Traverse City Real Estate Co-Op Breaks Several Different Molds Josh Davis November 2, 2021, 5:38 pm
Slated to finish construction and open its doors in early 2022 (there’s even a live webcam feed of the construction site), Commongrounds Cooperative will have space for an independent coffee roaster, a local craft distillery, a food hall with a shared commercial kitchen for hourly rental, a childcare facility, a performing arts space and 24 apartments — 18 of them below-market rate, serving various income levels.
But what really makes Commongrounds Cooperative such an atypical project is who owns it and how it was financed. The co-op is owned by a combination of the commercial tenants that will occupy it once it opens and members of their community — their customers, employees and other supporters as well as the residents once they move in.
Housing activity accounts for 29% of GDP, but Evergrande’s debt crisis is sign that things could soon change
In China today, the buzz is all about how the government there too has stumbled into an energy crisis with widespread power cuts. Yet this and other supply shocks will eventually pass, while the $300bn (£218bn) of debt enveloping China’s second biggest property developer, Evergrande, is of greater significance. It suggests China’s long housing boom is over, and bodes badly for the increasingly troubled economy, with implications for the rest of the world too.
China’s real estate market has been called the most important sector in the world economy. Valued at about $55tn, it is now twice the size of its US equivalent, and four times larger than China’s GDP. Taking into account construction and other property-related goods and services, annual housing activity accounts for about 29% of China’s GDP, far above the 10%-20% typical of most developed nations.
Lenders are on pace to underwrite about $550 billion of U.S. jumbo home loans this year, a level last seen in the runup to the 2008 global financial crisis, according to BofA Global.
An unexpected constituency is sounding the alarm on climate change: U.S. mortgage bankers.
Their predictions are dire: As climate change worsens and natural disasters wreak havoc on America’s housing stock, homeowners increasingly default on their mortgages. The ballooning financial losses force lenders to ratchet up interest rates. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the massive government-backed companies charged with supporting affordable housing, continue issuing loans in risky areas, subsidizing homes in harm’s way. Private sector investors in the housing market back away from communities facing severe climate risks, like rising sea levels, repeated flooding, and more severe wildfires. The economic losses, which could easily number in the billions of dollars, are shouldered by the federal government — and ultimately taxpayers.
That’s all according to a new report by the Research Institute for Housing America, a think tank founded by the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group representing the real estate finance industry.
“Climate change will impact all governments, industries, and individuals,” the report notes. “Housing and housing finance will not be spared.”
The U.S. housing market consists of a vast panoply of stakeholders, including homeowners, renters, lenders, insurers, government-backed entities, loan servicers, and the federal government itself. As climate-fueled disasters continue to wreak havoc, each group faces different risks and consequences, according to the report. Homeowners in the path of hurricanes and other climate disasters may see their home values plummet. If homeowners weathering ever more severe flooding and wildfires increasingly default on their mortgages, it will ricochet through the entire financial ecosystem. Both lenders and investors could see major losses as a result. The federal government stands in the middle of it all: It runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which is responsible for 5.1 million residential flood insurance policies nationwide, and backstops Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The specter of massive bailouts looms large.
It is not a far-off scenario. The National Flood Insurance Program is already deep in debt. The program is currently more than $20 billion underwater, and research from The Pew Charitable Trusts, a public policy nonprofit, found that about 1 percent of the properties enrolled in the program are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the claims. The cost of paying out claims from properties that repeatedly flood is more than $12 billion.
“Is there going to be a point where the public is no longer willing to fund these programs?” said Sean Becketti, a former chief economist at Freddie Mac and author of the report. “If you live in Iowa, how much do you want to pay in taxes to protect people against coastal flooding? There’s going to be real political stress on these programs because they’re going to get a lot more expensive.”
The report is the first from the Research Institute for Housing America since the think tank was founded in 1998 to take an in-depth look at the many ways that climate change is likely to reshape the mortgage industry and broader housing market. It is definitive in its assertion that climate change is real, that it will profoundly affect housing and housing finance, and that no player in the industry will be able to escape the consequences. With federal regulatorsbeginning toexamine the risks that climate change poses to the housing market and the broader economy, Adam DeSanctis, a spokesperson for the Mortgage Bankers Association, said that the group’s members are preparing for the impact of climate change and potential regulatory requirements. “Everyone knows that this is coming down the road,” he said.
The report says that climate change will test the limits of insurance and that the ever-growing risks from a warming planet will stress lenders, investors, and the government. Firms that are trying to quantify those risks and put a dollar value on it face practical challenges to doing so. Climate models are uncertain and depend on actions that governments may take now to reduce emissions. Standardized climate risk indicators don’t yet exist. And historical measurements of climate risk are unavailable.
“It is quite a challenging task,” said Becketti. “There’s not an obvious way to do things that all regulators would be comfortable with and approve of.”
Many players in the mortgage industry — including banks, lenders, and investment firms — are already making business decisionsbased on climate risks. Using private and public data on the evolving risks posed by climate change, some firms are steering their investmentsaway from disaster-prone regions. The approaches, however, are varied and inconsistent. Without clear federal guidelines or industry standards on how to use the data and price the risk, each institution is developing its own method, according to Becketti.
“The results are not very comparable,” he said. “One firm says they have a lot of risk, but maybe it doesn’t have as much risk as the next firm which has a more optimistic estimate.” The inconsistency could create an uneven playing field where major institutions continue to support housing investment in the path of climate change’s wrath.
Clarity on how to assess climate risk may still be years away. Earlier this year, President Joe Biden issued an executive order tasking various federal agencies with developing recommendations and reports that assess the financial risks of climate change and provide solutions. The Federal Housing Finance Agency also solicited comments on regulatory actions it can take to address risks on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s books in January. And separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission has requested public comment on how companies should disclose climate risks on their books. It’s the first step toward requiring more transparency from companies about the ways in which climate change may affect their bottom lines.
Thursday’s report makes clear that the country’s housing sector is starting to see the writing on the wall. “Climate change triggered by global warming already has happened and will continue to happen at a difficult-to-predict pace in the future,” it reads. “Its global impacts are significant, and the housing and housing finance industries will feel these impacts along with all other industries.”
This is dire. The continued failure to cancel rent payments in the pandemic on Biden’s watch means people will die, families will be separated, and the carceral system will act to claim both parents and children. How? Families with small children are more likely to be behind on their rent, especially Black families. The moratorium did not eliminate rent payments but simply halted them, meaning those families will now have to pay impossible sums or face eviction from landlords who have been chomping at the bit for this moment to present itself. When families are evicted–forced into being unhoused or . . .
It’s the biggest thing you might ever buy. And it could be turning you into a bad person.
“Homeowner” is an identity baked into the fabric of America.
From political speeches to articles and advertising, Americans are bombarded with messaging valorizing homeownership. In 1995, President Bill Clinton released a 100-point plan to “boost homeownership to an all-time high,” writing that “for millions of America’s working families throughout our history, owning a home has come to symbolize the realization of the American Dream.”
His successor, President George W. Bush, made increasing homeownership a key policy priority of his administration, once explaining: “This Administration will constantly strive to promote an ownership society in America. … After all, if you own your own home, you have a vital stake in the future of our country.”
Researcher Rachel Bogardus Drew points to more than a century’s worth of messages praising the benefits of homeownership, “everything from personal freedom and self-determination, social equality and inclusion, personal and economic success, and a better quality of life.”
One of the messages Drew cites is from a 1916 article in the Hutchinson News telling readers: “Owning a home raises one in the estimation of his neighbors and associates. … Nothing gives a man a better standing in a community than the fact that he is a house-holder, a payer of taxes on real estate.”
Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change
There aren’t many other purchases that confer this aura of civic duty, and it’s worth examining the dark side of what happens to you when you become a homeowner.
Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change, manifesting as anything from opposing homeless shelters in your neighborhood to blocking transit projects in your region. This identity transcends partisanship, a rarity in our polarized age. You’ll find Democrats and Republicans alike screaming opposition to change and growth, no matter what it costs. To that end, Republicans have supported onerous regulations they would likely scoff at in the abstract, and Democrats have defended a system that has perpetuated the racial and economic segregation they often rail against in theory. What can help explain this phenomenon?
A home is the largest asset the vast majority of Americans can ever own. Protecting its value is akin to protecting your family’s future — your ability to weather bad financial times, borrow if your kid needs help paying for college, or rest easy knowing that in a country that will leave you out to dry if you get sick, at least you can sell your house if it ever gets that bad.
Homeownership is supposed to mean security, opportunity, and a sense of investment in your community. But often, the pressure of tying your family’s financial security to one asset incentivizes homeowners to behave selfishly and antisocially, opposing important public works that could provide significant public benefits.
Homeownership in the 21st century is homeownership under scarcity
Homes are scarce.
One credible analysis found that the United States was short 3.8 million homes as of the fourth quarter of 2020, leaving millions of Americans overcrowded in their current living situations, paying increasingly high rents, and unable to find a starter home to break into the ownership game.
The problem has only gotten worse over the past year as the supply shortage became the primary driver of the chaotic housing market. At one point near the end of 2020, researchers found that the country had just 1.9 months supply of housing left. In simpler terms, if no new housing came onto the market, the nation would have run out of homes to sell in under two months.
In a newsletter titled “America’s scarcity mindset,” economist Noah Smith described the political effect of what happens when people are forced to live under scarcity: “Survival values, which supposedly come about because of economic scarcity, include ethnocentrism, xenophobia, fear of disease, and a hunger for authoritarianism. Sounds a lot like Trumpism, but I think you can also see echoes of this in various leftist ideologies and spaces.” He goes on to cite housing politics as the quintessential example of this phenomenon.
The most charitable reading of this behavior is that the failure of the United States to provide a social safety net for its residents has forced homeowners to defend the value of their asset however they can.
Unlike many things, the value of a home is largely dependent on subjective evaluations of things outside of the individual homeowner’s control. An individual can’t control for school quality or the crime rate or whether homebuyers will find their neighborhood aesthetically appealing. But all those things will affect how much they can sell their home for. And even if homeowners did control every policy lever available, the solutions for these problems are incredibly complex.
So to hedge against the possibility that changes in the neighborhood could harm the value of their largest asset, some homeowners will use whatever local levers they have available to them to block change in their communities, whether it’s new housing, homeless shelters, transit, or Covid-19 testing centers. This phenomenon is often referred to as Nimbyism (NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard”), and it often describes people opposing development or public projects in their area, particularly when they have no objection to the project when it exists somewhere else.
It’s a risk-averse strategy that can work, often not because there’s good evidence that these things would necessarily lower the value of their homes but because the effect is that fewer homes end up getting built. This exacerbates the supply problem, but for homeowners it ensures that anyone who wants to live in their neighborhood will have fewer options, thereby increasing competition and prices for the existing homes.
Stanford University researchers Andrew Hall and Jesse Yoder find that homeownership increases participation in local elections and that “asset investment may be an important mechanism for the participatory effects.” That is, purchasing the home and seeking to protect its value may drive people to become more involved in local politics.
And when they do, they fight policies that would provide for affordable housing.
Boston University researchers Katherine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer looked at planning board and zoning meetings in nearly 100 Massachusetts cities and towns and found that meeting participants were disproportionately homeowners. Participants also were more likely to oppose new housing in their communities than to support it.
There’s also a structural imbalance to the types of projects homeowners often oppose. People who benefit from new housing or transit or a Covid-19 testing center are a diffuse group. No one knows exactly who will be the direct beneficiary of a new home or a new bus line, but the people who might be annoyed by construction or have the value of their homes impacted are a distinct class. And that means they advocate and organize as a group in a way that the beneficiaries of these policies cannot.
A less charitable interpretation: Classism and racism
Opposing change and progress in your community is not only due to lack of a social safety net. Rich Palo Altans, wealthy Upper East Siders, and the Boston elite all exhibit the same traits of Nimbyism that I described above. The wealthy do not need a social safety net, so why are they so opposed to progress?
The aforementioned Boston University researchers also looked at the types of comments made by meeting participants who were opposed to new housing and found several commenters who feared that “their homogenous communities would resemble much more diverse ones if a project were approved.” They cite a commenter who asked if there would be restrictions to ensure people receiving rent assistance from the government could be prohibited from occupying the potential development.
The wealthy do not need a social safety net, so why are they so opposed to progress?
This type of rhetoric is not uncommon. The San Francisco Chronicle documented a man in the Bay Area worrying that affordable housing might turn his area into a “ghetto.” Others called the proposed homes “high-rise slum[s]” that would “become the best place in San Francisco to buy heroin.”
As part of an attempt to make it harder for lower-income people to live in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford, the mayor said “we believe in neighborhoods, not hoods,” and that students walking down the streets “are predominantly African American kids who bring in that mentality from the inner city where that was a gang-related thing by staking their turf. We are trying to stop that.”
More common are the allusions to “neighborhood character,” which is an amorphous term that could mean something very anodyne or sinister. As St. Paul, Minnesota, City Council member Mitra Jalali told Rewire: “People who use coded language like ‘neighborhood character’ and ‘historic preservation’ are participating in structural white supremacy that has historically and presently mostly valued white ‘character’ and white ‘history’ at the expense of everyone else.”
It’s not that homeowners somehow have an exclusive claim on classism and racism — it’s that the median homeowner is likely to be older and wealthier than the average US resident. Older and wealthier people often have a preference for stability; they’re closer to retirement and more likely to be facing medical needs, as they are later in life. That means this group is predisposed to fear change even more than the average person. And they are overrepresented in our political system.
None of this is meant to be an indictment of people who want to become homeowners. But it’s a warning about how it could affect your thinking and politics. Because while there is some rationality to the fears that drive homeowners to oppose growth and progress in their communities, there is also a massive cost.
Economists have measured the loss of aggregate growth as a result of restrictions to housing supply to be roughly 36 percent — the average worker could have made roughly $3,600 more absent some of the restrictions that local officials have placed on housing development. Blocking affordable housing and public transit also serves to segregate Black and brown communities that are purposely priced out of low-poverty neighborhoods. And the lack of transit in the densest cities could be costing Americans roughly 10 percent in aggregate economic growth.
And the neighborhoods these homeowners are seeking to protect? Perhaps their bet will pay off and when they’re ready to retire, they’ll be sitting on a nest egg. But perhaps instead they will watch their kids grow up and leave, unable to afford rent. They may see community businesses struggle to support themselves as workers leave for other opportunities, unable to continue justifying living an hour away from their job and spending that entire time stuck in traffic. They may even find themselves unable to afford their rising property taxes after they’ve spent a lifetime paying down a mortgage.
Pro-growth policies are what allow for economic opportunity. And America’s failure to provide a reasonable social safety net and its deference toward the interests of homeowners at the local level has undermined those policies at every turn.
Europe’s largest residential property group Vonovia has agreed to buy rival Deutsche Wohnen for €18 billion, in a deal that will reshape Germany’s real-estate sector.
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It started last June with squatting. Quietly and without fanfare, Philadelphia activists affiliated with OccupyPHL and the Black Renter’s Cooperative broke into long-vacant public housing buildings and supported houseless families moving in. Then came the massive, barricaded protest encampment on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a tree-lined oasis in the middle of the Pennsylvania city surrounded by some of Philadelphia’s most expensive housing.
“They totally could have used the cops to disperse the encampment,” activist Wiley Cunningham of Philadelphia Housing Action remarked. “But politically, it would have looked bad for them.”
Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, who is white, was wary of the optics of clearing a mostly-Black encampment in the midst of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. When activists blocked construction of an expensive high-rise complex with their second protest encampment next to the Housing Authority headquarters, city officials decided it was in their best interest to negotiate.
With COVID eviction moratoriums rapidly reaching their end, around 40 million people in the U.S. will soon face eviction and houselessness. On January 18, more than 160 organizations sent a letter to Joe Biden and Rochelle Walensky, the incoming director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), calling on them to take stronger and immediate executive action to protect tens of millions of people from eviction and displacement.
On his first day, Biden issued an executive order to extend the moratorium for evictions until at least March 31. Forbes notes, “The executive order also calls on federal housing agencies to extend the foreclosure and eviction moratorium for federally backed mortgages at least through March, and allow forbearance applications to continue for federally-backed mortgages.”
The Biden administration also intends to allocate a total of $30 billion for rent and utility bill relief as part of his American Rescue Plan. The plan, which also includes $5 billion in assistance for those at risk of homelessness, must be approved by Congress.
However, some activists are skeptical. The Right to the City Alliance called Biden’s executive order “deeply concerning for renters and housing advocates nationwide” in a statement, noting that “it is confusing and distressing that President Joe Biden would choose to extend this same moratorium for only a couple months without first strengthening it, removing loopholes, creating enforcement mechanisms, and ensuring that it lasts for the duration of the pandemic with a buffer period after.”While $35 billion in rental and utility relief is a step in the right direction, these funds are woefully insufficient to end the crisis.
Across the nation, activists are already deploying a variety of tactics to keep tenants in their homes and to find homes for those without. Sometimes, as in Washington, D.C., this looks like tenant organizations and legal education. Other times, eviction defense involves facing off against the police.
Always, the goal is the same: get people into homes and keep them there.
Eviction America
The U.S.’s out-of-control COVID epidemic continues to wreak economic havoc alongside skyrocketing death tolls. In September, the CDC issued a moratorium on evictions to slow spread of the disease. Many states followed suit, but most of these protections will soon expire. Currently, this federal moratorium expires on March 31, leaving many tenants and homeowners wondering whether they will have a place to lay their head through the rest of 2021.
While the eviction ban was extended, as things stand, tenants will owe the entirety of their back-payments the moment the moratorium expires. Those who could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage during this crisis are unlikely to be able to afford months’ worth of payments on April 1, or any other time. Studies indicate that people of color and single mothers will be disproportionately impacted by this pending crisis.
This crisis of incoming evictions is being met by a growing collection of organizers who are taking to eviction defense as a community-based solution to what could become a catastrophe unseen since the 2010 foreclosure crisis. In Western New York, in the Rust Belt city of Rochester, a coalition effort is bringing together a number of organizations to work on multiple levels to stop evictions. The Rochester Housing Justice Alliance (RHJA) is a collection of a number of activist groups, tenant unions and nonprofits that are organizing eviction defense for people whose legal challenges have failed or whose landlords are ignoring the laws. During COVID, they have taken up the challenge of in-person actions, starting by staging protests at homes where they knew evictions were being issued and working up to a round-the-clock eviction watch where they use a sophisticated phone tree system to call out activists for support.
“The biggest problem is, as it has ever been, the disorganization of working people — tenants in this instance. Because the landlords have us atomized, relatively few choose to fight back, or even consider the option,” says Crescenzo Scipione, who works with Metro Justice, a member of RHJA. “The more tenants unionize, the more neighborhoods band together against evictions, the fewer people in our communities will die from combinations of poverty, displacement and COVID-19. Join a tenant union or anti-eviction organization. If there ain’t one, build one.”
Activists in Washington, D.C., are concentrating more on tenant organization than immediate direct action, according to organizer Greg Afinogenov. Afinogenov is part of Stomp Out Slumlords, an organization that concentrates on building tenants’ associations in apartment buildings. Not only do these associations bring renters together to defend their rights, they coordinate for actions with a larger, city-wide focus.
Tenants’ unions are one reason that, unlike other cities with supposed eviction protections, D.C. has not had a single eviction since the moratorium went into place.
Washington, D.C., enacted an eviction moratorium at the beginning of the COVID crisis, now extended through June. Tenants’ unions are one reason that, unlike other cities with supposed eviction protections, D.C. has not had a single eviction since the moratorium went into place. “I think the existence of this sort of movement is one of the main reasons eviction moratoriums survived,” Afinogenov tells Truthout. “Because it’s been challenged repeatedly by various political voices on the city council who are very much not friendly to it.”
Because their efforts to prevent evictions have been so successful, D.C. activists have turned their attention to rent debt cancellation. A Halloween direct action at Mayor Muriel Bowser’s house contributed to Bowser’s subsequent decision to forgive $10 million of rent debt. “This is not a huge amount in actual terms of need,” Afinogenov says. “But it does show that this kind of direct action actually works.”
Building a Network
Stomp Out Landlords is a part of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN), which is an organization that began coordinating different tenant unions in 2018, free from large NGO funding and accountabilities. In 2020, ATUN formalized the network to support unions confronting evictions during the pandemic. The Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) is a member of that network and based in the San Francisco Bay area, one of the epicenters of climbing urban rental costs and eviction rates. TANC works on multiple fronts to confront evictions, from running activist campaigns to an eviction defense team that attempts to hold back evictions. “We will work to unite their neighbors to defend them and to fight the landlord, the sheriffs and the city. We will blockade their home and prevent these groups from entering,” says Nick Jackson, an organizer with TANC. The council has created a Cancel Rent Agreement which is asking the East Bay Rental Housing Association, a landlord organization, to have members forgive rental debt as an alternative to the current “debt repayment forms” the association is using that TANC says are misleading and predatory. While many eviction moratoriums may have halted evictions during the pandemic, as debt piles up for many out-of-work tenants, the evictions are only delayed.
“One day I hope to see the tenant movement strong enough to expropriate empty housing and put those on the street into safe living environments. We’ve seen examples of this around the country, and it is inevitable as long as the commodification of housing continues to … condemn people to die in the streets,” says Jackson.
Portland Tenants United (PTU) (also a member of ATUN) formed in 2015 to confront the dramatic rise in evictions as Portland, Oregon, gentrified many of its working-class and BIPOC neighborhoods. Over the past five years, the PTU has undertaken dozens of eviction protests, mass actions against displacement, and been responsible for pushing moderate tenant legislation and getting renter-friendly candidates elected. Now, the group is moving in the direction of eviction defense as it coordinates a type of “rapid response” system that has been implemented by other network members.
“I think for the people who participate in [direct action eviction defense], it’s very empowering because you’re working together, often with people you don’t know. Something that’s very physical and literal,” says Lauren Everett, who works with the PTU. “So, it doesn’t have that abstract feeling of like, we’re sending letters or like we’re trying to get this thing passed. It’s like we are literally preventing this landlord from doing something illegal and walking locked out of their home.”
The PTU began this eviction defense work staging a multiday eviction watch in support of a couple who were being evicted by a landlord they lived with, where members of the community came together and stayed several days in front of the house to ensure that the landlord did not try to remove the family and change the locks.
The LA Tenants Union, also part of ATUN, faces a unique challenge: coordinating efforts across a large and traffic-clogged city with a wide variety of tenant issues. Initially, the group concentrated mostly on organizing tenants into autonomous local organizations capable of catering to their tenants’ specific needs. With COVID, however, everything changed. As evictions increased, union membership grew from 300 to 3,000.
Los Angeles activists spent much of last summer fighting illegal evictions. Although the law prevents anyone except a sheriff with a writ of possession from carrying out an eviction, many landlords began to change locks and evict without due process. Legally, tenants are allowed to break the lock and move back in when this happens, but many of them do not know this and are too afraid of violence from their landlord or the police to exercise their rights. “Even though it’s an entirely civil matter, [the police] will side with the landlord,” explained Colin Stevens, an activist with the LA Tenants Union. In response, the union mobilized to get people on scene and resist the police until the issue went far enough up the chain of command that someone realized the illegality of the eviction and called off the cops. After a summer of resistance, the police have begun to realize they cannot actually assist with illegal evictions with impunity.
Looking Forward
Philadelphia’s combination of tactics — from squatting to protest encampments — paid big dividends. By the end of October, the city agreed to establish a land trust with over 60 housing units in exchange for disbanding the encampments. The city also committed to amnesty for squatters, a commissioned study on the effects of public land transfers in poor and historically Black neighborhoods, and a cessation of evictions without a court order.
“A lot of it was just timing,” Cunningham says. Philadelphia’s white mayor was wary of sending the police to violently disband a majority-Black encampment during the summer of Black Lives Matter, which helped the encampments last long enough to bring the city to the negotiating table.
Activists also controlled the narrative. When the mainstream media tried demonizing the movement with tales of overdoses and violence within the encampments, activists like Cunningham were able to contextualize it. “Yeah, that happens every day,” he would respond. “That’s what we’re talking about. It wouldn’t happen if they had housing.”
Eventually, the neighborhood association for the luxury dwellings surrounding Benjamin Franklin Parkway came around with an op-ed that, along with calls for the dismantling of the encampment, demanded permanent housing for its inhabitants.
ATUN looks poised to be a foundation of coordinating local work nationally, taking those experiences and pulling out lessons that can apply to other cities.
“We exist to support tenant unions in growing, and more and more people becoming members of tenant unions, and more people organizing their buildings,” says Afinogenov, and that longer-term coordination can shift the balance of power. As they help to support the building of tenant unions on a ground-up model, the power of tactics like rent strikes begin to escalate and can confront the looming rental crisis. With a lot of uncertainty in 2021, this wide scale coordination of direct action and willingness to organize tenants at the site of their housing can be a solution to halting another housing collapse.
