Nitya Capital is reportedly looking to sell about 40% of its multifamily portfolio because rate hikes are making its floating-rate debt a lot more expense.
Archive for category: #Housing

Rebecca Gordon: Singing the “Bourgeois Blues”
On my way home from the doctor’s office, I regularly pass the New York apartment building where I grew up. I would invariably stop, stare, and feel an overwhelming desire to visit the place I hadn’t seen in perhaps 60 years. The street door hadn’t changed a bit.
A few months ago, on a whim, I looked for the buzzer to apartment 6D, pressed it, and a woman’s voice answered. I promptly said, “Hi, I’m Tom Engelhardt. I grew up in the apartment you now live in and was wondering whether you’d let me see it again.” To my amazement — yes, this is New York City! — she promptly buzzed me in and I found myself riding to the 6th floor on the barely updated gate elevator I used as a kid. Ours was, I must tell you, a remarkable apartment. Even to get to it, you had to step out of the elevator, walk down a short corridor out onto a covered but open catwalk (where you can still see the roofs of New York around you), and then down another corridor.
So many years later, I did just that and, when the present resident of 6D let me in, felt overwhelmed with memories as I saw the staircase to the second floor where my old bedroom was, the living room with the remarkable skylight under which my mother drew her caricatures, and even the little porch beyond it. And yes, it sounds, I know, like quite a place, which it was (and remains). Today, fully renovated, it’s undoubtedly a wildly expensive coop or condo, but, in 1946, when my parents got that duplex apartment, just after my father left the Air Force in the wake of World War II, it was rent-controlled and cheap as hell. (Lucky for them as, in the 1950s when I was a kid, they were eternally short on cash.) But no surprise then either. After all, at the time, all of New York was rent-controlled and veterans stood a reasonable chance of getting a fine apartment they could actually afford.
As in much of the country now, rent control in New York is largely a thing of the past as rents here have all too literally gone through the roof, with even studio apartments soaring toward $4,000 a month. As Bloomberg News reports, there’s never been a worse time to rent in the big city. More than three bedrooms will cost you an average of $9,592 per month. And yes, that’s to rent, not buy! Imagine that! Once upon a time, that apartment of mine was something like $190 per month! And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon fill you in on rent madness in twenty-first-century America. Tom
Don’t Try to Find a Home in Washington, D.C. Or Pretty Much Anywhere Else If You’re a Renter
In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter, nor would any Black landlord let them in, because they were accompanied by Lomax, who was white. A white friend of Lomax’s finally agreed to put them up, although his landlord screamed abuse at him and threatened to call the police.
In response to this encounter with D.C.’s Jim Crow laws, Lead Belly wrote a song, “The Bourgeois Blues,” recounting his and Martha’s humiliation and warning Blacks to avoid the capital if they were looking for a place to live. The chorus goes,
Lord, in a bourgeois town
It’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
And one verse adds,
I want to tell all the colored people to listen to me
Don’t ever try to get a home in Washington, D.C.
‘Cause it’s a bourgeois town
Such affronts, Lead Belly sang, occurred in the “home of the brave, land of the free,” where he didn’t want “to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie.”
There are music scholars who believe that Lead Belly didn’t really understand what “bourgeois” meant. They claim Lomax, later accused of being a Communist “fellow traveler,” provided him with that addition to his vocabulary and he simply understood it as a synonym for “racist.” Personally, I think that, in a few deft verses, Lead Belly managed to show how racism and class stratification merged to make it all but impossible to find a home in Washington, as in so many other places in America.
Still a Bourgeois Town
In the late 1970s, after a period of unemployment, my mother got a job for a year in Washington. We’d lived there while I was growing up, but she hadn’t been back for almost a decade. She was a white middle-class professional and it was still hell finding an affordable place to rent. (She’d been without a job for more than a year.) It would be some time before credit ratings would be formalized, thanks to the financial corporation FICO, producing a model of a standardized credit score for anyone. But her prospective landlords had other ways of checking on her creditworthiness. That she was a divorced woman with no rental history and no recent jobs didn’t make things easy.
Still, she had her sense of humor. One day during that search, she mailed me an old 45 rpm recording of Lead Belly’s “Bourgeois Blues.” It seemed to perfectly catch her frustrated efforts to escape a friend’s guest room before she wore out her welcome.
I was reminded of that record recently when I read about the travails of Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a new Democratic congressman from Orlando, Florida. Born in 1996, he’s the youngest member of the House of Representatives. He quit his full-time job to campaign for Congress, supporting himself by driving an Uber. When he tried to find a home in Washington, his application for a studio apartment was rejected because of a bad credit score. As Frost tweeted:
Just applied to an apartment in DC where I told the guy that my credit was really bad. He said I’d be fine. Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee. This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.
Nor, as Lead Belly might have added, for people like Frost who are Black.
Washington, D.C., it seems, remains a “bourgeois” town.
The True Costs of Renting
Suppose you want to rent a place to live. What will you need to have put aside just to move in? This depends not only on the monthly rent, but on other fees and upfront payments in the place where you plan to live. And, of course, your credit score.
Application fee: One part of Frost’s story caught my attention: he had to forfeit his “application fee” for an apartment he didn’t get. If, like me, you haven’t rented a house or apartment in a while you might not even know about such fees. They’re meant to cover the cost of a background check on the applicant. You might expect them to be rolled into the rent, but in a seller’s (or renter’s) market, there’s no risk to landlords in making them extra.
Frost’s fee was $50 for one application. (These fees tend to top out around $75.) Not so bad, right? Until you grasp that many potential renters find themselves filing multiple applications — 10 isn’t unheard of — simply to find one place to rent, so you’re potentially talking about hundreds of dollars in fees. California, my own state, is among the few that regulate application fees. The maximum rises to match inflation. In December 2022, that max was $59.67. Some states set a lower maximum, and some don’t regulate the fees at all.
Move-in fees: If you haven’t rented in a while, this one may take you by surprise. Unlike a security deposit, move-in fees are nonrefundable. They’e supposed to cover the costs of preparing a place for a new tenant — everything from installing new locks to replacing appliances and painting. Once subsumed in the monthly rent, today these costs are often passed on directly to renters. Nationally, they average between 30% and 50% of a month’s rent.
In June 2022, the median rent for an apartment in the United States crossed the $2,000 threshold for the first time, which means the median move-in fee now ranges from $600 to $1,000.
First and last months’ rent: This upfront cost should be familiar to anyone who’s ever rented. Landlords almost always require two months’ rent upfront and hold on to the last month’s rent to ensure that a tenant can’t skip out without paying. Because landlords can invest the money they’re holding (and tenants can’t invest what they’ve forked over to landlords), in recent years, most states have required landlords to pay interest on the tenant’s funds.
Security deposit: Unlike the move-in fee, a security deposit — often a month’s rent — is refundable if tenants leave a place in good condition. Its ostensible purpose: to reimburse the landlord for future cleaning and repair costs that exceed normal wear-and-tear. (But wait! Isn’t that what the non-refundable move-in fee should do?)
Other fees: If you’re renting a condo, you may have to cover the owner’s monthly Home Owner Association fees. In some cases, you’ll also pay for a utility’s hookup like gas or electricity.
So, how much will you have to pay to set foot in that apartment? Well, if you’re like Nuala Bishari, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who recently tried to rent a house in nearby Oakland, California, you’ll need to set aside almost $10,000. If you’re not sure how you could possibly put that kind of money together, the credit score company Experian has some advice for you:
First, “calculate your odds.” Find out how many other people are applying for the unit you’re interested in and, if the competition is stiff, “consider looking elsewhere.” (As if you haven’t done that already!)
Then tighten your belt. “Reducing extraneous expenses,” it observes, “is an easy way to save.” Stop going out to eat, for instance, and look for free family activities. If that’s not enough, it’s time to “get serious about cost cutting.” Their brilliant suggestions include:
- “Cut back on utility use. [Wait! I thought I was supposed to cook more at home. Never mind. I’ll just sit here in the dark.]
- Carpool to work instead of driving. [I take the bus, but maybe I should start walking.]
- Switch to a budget grocery store and look for coupons and sales. [Right! No more Whole Paycheck for me!]
- Join a buy-nothing group.”
Such “advice” to people desperate to find housing would be amusing if it weren’t so desperately insulting.
Rent Is Unaffordable for More Than Half the Country
Suppose you’ve managed to get together your up-front costs. What can you expect to pay each month? The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development considers housing affordable when rent takes no more than 30% of an individual’s or family’s monthly income. Human Rights Watch (!) reported in December 2022 that the Census Bureau’s 2021 Annual Community Survey revealed a little over half of all renters are spending more than 30% of their income that way — and in many cases, significantly more.
It tells you something that Human Rights Watch is concerned about housing costs in this country. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) put its data in perspective through what it calls a “Housing Wage”: the hourly rate you’d need to make working 40 hours a week to afford to rent a place in a specific area. For many Americans, housing, they report, is simply “out of reach.”
In 2022, a full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $25.82 on average to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. This Housing Wage for a two-bedroom home is $18.57 higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In 11 states and the District of Columbia, the two-bedroom Housing Wage is more than $25.00 per hour. A full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $21.25 on average in order to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home in the U.S.
Unfortunately, many people don’t earn $21.25 an hour, which is why they hold two or three jobs, or add Uber or Door Dash shifts to their other work. It’s hardest for minimum wage workers. As the NLIHC observes, “In no state can a person working full-time at the prevailing federal, state, or county minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment at the [fair market rate].” Furthermore, “in only 274 counties out of more than 3,000 nationwide can a full-time worker earning the minimum wage afford a one-bedroom rental home at the [fair market rate].”
For people living at or below the poverty line, the situation is even direr, which is why so many end up unhoused, whether by couch-surfing among friends and family or pitching a tent on the street.
In the coming months, the situation is only expected to worsen now that pandemic-era eviction moratoriums and the $46.5 billion federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program are expiring. According to the Pew Research Center, those programs prevented more than a million people from being evicted.
It Wasn’t Always This Way
People have always experienced poverty, but in the United States, the poor have not always gone without housing. Yes, they lived in tenements or, if they were men down on their luck, in single-room occupancy hotels. And yes, the conditions were often horrible, but at least they spent their nights indoors.
Indeed, the routine presence of significant populations of the urban unhoused on this country’s city streets goes back only about four decades. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1982, there was a community of about 400 people living in or near People’s Park in Berkeley. Known as the Berkeley Beggars, they were considered a complete oddity, a hangover of burnt-out hippies from the 1960s.
During President Ronald Reagan’s administration, however, a number of factors combined to create a semi-permanent class of the unhoused in this country: high-interest rates implemented by the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight drove up the cost of mortgages; a corruption scandal destroyed many savings and loan institutions from which middle-income people had long secured home mortgages; labor unions came under sustained attack, even by the federal government; and real wages (adjusted for inflation) plateaued.
Declaring that government was the problem, not the solution, Reagan began a four-decade-long Republican quest to dismantle the New Deal social-safety net implemented under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and supplemented under President Lyndon Johnson. Reagan savaged poverty-reduction programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid, while throwing more than 300,000 people with disabilities off Social Security. Democrat Bill Clinton followed up, joining with Republicans to weaken Aid to Families with Dependent Children (“welfare”).
A decade earlier, scandal-ridden state asylums for the mentally ill began to be shut down all over the country. In the late 1960s, Reagan had led that effort in California when he was governor. While hundreds of thousands were freed from a form of incarceration, they also instantly lost their housing. (On a personal note, this is why, in 1990, my mother found herself living in unsupervised subsidized housing for a population of frail elderly and recently de-institutionalized people with mental illnesses. This wasn’t a good combination.)
By the turn of the century, a permanent cohort of people without housing had come to seem a natural part of American life.
And It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This Forever
There is no single solution to the growing problem of unaffordable housing, but with political will and organizing action at the local, state, and federal levels it could be dealt with. In addition to the obvious — building more housing — here are a few modest suggestions:
At the state and local level:
- Raise minimum wages to reflect the prevailing cost of living.
- Remove zoning restrictions on the construction of multifamily buildings.
- Pass rent-control ordinances, so rents rise no faster than the consumer price index.
- Pass limits on up-front rental and move-in fees.
- Pass legislation to prevent no-cause evictions.
- Pass legislation, as California has already done, to allow renters to report their on-time rent payments to credit bureaus, allowing them to boost their credit scores without borrowing money.
At the federal level:
- Raise the federal minimum wage, which, even in this era of inflation, has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
- Increase funding for SNAP, the present food-stamp program (whose pandemic-era increases have just expired).
- Increase federal funding for public housing.
- Provide universal healthcare, ideally in the form of Medicare for all.
- Increase “Section 8” housing subsidies for low-income renters.
- Raise taxes on the wealthy to fund such changes.
- Finally, shift part — say one-third — of the bloated “defense” budget (up $80 billion from last year to $858 billion in 2023) to programs that actually contribute to national security — the daily financial security of the people who live in this nation.
Then maybe the next time we send new people to Congress, all of them will be able to find a home in Washington, D.C.

The Real Estate for Radicals project features case study-based research on affordable community-owned housing (co-ops, community land trusts, communes, and squats) and their potential to advance housing as a human right.
PDX Commons
- Some older Americans are building cohousing communities instead of moving into senior living.
- Cohousing refers to living arrangements in which residents own a unit and share common spaces.
- Residents said cohousing helped them avoid social isolation and lead their most authentic lives.
Carolyn Salmon, 82, and her husband used to live in a retirement neighborhood of about 500 homes just outside Port Townsend, Washington, but they never felt as if they were part of the community.
“We basically never saw our neighbors,” Salmon told Insider. “We had a little group that would get together about once a month for dinner, but other than that we had no other real contact with them.”
That was until 2014, when the Salmons and a group of eight other seniors began developing Quimper Village, a cohousing community in Port Townsend for people ages 55 and older. The group purchased nearly 3 acres of land and helped finance the construction of the 28-unit community, which was completed in 2017. The couple then purchased their 1,300-square-foot home in the community for about $400,000.
The Salmons are part of a growing coalition of older adults who are choosing to live in cohousing communities with people who are about their same age.
Quimper Village is a 28-unit self-governing condominium community about a mile outside downtown Port Townsend. Residents work on one of several “teams” that handle the village’s affairs, from landscaping and gardening to financial planning, according to its website. The website also highlights amenities such as a bocce court and an art studio, which residents also manage.
Carolyn Salmon
Cohousing emerged in Denmark during the 1960s and describes a living arrangement in which residents own or rent their own home but also share a common house — which may include amenities like laundry and a shared kitchen — with their neighbors.
Salmon said the group decided to build Quimper Village because more traditional senior-housing options in the area were scarce or were in locations that didn’t have a lot of nearby grocery stores.
“Maintaining community and close relationships isn’t always easy to do,” Salmon said. “But this place gives us the ability to drive less and do the things that build friendships.”
Cohousing is an example of how the senior-housing industry is evolving
Since 2005, 17 cohousing communities for older people have cropped up across the US with another six more in development, according to an online directory maintained by a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
The move comes at a time when the cost of more traditional senior-living options is at an all-time high and occupancy rates and construction activity for these housing units are still below their pre-pandemic levels, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care, or NIC, a nonprofit senior-housing research firm. Senior-living facilities include assisted living, memory care, and independent living. Nursing homes fall under a different category because Medicaid can reimburse their costs.
“The senior-living industry is evolving,” Beth Mace, a senior economist at NIC, told Insider. “Partly because of what happened during the pandemic, but also because developers are trying to figure out exactly what this cohort wants.”
Residents want to live their most authentic lives
Barbara Chase, 71, said that to earn the respect of her peers and clients while working as a corporate-management consultant she always felt as if she needed to hide the fact that she identified as a lesbian.
Chase retired in 2020 and moved into a cohousing community for LGBTQ seniors and allies ages 55 and up called Village Hearth just outside Raleigh, North Carolina. Chase said she purchased a 1,150-square-foot unit for about $385,000 when she moved in.
Barbara Chase
She said that decision had helped her live her most authentic life and avoid more corporate senior-living operations, where a growing number of seniors feel as if they have few support options, according to research from the National Center for Elder Abuse.
“As I was nearing retirement, I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to spend the last sliver of my life in the closet,'” Chase told Insider. “To me, it means the world to live among people who embrace you, and help you preserve your dignity and self-respect.”
Chase considered more traditional senior-housing options, but none of the nearby places offered the same level of activity that she was looking for. At Village Hearth, Chase said, residents are responsible for everything from maintaining the property to planning and cooking community meals.
“We make collective decisions together about how we’re going to treat one another,” Chase said. “And that is the true meaning of community.”
Cohousing can help avoid social isolation
Karen Erde, 70, moved into PDX Commons in Portland, Oregon, in 2018 after retiring from a long career as a family physician. The 27-unit complex requires at least 80% of its residents to be above the age of 55, while younger homeowners can make up the remaining 20%, according to its website.
Karen Erde
Erde said she moved into PDX Commons because it was the only cohousing community in Portland where she could live among people her own age and not have roommates who were generations younger than her. The community is also within walking distance of the Belmont Library, Laurelhurst Park, and pharmacies like Walgreens. Erde purchased her 1,065-square-foot unit for about $585,000, she said.
“I like kids and all that stuff — I raised three children of my own,” Erde told Insider. “But I’m not really interested in raising anybody else’s kids at this point of my life.”
Though Erde describes herself as an introvert, living at PDX Commons has allowed her to be more social, she said. Erde chairs the community’s communication committee, which helps spread the word about PDX Commons. She said she also helped community members solve computer issues and worked with other retired medical professionals who live in the community to develop the local COVID-19 guidelines.
It is also comforting to know that help is always nearby, Erde said. When Erde had her knee replaced in 2014, she said, her friends and family would have to drive 20 to 30 minutes to her townhome in Portland to help her cook and clean up around the house. If something similar happened today, Erde said, she has a group of friends at PDX in nearby units who would pitch in.
“I’ve been around other senior-living facilities where they have activities and people generally get to hang out with each other,” Erde said, “but I never got the sense that the people there actually wanted to live together.”
Rental markets everywhere are being overtaken by a cresting wave of housing speculation. Pandemic-era rental deals for tenants in both high- and low-cost cities have given way to 100 percent rent hikes, rising eviction rates, and a conservative backlash against tenants’ rights. In cities across the world, tenants are pushing back and building political power to fight against political retrenchment.
Historically, successful tenant movements do not materialize in a vacuum but build on long-term, on-the-ground organizing around issues that are immediately important to tenants. These include a neighbor being evicted, the heat getting cut off in February, or an unexplainable rent increase. The traditional venue for dealing with bread-and-butter organizing issues are building-level tenant associations and/or neighborhood-level tenant unions. The shape, scale, and formality of any given tenant union is highly context-specific, influenced by everything from international investment trends to state housing laws, to the availability of space in the neighborhood to hold an evening meeting. At the same time, tenant unions everywhere are based around the same core principle: to address a fundamental imbalance of power between tenants and landlords, and to tip the scales in tenants’ favor.
In September 2022, Housing Justice for All, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung-New York, and the Community Service Society of New York organized a discussion about tenant associations and tenant unions in the RLS-NY offices. We brought together a group of organizers and tenant leaders from New York’s tenant movement to hear from U.S., German, and Australian tenant organizers.
The discussion was led by Berta Del Ben, spokesperson for Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen (Socialize Deutsche Wohnen), a group working to municipalize large landlords in Berlin; Joel Dignam, founder of Better Renting, an Australian community of renters working together for stable, affordable, and healthy homes; Esteban Girón, a member/leader with the Crown Heights Tenants Union, a union of 40 buildings across Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and, Lulu Kirtchuk, an organizer with Los Sures, a nonprofit in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which organizes tenants, develops affordable housing, and provides direct services to the community.
While day-to-day tenant organizing happens on the smallest of scales, bringing in an international lens gave our audience a new perspective on strategy and tactics. The discussion provided a moment for participating organizers and tenant leaders to reflect on their work and challenge outcomes they deem “reasonable”. For example, in New York City, the socialization of privately owned apartment buildings doesn’t seem like an immediate possibility. However, DWE’s ongoing socialization campaign in Berlin helped normalize the concept for some participants, making it seem both reasonable and possible.
The discussion with Berta, Joel, Esteban, and Lulu approached the mechanics of building tenant power from multiple angles, covered short and long-term campaigns, and connected local issues to global power imbalances.
Looking forward, three major themes emerged during our discussion:
Building conditions and unjust rent hikes act as entry points into tenant organizing: For many tenants, habitability issues in their apartments or buildings, sometimes paired with a rent increase, often act as a politicizing spark. This was true in Berlin, in large developments like Kotti & Co., where private owners failed to keep up the building, cut-off heat in the winter, and hiked up rents beyond what was affordable to low-income tenants receiving government assistance. It was also true in New York City, where the Crown Heights Tenants Union provides support for tenants exercising their rights to repairs in Crown Heights, while Los Sures helps tenants organize to address building-level repair issues in Williamsburg. Habitability issues relating to extreme weather conditions also proved to be galvanizing for many Australian tenants.
Developing a shared political consciousness among tenants is important: Most forms of political organizing allow people to first make a connection between individual and shared needs, and then helps channel those needs into collective action. Among tenant organizers, this process often involves creating a space for tenants to understand that bad conditions in their apartment or their inability to make rent is not an individual failing, but a structural power imbalance with their landlord.
Among the cities represented on the panel, Berlin provides the strongest model for tenant politicization, because of the high share of tenants in the city (85 percent) and the militant history of tenant organizing from the left. Before the pandemic, the city’s Mietenwahnsinn [Rent madness] protests drew as many as 40,000 people. Even during the pandemic, Berta described Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen’s outreach workgroups (safely) collecting the signatures necessary to get the socialization issue on the ballot. While for Berta, and many of the other campaign volunteers, this campaign was their first foray into tenant organizing, they were entering into a civic participation model that is well-practiced in Berlin.
Unlike Berlin, Australia as a whole does not have as long of a history of tenant-centric political consciousness. Tenants do not see themselves as a political class, and they are scattered in single-family homes, or individual rental units within condo buildings, presenting a further challenge to organizing. Better Renting is actively working to build a culture of organizing and cultivating a sense of community among Australia’s renters.
Tenant unions will need to navigate multiple geographic scales to be successful: Berta, Joel, Esteban, and Lulu all spoke about learning to function on the local, state, national, and international scales as part of their work. While conditions affecting tenants happen on the local level, they are ultimately tied to city and state laws, national housing policy, and transnational financial flows. Berta mentioned DWE volunteers making these connections in their workgroups, which had to balance connecting with tenants about their individual rent increases while understanding German constitutional law and housing financing. Similarly, Lulu and Esteban talked about the day-to-day work of organizing building by building, block by block, while participating in city-wide campaigns, connecting with other tenant unions from across the U.S., and even building transnational tenant union connections.
Our panelists provided participating NYC tenant leaders and organizers with an international perspective on tenant power, creating space for consideration of day-to-day tactics and broader strategy. Perhaps the most important theme that emerged from the convening was the connection between tenant organizing and broader struggles for racial and economic justice, immigrant rights, and against climate change. Connecting housing struggles to broader societal issues helps to form the connective tissue of strong and effective social movements.
Oksana Mironova is a writer and researcher who was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She writes about cities, urban planning, housing, and public space. You can follow her on twitter @OksanaMironov or read more of her writing at oksana.nyc.
The post Building Tenant Power in Berlin, Australia, and New York appeared first on RLS-NYC.
Detroit Resident Taura Brown is being threatened with eviction by her nonprofit landlord, Cass Community Social Services (CCSS), a major nonprofit with a $7 million dollar operating budget. A participant in CCSS’ rent-to-own Tiny Homes program, Ms. Brown is being evicted in retaliation for speaking out about exploitation within the program and advocating on behalf of her neighbors, tenants in the Tiny Homes and CCSS’ homeless shelter. Her situation highlights the effects of the housing crisis and real estate speculation, and the exploitation of nonprofits.
Demanding Fair Housing, Fighting Retaliatory Eviction
When Ms. Brown first enrolled in the Tiny Homes program, she lacked secure housing and was practically homeless. Ms. Brown was herself a former property manager but was unable to work due to a medical diagnosis that placed her on dialysis and in need of a replacement kidney. For Ms. Brown, the Tiny Homes rent-to-own “homeownership” program represented a chance to get her life on track and secure financial stability for herself and her son.
Excited to enter the program, Ms. Brown initially had no issues with the program or its director, Rev. Faith Fowler. Yet rent-to-own programs in Detroit have a troubled history. As tenants progress through the program, property owners often move the goalposts and rely on technicalities to prevent tenants from ever making it to homeownership. Ms. Brown sensed that these programs had problems based on the fact that it was hard to get details about them, and approached the Tiny Homes program with attentiveness to detail. When she started asking questions and spoke out against exploitative practices, program inconsistencies, mandatory volunteer hours, and an attempt to evict her neighbor, her relationship with Rev. Fowler soured. Rather than respond to the concerns raised by her advocacy, CCSS moved to evict Ms. Brown.
Ms. Brown attempted to fight the eviction in court, but recently lost her appeal. She and her supporters now seek to defend her home by any means necessary. On Saturday, Oct. 8, a rally in support of Ms. Brown and others being evicted in Detroit will take place at her house. The court system is not designed or intended to support tenants – it swings in favor of tenants in direct proportion to the strength of the movement in the streets and the ability of the tenants and their community to self-organize. The success of the home defense against CCSS rests on the strength of the community defense.
Ms. Brown is joined in her home defense by several groups including Detroit Eviction Defense, Charlevoix Village Association, Detroit Will Breathe, and General Defense Committee.
“Nonprofit” Doesn’t Mean “Nonexploitative”
Detroit, and most of the nation, are in the midst of another housing crisis. In Detroit, rent and evictions are increasing rapidly coupled with a serious shortage of accessible rental units, homes, and public housing. The crisis has had an outsized impact of Black working class Detroiters, easily observed in the large-scale displacement, segregation, and gentrification that has occurred over the last 20 years. Detroit, the State of Michigan, and community groups have sought to address the problem, in part, by promoting nonprofit housing schemes such as rent-to-own programs, church-run developments, and community land trusts. These programs fail to address the underlying causes of the housing crisis.
Ms. Brown’s eviction highlights how a nonprofit landlord is still a landlord. Privatization of housing via public-private partnerships and nonprofits only shifts the labels, not the underlying dynamics of housing. Nonprofits, including CCSS – which has an annual budget of $7 million – are dependent on philanthropy and government grants to exist. In line with broader neoliberal politics of austerity, nonprofits are kept in a precarious position, balanced on the edge of closing, and never receive enough funding to serve their community, pay employees, and keep the lights on. As a result, nonprofits must bend towards the funding priorities of wealthy, corporate, and government donors rather than designing programs around the real needs of their constituents. Further, due to the instability of grant-based funding, nonprofits are also under great pressure to find other revenue streams. For nonprofit landlords, like CCSS, that includes collecting rent from properties such as the Tiny Homes project. CCSS is incentivised not to follow through on its promise to transition Ms. Brown and the other residents to homeownership in no small part because the Tiny Homes are a valuable asset and a revenue source.
These structural pressures pit CCSS against its own constituents, leading them to prioritize control over the well-being of their constituents. This can be seen in the extraordinary efforts CCSS has taken to evict Ms. Brown, going so far as to hire a high-profile attorney and file a defamation lawsuit, which has been dismissed. Indeed, CCSS offered Ms. Brown an initial payout of $2,500 then increased it to $10,000 to leave rather than give her the opportunity to complete the program and own her home.
As part of the neoliberal approach of replacing governmental functions and services with public-private partnerships, large nonprofits such as CCSS function as an extension of the state. They often operate in tight coordination with government entities and funding agencies, but lack the accountability of elected (and recallable) leaders. In this way, nonprofit organizations can still be highly exploitative.
The current housing crisis is not the first one, nor will it be the last, while real estate remains a tool of speculation and capital accumulation. Instead of speculation, what we need is public housing controlled directly by the community. That means the elimination of real estate as a tool of financial investment and speculation. Instead, apartment buildings and housing collections like the Tiny Homes must be controlled and operated by the people that work and live in them.
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Low-income Black and Brown housing activists in Philadelphia are fighting to stop the displacement of residents who live in an affordable housing complex in the largely gentrified neighborhood of University City. The complex, known as University City Townhomes, was built to provide affordable housing to low-income residents, many of whom are elderly and disabled, but the property owner has since announced plans to redevelop the property, which is near the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. We speak with University City Townhomes residents Rasheda Alexander and Sheldon Davids, who have held months of encampments and protests alongside William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. “It was always about greed and money and racism,” says Barber, who notes the move to redevelop the complex is part of a larger assault on poor people and housing services in the United States.