UFCW Local Leads Fight to Win Washington’s Strongest Tenant Protections / by Ty Moore

_{^{Members and staff of UFCW Local 367 systematically reached out to the union’s 1,800 members registered to vote in Tacoma to urge them to support an initiative that dramatically strengthens tenants’ rights in the city. Photo: UFCW Local 367}}

_{Reposted from Labor Notes}

Grocery and retail workers helped win the strongest tenant protections in Washington state last November for the 100,000 renters in the city of Tacoma.

First we had to beat the mayor’s and city council’s attempt to bring a competing watered-down ballot measure. And then we had to overcome a vicious and deceptive landlord opposition that smashed all previous political spending records in Tacoma.

“We’ve created incredible goodwill in the community just as we gear up for a tough contract fight,” said Michael Whalen, who helped initiate the campaign as a dairy clerk and shop steward at Fred Meyer.

“Members were inspired to take on this fight not only because we have co-workers sleeping in cars; not only because rent hikes keep eating away at bargaining table gains,” said Whalen, a member of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367’s executive board and now on union staff. “Solidarity goes both ways, and we’re going to need all of Tacoma to stand with us as we get strike-ready.”

Local 367’s contracts cover more than 7,000 workers at Fred Meyer, Safeway, and Albertsons, as well as many independent grocery stores across six counties. County-wide contracts begin to expire in May 2025, and the union faces a tough fight to win stable, guaranteed hours, safety measures, and pay increases.

WHAT WE WON

Under the new law, tenants who fall behind on rent are protected from cold-weather evictions between November 1 and April 1. Households with students or educators are protected from eviction during the entire school year.

Landlords who raise rents by more than 5 percent must offer relocation assistance equal to two months’ rent. If they hike rents by more than 10 percent, that assistance rises to three months.

The law also requires that notice of rent increases be sent out six months in advance. Landlords cannot raise rent or evict tenants if outstanding health and safety code violations exist.

Move-in fees, including deposits, cannot exceed one month’s rent, and late fees are capped at $10 a month. The law also creates stiff new penalties against landlords who violate renters’ rights.

‘KEEP TACOMA FEARED’

Tacoma is known as the “grit city,” and Tacomans are proud of our blue-collar reputation. Since we’re situated beside the sprawling Joint Army-Air Force Base Lewis-McChord, many veterans settle here. While solidly “blue,” Tacoma’s political leaders have tilted more conservative than Seattle’s, making it all the more shocking when working-class voters passed the strongest tenant protections in the state.

Though we’re just 45 minutes south of Seattle’s booming tech industry, “new economy” investments have largely passed us by. “Keep Tacoma Feared” is a favorite local bumper sticker that roughly translates to, “We don’t want you wealthy snobs moving down here anyway!”

Nonetheless, Seattle’s affordability crisis is pushing more and more people to move southward. Real estate vultures are buying up Tacoma properties—and working people are being squeezed out.

Between 2017 and 2022, landlords in Pierce County (which includes Tacoma) hiked rents by 43 percent. They are evicting our neighbors at the highest rate in the state. Young workers, women, and especially workers of color have been the hardest hit.

Now workers need to earn at least $32 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to the Tacoma Housing Authority. And you’d need to make double that, at least $150,000 a year, to buy a new home in Tacoma, according to real estate listing service Redfin.

WHOLE WORKER ORGANIZING

The rising cost of housing has hit grocery workers hard. Despite significant wage gains in our last contract, union grocery workers in Tacoma start at just $16.53 an hour. Meat cutters, the best paid, top out at $29.70. Making things worse, many grocery workers are denied full-time hours.

“The labor movement backed Initiative 1 because housing costs keep rising faster than wages, forcing more and more workers into housing insecurity,” said Local 367 President Michael Hines at a December press conference.

“To secure a decent standard of living, dignity, and hope for the future, our movement needs to look beyond the workplace and fight for the whole worker where they live,” Hines said.

TACOMA FOR ALL

Initiative 1 began as a joint campaign of Local 367 and the Tacoma chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Our local’s partnership with DSA has helped excite and activate members, especially younger members,” Hines added. “The partnership was critical to our victory.”

With an initial donation of $6,000 from the union, Tacoma for All was launched in the summer of 2022 to advance a bold housing policy platform and to organize tenants into action. By last February, when 120 union and community activists gathered to kick off the signature drive, the Pierce County Central Labor Council and numerous community groups were backing the campaign.

Fueled by 100 volunteers, Tacoma for All gathered 7,300 signatures to qualify the initiative for the November ballot, and knocked 20,000 doors to win the vote. Hundreds of small donors contributed most of the $130,000 raised.

Within Local 367, the 21 members of the executive board agreed to lead by example, with nearly all volunteering to collect signatures, phone-bank members, and canvass to get out the vote. A dozen other members also put in volunteer shifts, and more than 20 provided video testimonies for social media highlighting how Initiative 1 would impact them.

All told, Local 367 donated $17,000 and dedicated significant staff resources to the effort. In August, Whalen was hired off the shop floor to become the local’s community and political organizer, leading up the union’s get-out-the-vote campaign. In the final weeks, member leaders and staff systematically reached out to the local’s 1,800 members registered to vote in Tacoma.

“This victory made me and my co-workers proud to be a part of Local 367,” said Whalen. “I think a lot of my co-workers are more confident now, going into our next contract fight, knowing that the community has our back and knowing that when we fight, we can win.”

BEATING CITY HALL

Before we started collecting signatures, the mayor and most city council members dismissed our lobbying efforts. But in April, as it became clear we would qualify the Tenant Bill of Rights for the November ballot, Mayor Victoria Woodards rolled out the red carpet for negotiations.

By offering us “a seat at the table,” the mayor hoped our coalition would agree to a weak compromise rather than turning in signatures to force a popular vote. The implicit threat was that city leaders would put forward a competing, watered-down tenant rights initiative.

We faced two potential traps here. On the one hand, if we rejected negotiations, city leaders and landlords could have dismissed us as “uncompromising radicals” (they tried this anyway, but it didn’t stick). On the other hand, if we kept negotiations with city leaders behind closed doors, we risked alienating our activist base, who were correctly skeptical of the mayor’s intentions.

So after the first of five negotiating meetings, we publicly committed that:

any compromise offered by the mayor would be put to a democratic vote of all supporters at an open conference on June 11, just before the signature deadline;
we would publicly report on our meetings with city leaders; and
we would continue going all out to collect enough signatures to qualify our initiative.

In the end, the city’s alternative was so weak that the 100 supporters who gathered on June 11 voted unanimously to turn in the signatures and put Initiative 1 on the ballot.

In July, the City Council voted 7-2 to put forward its competing initiative, but made a critical legal blunder in the process. Tacoma for All and Local 367 filed a lawsuit to knock it off the November ballot. We won, clearing the way for a clean up-or-down fight for Initiative 1.

THE LANDLORD OPPOSITION

We spent the entire nine-month campaign warning supporters that landlords would spend big to stop us. But for months they hid their faces, hoping the city council would derail our efforts. When that failed, corporate landlords came out swinging in the final month of the campaign.

The landlords spent a record-shattering $371,000, including $200,000 from the National Realtors Association alone. All told, more than 90 percent of the opposition money came from outside of Tacoma—no surprise, since a big majority of Tacoma’s landlords don’t live in the city.

Nonetheless, their deceptive and divisive campaign of ads, mailers, text messages, and robo-calls clearly had an impact. Most of it was outright lies. They claimed Initiative 1 would protect “criminals” and “squatters” from eviction, increase taxes on working people, and destroy small landlords.

In the end, in a close vote polarized along class lines, our grassroots campaign proved more powerful. In many working-class and racially diverse precincts we won by more than 80 percent, while voters in wealthier waterfront neighborhoods turned out in big numbers against us.

This victory raised the confidence of tenants and union members in Tacoma—demonstrating our power when we organize, and putting on display how different the bosses’ interests and workers’ interests are. Our coalition is already discussing what we should take on next.

_{Ty Moore was the campaign manager for Initiative 1. He began working as a political and community organizer with UFCW Local 367 in January.}

The Social Housing Secret: How Vienna Became the World’s Most Livable City / by Philip Oltermann

_{^{Allt-Erlaa public housing project, Vienna}}

In the Austrian capital, renters pay a third of what their counterparts do in London, Paris or Dublin. How is it possible?

_{Reposted from ZNet}

The first place that Max Schranz moved into after leaving his family home is the kind that many young professionals dream of inhabiting at the peak of their career. At only 26, he lives in a bright fifth-floor apartment with high ceilings overlooking a European capital city, 10 minutes from the central station and within walking distance of cinemas, theatres and bars.

No lottery win or parental trust fund was needed to make that dream a reality: Schranz, who is a master’s student, pays €596 (£512) a month for his 54 sq metre two-bedroom apartment – a fraction of typical rents for similarly sized and similarly located apartments in other major European cities. What’s more, he didn’t have to put down a deposit and his rental contract is unlimited – in theory, he’s allowed to pass it on to his children or a sibling when he eventually decides to move on. “I’m aware it’s a pretty stress-free existence,” Schranz says. “My friends in other European cities are a bit jealous.”

Welcome to Vienna, the city that may have cracked the code of how to keep inner-city housing affordable. As other cities battle spiralling rental prices, partly fuelled by inner-city apartments being used as short-term holiday rentals or being kept strategically vacant by property speculators, the Austrian capital bucks the trend. In the place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte.

Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the population.

Many of these apartments came into being a century ago, as part of an enormously ambitious building programme after the end of the first world war, when Vienna was awash with people uprooted by the collapse of the Habsburg empire. Funded primarily through a hypothecated tax on luxuries such as champagne or horse-riding, the inaugural phase of socialist-governed “Red Vienna” saw 65,000 socially rented apartments shoot up within the city by the time of the Nazi coup attempt in 1934.

These “superblocks” from the 20s and 30s don’t look like ordinary social housing. With the modernist ideals of the contemporaneous Bauhaus school yet to capture the imagination of Austrian architects, for one, they haven’t got flat roofs. The most famous examples of Red Vienna social housing, such as the Karl Marx-Hof in the 19th district or the estates dotted along the “Ring Road of the Proletariat” on Margaretengürtel, look more like castles or monasteries, with art deco flourishes on their facades. As the historian Eve Blau has put it: “If you’re planning something radical, it’s not a bad idea to come across as conservative as possible.”

The majority of Vienna’s council estates were built after the second world and look more familiar, but even they don’t tend to have the stigma of poverty and crime associated with similar developments in the US or Europe. Schranz’s apartment is inside the Theodor Körner-Hof, a 50s-built group of 14 housing blocks in the Margareten district that are far from fancy, yet still well-maintained enough that Schranz likes to hang out in the green inner courtyards on summer evenings to read his books.

The Viennese term for estates like these is Gemeindebauten, “communal buildings”, which hints at their underlying philosophy. “One of the key concepts to understanding Vienna’s approach to housing is social sustainability,” says Maik Novotny, an architecture critic for the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. “In order to avoid the creation of ghettoes and the costly social conflicts that come with them, the city actively strives for a mixing of people from different backgrounds and on different incomes in the same estates. Social housing isn’t just for the poor.”

As a student without a disability or any dependants, Schranz would have no hope of applying for social housing in countries such as the UK, but in Vienna the city courted him via a programme for first-time tenants under 30.

“Keeping a mix of people from different paths of life in social housing is key, and yes, it isn’t always easy,” says Kathrin Gaal, Vienna’s deputy mayor and executive councillor for housing. One tactic is an income maximum for applicants of €57,600 a year for single people and €85,830 for two-person households. But “once you’ve moved into a Gemeindebau as a young student, if you start earning more once your career progresses, we don’t check in on you, because your situation could also worsen again,” says Gaal.

Vienna’s social housing programme is more than a policy – in the city it is a foundational ideal that is a source of immense pride. And as with similar progressive achievements that command a political consensus – the UK’s National Health Service, say, or Norway’s oil fund – that can create blindspots in the national debate. Talk to Gemeindebau residents such as 76-year-old Heinz Barnerth, a retired mechanical engineer who has lived for the past seven decades in the Reumannhof estate in Margareten, and he will be unswerving in his praise of the idea that brought his block into existence in the 1920s. “Vienna’s model is more timely than ever, because rental prices are hard to contain,” he says.

But the reality doesn’t always live up to the ideal, and Barnerth is even more animated when complaining about the time it takes the city to carry out repairs in his estate. The light by the stairs leading to the basement hasn’t been working for three weeks, and when a door lock breaks, the residents usually don’t bother waiting for central management to fix it. “If you don’t sort a handyman to repair the lock overnight, the junkies try to break in,” he says. One of the downsides of having a single large company, Wiener Wohnen, in charge of managing and maintaining so much housing stock in the city is that logging and commissioning caretakers’ tasks can lead to bottlenecks.

The other downside of the Vienna model is that while 60% of the city’s residents have hit the jackpot by getting into a Gemeindebau or subsidised co-op, that still excludes a large chunk of the population of a city in which 80% are renters. Only those who have resided permanently in Vienna for two years can apply for social housing, and those who stay in private rentals face problems more familiar from other European cities.

“Twenty years ago, private rentals in Vienna were mostly low quality and low price,” says Justin Kadi, an assistant professor in planning and housing at University of Cambridge. “But in recent years, private rentals have transformed into a segment of Vienna’s housing market that is in many cases not just high quality, but also quite expensive.”

This, he explains, was largely due to deregulation in the mid-90s, which allowed landlords to charge tenants not just for size and equipment standards, but also for location, often leading to arbitrary mark-ups. As part of the same reforms, it became easier for landlords to limit contracts, putting private renters in Vienna in a less secure position.

“The only thing that other European cities can learn from Vienna is their marketing,” says Harald Simons, a Berlin-based economist and researcher who published a scathing analysis of the Viennese housing market in 2020. Vienna, Europe’s second-largest German-speaking city, has “an income structure that is more like Berlin’s but average new rental prices similar to those of a high-income city like Hamburg”, Simon says. He criticises Wiener Wohnen for its opaque accounting, suggesting its finances are in direr straits than the Vienna’s senate admits, and that the city’s underspending on maintenance is driving the middle-income earners so desired for the social mix into private rentals.

And yet, there are good reasons why Vienna’s social housing model has attracted renewed attention and regular visits from international policymakers recently.

The crucial difference is in the trend. While the number of homes in London’s socially rented sector has stayed broadly stable, at about 800,000, for example, its share of the city’s housing stock continues to fall, partly due to them being converted into privately owned homes via the right-to-buy scheme, and in part because of the lack of new homes being built while the UK capital continues to grow. Figures released just before Christmas show that 105,000 households in the UK are trapped in temporary accommodation because of a shortage of social housing. Many cities in continental Europe battle with similar problems: Berlin, for example, having missed its target for 20,000 new homes in 2022, only managed to build about 16,000 last year.

Vienna, by contrast, has the advantage of being in a monopoly position that it has never relinquished. “We never succumbed to the temptation of selling off our municipal or subsidised apartments in the way many other European cities did to plug holes in their budgets,” Gaal says. “It means our stock of housing is still vast.”

About 40 years ago, Vienna started a “land procurement and urban renewal fund” that reserves land in the city exclusively for social housing: it currently has 3m sq metres of space, including farm or fallow land, disused rail tracks and empty hospitals, that it can exclusively put out to tender to social developers. “That kind of systemic stockpiling might be something that other countries could get started on too,” Gaal says.

In 2019, Vienna introduced a new zoning rule that means that in developments with more than 5,000 sq metres of living space, two-thirds must be subsidised housing. “For cities, the question is always whether they have a good bargaining position with land owners,” even Vienna-sceptic Simons concedes. “And Vienna has a good bargaining position.” The city’s land procurement fund coordinates closely with the department that hands out planning permissions, and can strike deals accordingly.

Whether Vienna will reach its target of building 5,500 new Gemeindebau apartments by 2025 remains to be seen, and whether that will be enough if the city is expected to return to its 1910 population levels by 2038 is another question entirely. But it is taking tangible steps. After an 11-year freeze on new social housing developments, the city resumed building new Gemeindebau blocks in 2015, and has earmarked €557m for new developments in 2024. One of the most recent to be completed, by the local architecture firm WUP, lies about 7km east of the city centre in Seestadt Aspern, a new urban centre growing on the site of a former airfield.

Margarete Stoklassa, 73, and her husband moved into one of the 74 apartments from an estate in the city centre last April because they needed barrier-free access, and seem more than pleased. At 50 sq metres their new home is not huge, but a circular floorplan and several sliding walls mean that “I sometimes end up playing hide-and-seek with my husband,” says Stoklassa. “I am very happy; everything I need is here.” The couple pay €520 in rent a month.

The facades of the new-era Gemeindebau are painted in chalky reds, blues and greens that reference the mighty fortresses of the Red Vienna period, although with prices of building materials peaking during the construction phase, there is plenty of bare concrete and galvanised steel. “The rise in the cost of raw materials forced us to concentrate on what social housing is really about,” says the architect Bernhard Weinberger. Having prevailed for more than a century, Vienna’s ideals of communal living have shown they can stand the test of time. “This building should still be standing in 200 years,” he says.

_{Philip Oltermann is the Guardian’s European culture editor.}

Connecticut Communists issue emergency housing program / C.D. Carlson

_{^{EVICTED: City-hired movers carry out a former tenants’ belongings from a house in Norwalk, Ct. | Erik Trautmann / Hearst Connecticut Newspapers via AP}}

_{Originally published in the People’s World on April 19, 2023}

HARTFORD, Conn.—Tired of the same old system, a rising movement is organizing around the cornerstone principle that all people have the right to housing. In Connecticut, the movement is organizing for secure and stable housing as a means of creating a fairer, more stable, and more reliable democracy that puts the interests of working people before the interests of profit.

Last week, the Connecticut Communist Party USA issued an urgent program calling on all communities in the state to declare a housing emergency. The program grew out of the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and the formation of a broad coalition of struggle to address working class needs, specifically the need to be free from arbitrary and aggressive evictions and the need for affordable housing.

The program, available online in full, draws a picture of a small state that has been hammered by an aggressive inflow of capital that has destabilized communities and harmed working renters and homeowners in the name of profit.

Recognizing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where the United Nations stated all people have the right to housing, the program critiques the capitalist system that routinely fails to provide for the needs of people, opting instead to commodify housing in order to provide maximum profits for a corporate ruling class at the expense of people and planet.

The program describes in great detail the crisis in Connecticut that was kicked into overdrive by COVID-19. For example, the program makes clear that during the pandemic institutional investors like Blackstone and UBS Realty Investors flocked to the state for the sole purpose of land speculation, to flip housing, and jack up rents.

At the same time, big business in the state thrived; 12 Connecticut billionaires acquired $15 billion in value while essential and low-wage workers struggled to get by.

This squeeze on working people—being pressed in a vice of land speculation and capitalist exploitation—has caused wild disruption in housing and is gutting communities. For example, as rents have risen, 68% of workers in Connecticut now spend more than half their income on rent. This incredible pressure has led to a rise in homelessness for the first time in ten years.

The state has struggled to provide for the needs of the people being thrown into homelessness: Only one third of the people who call 2-1-1 for emergency housing are able to get placements—the remainder are left outside.

The program explains that the burden of high rent and evictions is borne disproportionately by Black and Latino residents, who are twice as likely to be evicted than white renters. Likewise, working mothers account for 56% of eviction filings, and the LGBTQ community and the undocumented are subjected to disastrous rates of discrimination and harm.

Despite these horrendous conditions, the program notes that the movement is rising and winning victories, raising class consciousness around the issue of landlord speculation along the way. For example, a diverse working-class coalition of housing activists in Connecticut won action by the state legislature establishing Right to Counsel in 2021, a program that gives tenants the right to an attorney in housing court.

This program has blunted arbitrary and aggressive evictions, as 76% of tenants with a lawyer are able to now avoid an eviction judgment and 71% are now able to avoid involuntary moves.

Building off that victory, door-knocking across the state was launched to build support for a statewide 2.5% rent cap. The coalition expanded to include unions and community groups. This broad coalition of working-class organizations organized hundreds of people to give their testimonies to the legislature’s Housing Committee in a hearing that ran 20 hours through the night and into the morning.

Workers sharing horror stories of eviction and severe hardship that resulted from skyrocketing rents—sometimes doubled rents imposed with little notice—far outnumbered the corporate landlords five-to-one in the longest public hearing in living memory.

While corporate interests were able to block legislation in this session, the movement carries on, as 72% of Connecticut workers continue to demand a cap on rent.

The program closes with a ten-point emergency program directed at local and state governments:

Immediately declare a state of emergency and continue and expand all protections against evictions and foreclosures put in place during the pandemic.
Enact a 2.5% annual rent cap, coupled with rules preventing rent increases from one tenant to the next and a prohibition on no-cause evictions.
Eliminate systemic inequalities and discrimination; enforce anti-discrimination laws against redlining and other harmful practices by large landlords and lenders; require municipal zoning laws that allow for multi-family and affordable housing units; enact rules that seal eviction and foreclosure records so landlords cannot use that information to discriminate against tenants who enforce their rights.
Require representative fair rent commissions in all municipalities and give standing to tenant unions before those commissions; defend the right to organize tenant unions and enact rules that require the recognition of those unions by their landlords.
Allocate sufficient resources to expand the Right to Counsel program to cover every municipality in the state.
Expand state and federal rental assistance for low- and moderate-income households, including for the unhoused.
Enforce equal protection from environmental and health hazards in housing.
Increase real estate conveyance taxes and fees on the large investors buying up single family and rental properties and use those funds to create affordable units.
Enact the Equity Agenda put forth by Recovery for All to tax the rich and provide relief to renters and homeowners. The Equity Agenda would increase revenue by $1.24 -1.44 billion per year through a 2-mill statewide property tax on commercial and residential properties worth more than $1.5 million, a 5 percent surtax on capital gains for people earning more than $500,000, raising the corporate tax rate, and a 10 percent digital advertising tax on companies earning more than $10 billion. It would create three new tax brackets with higher tax rates for people earning more than $1 million, $10 million and $25 million. The agenda includes tax relief for the poor and middle class by spending annually: $49 million to maintain the state’s income tax credit; $250 million to double the child tax credit to $500; $180-240 million to double the property tax credit to $600; and $180-240 million to provide property tax relief to seniors.
Make a historic national public investment in affordable housing by reallocating funds from the excessive military budget to our communities as part of a just transition to a green, peace economy.

The report concludes with a quote from a working-class mother of color. In Spanish, she recounted her children’s struggle with a recent eviction and unhealthy living conditions: “It is stressful and inhuman not to find affordable housing, because it is a human right to have a roof and stay in the community. Displacement is abusive much more for children.”

The movement is stepping forward.

_{C.D. Carlson writes from Connecticut.}

Hearing turnout shows wide support for Green New Deal housing legislation in D.C. / by Jamal Rich

_{^{Signs hang from the Meridian Heights apartment building in Northwest Washington on May 18, 2020. While the pandemic-caused economic crisis made the affordability problem in D.C. apparent, the issue of housing goes far beyond short-term COVID impacts. | Caroline Brehman / CQ Roll Call via AP}}

WASHINGTON— If a new proposal is enacted, D.C. could become one of the first major cities in the United States to adopt a municipal strategy aimed at creating a sustainable supply of affordable housing.

In April 2022, Janeese Lewis George, councilmember of Ward 4, introduced two historic legislative bills to the D.C. city council modeled after the Green New Deal in Congress.

The first bill, the “Green New Deal for Housing Act” aims to solve the affordable housing crisis in D.C., which was influenced in part by housing attorney and former at-large candidate, Will Merrifield who is inspired by the social housing model in European countries.

The second, the “Green New Deal for a Lead-Free DC” will accelerate lead water service line removal by making D.C.-owned or -leased buildings remove lead pipes by 2028 and privately-owned buildings by 2030 (currently only 20% of lead service lines are projected to be removed by 2030).

Social housing was the central plank of Merrifield’s campaign for D.C. council at-large in 2020. He noted in an email to supporters back in April, “Although we may have lost at the ballot box, the ideas that we proposed are taking root. I will follow up in the coming weeks with steps that you can take to make sure the bill becomes law and that social housing becomes a reality in Washington, D.C.”

The local president of the NAACP D.C. branch released a press statement supporting the councilmember’s proposal, saying:

“Housing justice and environmental justice are civil rights issues. Environmental injustice, housing injustice, and lead exposure have disproportionately severe health impacts on lower-income, Black, and Brown people in the District of Columbia. Not all residents in the District are equally impacted. Race, class, income, housing, healthcare access, and privilege influence the health impacts of environmental toxins. Today, affordable housing, green jobs, and reducing lead exposure are critical to promote healthier communities.”

The bill, if passed, would create a new Office of Social Housing Development, which will be under the guidance of a council of at least five renters and a director approved by the D.C. council. This office will be responsible for the creation and maintenance of social housing in the city. The bill will also create tenant leadership boards, which will give tenants power to fight for their interests in their buildings.

The units it develops will be mandated to be 2/3 social housing that is municipally-owned and mixed-income (for families at 30% median income and at 50% median income), while 1/3 will be market-rate to cross-subsidize affordability. The construction will be funded by D.C.’s Housing Production Trust Fund and Green Bank.

Any surplus rents will go toward deepening affordability and creating more social housing, instead of profit for landlords. This law most closely resembles the social housing approach in Vienna, Austria, where 50-60% of all people live in permanently affordable, rent-stabilized, subsidized housing.

Sunrise Movement D.C. was present during the original announcement of the historic legislation. “A catastrophic wave of displacement is pushing workers out of D.C.,” the group stated on its Twitter page. “Underlying it all is staggering inequality.” Other groups, including Sierra Club and Empower D.C., also back the housing proposals.

The legislation was co-introduced by five other councilmembers, including Brianne Nadeau (Ward 1), Brooke Pinto (Ward 2), Charles Allen (Ward 6), Trayon White (Ward 8), and Robert White (Ward 8). Trayon White and Robert White are both running for D.C. Mayor against the incumbent, Muriel Bowser, who has not signaled support for this bill as of yet.

On Nov. 22, the first hearing of the Green New Deal for Housing Amendment Act of 2022 took place with over 150 witnesses testifying from a variety of tenant, community, and legal organizations, as well as longtime D.C. residents who have been directly affected by housing costs and policy throughout the years.

If it becomes law, the proposal would make D.C. a leader on affordable housing policy, alongside other locales, like Montgomery County, Md., which recently approved funding for social housing to build new units.

Representatives from organizations like Sunrise Movement D.C., Green New Deal for D.C. Coalition, D.C. Statehood Green Party, D.C. for Democracy, Beloved Community Incubator, D.C. Jobs With Justice, Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America, the Claudia Jones School for Political Education, and a variety of others weighed in at the hearing with support for the bill.

Native Washingtonian and Claudia Jones School member Luci Murphy said:

“Separating people from their families, neighbors, and support systems is violence. The dislocation of families in D.C. demonstrates that our society values property rights more than children’s rights, women’s rights, and family’s rights—which are human rights.”

Other organizers of Claudia Jones School who spoke included Mark Agard and Dante O’Hara, who both noted that the current system of housing in D.C. centers on maximizing developers’ profits at the expense of the city’s working class.

The hearing lasted for 11 hours and heard from longtime District residents who spoke of poor housing conditions (mold, dilapidated conditions, rodent infestations, flooding, etc.) in conjunction with discussion of a recent HUD report exposing how the D.C. Housing Authority is failing.

The chairperson of the Committee on Housing and Executive Administration, Anita Bonds (At-Large-D), even admitted that her own daughter could not afford to live in the city. Bonds has historically supported policy on the side of the big developers and real estate speculators in the District.

Since the year is coming to a close, there are doubts about whether the proposal will make it out of committee on time for a full council vote, but organizers are feeling optimistic for 2023.

Social housing would be a historic landmark for the residents of D.C., a means of keeping the current residents from being displaced and expanding affordable housing for new people moving into the city.

_{Jamal Rich writes from Washington, D.C. where he is active with the Claudia Jones School for Political Education.}

_{People’s World, November 23, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/}

Detroit tenants organize to take on big landlords and property management companies / by Joseph Bierlein

_{Joseph Bierlein / People’s World}

DETROIT—Detroit today is a city mostly made up of renters. According to 2020 census data, 53% of residents are now rent-paying tenants. Sometime before 2015, Detroit transitioned from a majority homeowner city to a majority renter city. This transition can, in large part, be attributed to a large-scale corporate takeover of homes, apartment buildings, and public housing.

This change has not been a peaceful one. Just outside downtown, longtime residents in the New Center area (largely working-class residents of color) have been subject to an extended process of displacement in favor of young, white, higher-paid professionals. This process has taken many forms, including legal and illegal attacks on residents. Detroiters, however, are fighting back.

The recently formed Tenants Association of New Center Plaza and Marlenor (TANCPM) has taken up the struggle against large-scale landlords and property managers. Members of their association spoke with People’s World about their struggle.

TANCPM is in a battle with Raymond DeBates, the owner of the New Center Plaza and Marlenor buildings and an attorney whose firm specializes in real estate law. Management has changed twice over the last two years. In 2021, both buildings were administered by Golden Management, but recently a company named Continental Management took over operations.

Prior to forming the tenants’ association, residents addressed maintenance issues by filing complaints with the Buildings, Safety, Engineering, and Environmental Department (BSEED), which later issued a correctional order for multiple violations. Nonetheless, maintenance issues continued to go unresolved. In response, residents joined together to form TANCPM.

Lewis Bass, a New Center Plaza resident and founding member of the TANCPM, explained why tenants formed the association, saying, “I’ve had people coming to me for years, complaining about management, [saying], ‘We need to do something.’ We need to do something. If I go in there alone, you’ll be looking at my apartment being gutted and renovated. If I go in there to present your concerns, we have to go as a group.”

TANCPM held its first meeting in 2021 to discuss the installation of Project Green Light cameras (Detroit facial recognition surveillance), inaccessible housing due to a broken elevator, and racist rent hikes that targeted Black residents and TANCPM organizers. After coming together, the members of the association delivered a Notice of Requests, once again informing management of the unacceptable living conditions at both buildings.

Eventually, DeBates and management began working on some maintenance issues, albeit slowly. However, at the same time, residents reported harassment from both parties, citing verbal abuse, banging at their doors, and the vandalization of TANCPM flyers. DeBates also demanded to know who informed local news of the tenants’ issues and that tenants cease their attempts to secure reasonable rent and quality living conditions.

Continuing their harassment, DeBates and management threatened Lewis Bass with eviction. Management informed Bass that his rent check had not been sent. However, he disputed the claim, citing the copy of the check he produced when he sent the payment. The case proved frivolous and was swiftly thrown out of court.

Bass was not the only victim of a targeted attempt at displacement. Management previously assured Steve Rimmer, another resident and founding member of TANCPM, that he would not face a steep rent increase. However, he later received a short-notice lease agreement in January 2022 that informed him of a $269 rent increase, a 39% hike from his previous lease agreement.

TANCPM also reported rent increases were greater for Black residents than white residents. Members say it’s a racist strategy that aims to remove Black community members in favor of white residents.

In addition to their tenant organizing efforts, the association also reformed an old project on the street dubbed “The Seward Sharing Table,” a community pantry that operates on the principle of “give as you can, take as you need.” The Table serves as an important resource for many community members who are disabled, low-income, or otherwise unable to acquire quality groceries.

DeBates, upset with the potential impact that the pantry might have on the appearance of the grass, demanded that it be moved to a gated parking lot. He gave The Sharing Table just a few days to move. Community members rallied and announced a protest for the pantry to remain where it stands. After announcing the protest, the Sharing Table was vandalized and its tables stolen; the culprit remains unknown.

Following the protest, Steve Rimmer says an employee of Continental Management informed him that the company would not interfere with The Sharing Table, and that any attack on its placement had to have come from DeBates himself. However, a strongly-worded email from Vice President Robert Carson contradicted this claim. On the issue of relocating The Table, he had this to say:

“Disappointingly, the result of this simple, lateral, relocation request was met with, not compromise, not discussion, but with inflexibility, protest, and spectacle. You further then went on to publicly make false and misleading representation. Relocating is not unsafe, nor any less safe than the current location. If anything, it is safer. Relocating does not make the Sharing Table any less accessible. It is equally accessible as the gate is open. Your position, related behavior and misleading rhetoric is divisive and not helpful.”

Carson also attempted what TANCPM says amounts to legal intimidation when he requested the information of all members of the tenants’ association. Their presumption is that there are plans to target individuals for their activism. Carson cited the Open Meetings Act, which, according to its handbook, applies to:

“[A]ny state or local legislative or governing body, including a board, commission, committee, subcommittee, authority, or council, that is empowered by state constitution, statute, charter, ordinance, resolution, or rule to exercise governmental or proprietary authority or perform a governmental or proprietary function; a lessee of such a body performing an essential public purpose and function pursuant to the lease agreement.”

A tenants’ union, in this case, is a loose, informal association of residents who have joined together to advocate for better living conditions. They do not carry out proprietary or governing functions. So, the act simply does not apply. Words such as these are merely meant to intimidate residents.

Despite these obstacles, the members of TANCPM have been pushing their efforts outside the block. Rimmer also advocates for Right to Counsel, a local ordinance that passed on May 10 ensuring the right to an attorney for low-income residents facing eviction. A number of organizations and individuals appeared at the final hearing for the ordinance, including The Right to Counsel Coalition, Detroit Eviction Defense, Detroit Justice Center, TANCPM, the Detroit Club of the CPUSA, and others.

The TANCPM and The Seward Sharing Table represent two organizations that are part of the broad struggle for housing rights and food security. Their organizing efforts have brought them face-to-face with big landlords and property management companies who have attacked them every step of the way. Their struggle is taking place at an unprecedented time for housing in Detroit, with tenants facing explosive rent hikes, racist landlords, stagnating wages, and rising food prices. Their collective action serves as a shining example for tenant organizing all over the country and demonstrates the type of movement needed by many.

_{Joseph Bierlein is a UFCW union worker and student activist at Wayne State University in Detroit.}

_{People’s World, May 12, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/}