsettling provocation in the last chapter, reminding readers of their own agency: “now the question is . . . where you stand.”

The message is clear: it’s time to pick a side in this class struggle. There is no neutrality in the face of injustice, disinformation, and exploitation.

The Tenant Class practices what it preaches, systematically busting harmful myths about tenants and “struggling landlords” while offering compelling and research-backed arguments, stories, and quips, which can be mobilized by organizers and advocates to push for housing justice. And though it may not be politically palatable to the roughly two-thirds of the population who benefit from the status quo (namely, property owners), Tranjan’s clear and incisive class-based analysis extricates itself from the endless housing “policy merry-go-round” in important and radical ways.

The Housing Crisis Is Not Apolitical

For one, Tranjan decisively names the power-holders that feed, constitute, and enable the elite landlord class in its mission to extract more and more income from tenants. From homeowners to industry players, landlords, real estate investment firms, pension funds, developers, banks, and other mortgage providers, he makes apparent that a huge segment of the population benefits from a housing market in which rents rise faster and faster, untethered from income, inflation rates, and vacancy rates (not to mention human rights standards).

This doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however — government laws and policies (or lack thereof), institutions like landlord and tenant boards, and mainstream moral standards permit and legitimize this wealth accumulation. Meanwhile, disproportionately racialized, low-income, and already marginalized peoples in, or in need of, rental housing face deepening intergenerational poverty at the hands of the property-owning elite — a fact that is conveniently obscured in our mainstream news media and consciousness.

Tranjan thus argues that mainstream narratives that frame the “housing crisis” as an apolitical, complex, or new issue that requires technical or win-win solutions only serve the interests of the elite. In fact, these elites pour money and resources into making these narratives appear to be common sense or the way of the world, particularly through their influence over news media and government. They even co-opt progressive language (like the language of human rights, equity, and “affordable housing”) or use disinformation to undermine criticism, disguise their exploitative policies and practices, and maintain the status quo.

“Supply-side” arguments constitute one such narrative, suggesting that we simply need to build more housing faster to make housing affordable — a solution that conveniently involves sweetening the deal for developers and landlords through financial incentives. And, as Tranjan notes, our governments reproduce, pander to, and invest in these narratives.

Take Canada’s National Housing Strategy, for example. Steeped in supply-side logic, the strategy funnels billions of dollars to for-profit developers who produce housing that, more often than not, ends up contributing to, rather than addressing, the root causes of unaffordability, homelessness, and housing inequity. Yet, insidiously, the strategy uses the language of human rights and affordability to disguise these extractive practices.

In the context of my own work to implement the human right to adequate housing via federal policy, I see these dynamics firsthand. Well-intentioned and progressive housing policy professionals too often become trapped in cycles of consultation, make-work, and self-censorship with governments, only to have their research and solutions shelved time and time again.

Government and sector leaders engage in the endless “merry-go-round” of debating policy tweaks or Band-Aid solutions to homelessness and inadequate housing rather than meaningful, structural, and human rights–based change. And all the while, our political and policy leaders (many of whom are part of the elite class) manage to evade naming and regulating the profiteers and beneficiaries of housing injustice.

Fighting Back

This reality is what makes The Tenant Class so powerful, timely, and necessary. It resists the cyclical dynamics of the housing discourse and reminds readers of what tenant movements have known for decades: the problem is political, not technical. And importantly, profit doesn’t have to be part of the housing equation.

Drawing from inspirational stories of defiant tenant movements, resistance, and power, Tranjan places our contemporary “housing crisis” within a century-long history of class-based struggles — struggles that are ongoing.

The book reminds tenants of their agency and allies of the need to center and support those tenants, all while recognizing that “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase nonmarket housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing.

In this way, The Tenant Class stands apart from the mainstream housing paradigm and gets to the heart of Canada’s so-called housing crisis with precision and conviction. Weaving together history, data, and stories with thoughtful ease that makes the complex feel accessible, it serves as fuel for social change and vividly demonstrates the power of collective action. It paints a vision of a housing system that decenters profit in favor of justice, democracy, and human rights — one in which everyone has access to safe, affordable, and dignified housing.

And, most importantly, it makes social change feel possible so long as readers confront the reality of our class-based housing system head on.

This book is, therefore, a must-read for tenants, housing advocates, policy professionals, or “anyone else interested in rental housing.”

To tenants, it says: join or start a tenant union — you have the power to fight back.

To housing advocates and policy wonks, it says: now is the time to organize, build political pressure, and link arms with tenant movements who have been doing this work all along.

And to everyone else, it says: pick a side. Do you stand in solidarity with the rising tenant class, or will you uphold the exploitative status quo?

Tranjan doesn’t let anyone off the hook in this compelling piece, asserting that it is up to all of us to take up the mantle of tenant organizing, to support those on the front lines of the struggle, and to demand a world in which adequate housing is truly for everyone.

Sahar Raza is director of policy and communications at the National Right to Housing Network and a member of Oxfam Canada’s board of directors.