Berliners got to vote about expropriation once before. On June 20, 1926, the German Reich held a referendum about the demand to “expropriate the princes” without giving them “one pfennig.” The castles and forests still in the hands of the aristocratic houses were to be put into public ownership. At a time when poverty and unemployment was rising, there was little sympathy for the nobility that had been toppled in 1918. A huge majority of votes — 14 million, or 93 percent of all cast — said “Ja.”
But the Reich president Paul von Hindenburg, himself an aristocrat, declared that the referendum would only be successful if a majority of all eligible voters were in favour. Berlin, interestingly, even met this absurdly high quorum. But most of Germany did not — only 39 percent of eligible voters participated in the referendum. That is why, almost 100 years later, we are still stuck with German aristocrats living in obscene wealth, still owning all the forests, and demanding billions more from public coffers.
Now, it appears that we will get to vote about expropriation again. Instead of princes, however, we are now talking about the new financial aristocracy — the real estate companies that control hundreds of thousands of apartments in the German capital. The largest one, Deutsche Wohnen, has 100,000. The four largest companies own a total of 250,000 or so.
The campaign Deutsche Wohnen enteignen has cleared the hurdles to start a referendum. They collected 57,000 signatures — far more than the 20,000 required. The Senat was supposed to conduct a quick “legal review” of the proposal. The Interior Senator, Andreas Geisel from the SPD, took a full 441 days for that study! Yet the results have always been clear: expropriations are entirely possible according to Article 15 of Germany’s constitution (more on that in a second).
Now Berlin’s parliament, the Abgeordnetenhaus, has four months to vote on the proposed law. If they reject it, as they are almost certain to do, the initiative needs to gather another 170,000 signatures. Then, people in Berlin with German citizenship can vote on the proposal sometime next year. If it gets at least 50 percent of votes in favour, and at least 25 percent of eligible voters, then it becomes law.
Berliners are enthusiastic about the idea. A representative survey conducted by the Tagesspiegel at the beginning of 2019 (and that newspaper is beyond suspicion of communist sympathies) found that 54.8 percent of people think it is good that there is a push for expropriation.
How is this possible in Berlin, the former Frontstadt known around the world for its virulent anticommunism? It’s simple. The big monopolies have gone too far. Sucking up properties all over the city while ruthlessly jacking up rents, they have turned most of the population against them. Even my editor, when he heard about the story, mentioned he rents from Deutsche Wohnen and hates them.
If I were their public relations director, I would find a dozen or so renters who love Deutsche Wohnen and film them at a focus group, like those manipulative ads that Uber made about itself. But they haven’t done that — and I can only conclude that they can’t find even a dozen people in Berlin who have anything nice to say about them.
A leading figure of the campaign is Michael Prütz, an insurance salesman from Kreuzberg who has been active in Berlin’s radical Left for more than 50 years. (I interviewed him about his experiences as a 15-year-old Gymnasiast in West Berlin in 1968 for Exberliner magazine.) Prütz is shocked that after half a century of fighting against capitalism, he has finally found a topic where the majority of Berliners are on his side. Even older people in Steglitz-Zehlendorf, who once told him to “go over to the other side [of the wall],” are now in favour of expropriating big corporations, because… well, what else can you do when your rent keeps increasing year after year?
Some of the more than 100,000 apartments Deutsche Wohnen owns in Berlin. Photo: Deutsche Wohnen
Deutsche Wohnen is a strange construct as well, more of a financial company than a real estate company. Opponents of expropriation argue that this will prevent the construction of new housing — but DW builds very little. Instead, they buy up existing housing in order to raise the rents. According to one study, they pay out more in dividends to their investors every year than they take in in rent. This is possible because every year they claim higher values for the properties on their books. Your home, in other words, is just an object for financial speculation.
So how did this Artikel 15 allowing expropriation make it into Germany’s Basic Law? According to the official English translation, it reads:
Land, natural resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalisation, be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation.
When the Grundgesetz was written, lots of people were skeptical of capitalism. This was just a few years after the war had ended, and no one had forgotten who had brought the Nazis to power and who had accumulated tremendous profits from such horrific crimes. In 1946, a referendum was held in Saxony about the expropriation of Nazi criminals (which was basically the entire capitalist class), where 78 percent of people voted in favour. This is why the SPD, in order to sell the new capitalist republic in the West, told people it wasn’t a capitalist republic at all. Yes, the new constitution protected private property, but it also contained an article about the possibility to expropriate capital for the public good. Thus the SPD, now fighting against the demand for expropriation, was responsible for adding this possibility to the constitution.
In the last year, Berlin got the Mietendeckel, the law on rent-caps. Around 86 percent of homes in the city are rentals, and renters love the new law, but landlords are hoping to have it declared unconstitutional. Some people assume that the rent caps were the work of Berlin’s progressive “red-red-green” government. But really, it’s the opposite: it’s this very government that privatised most of Berlin’s public housing stock in the early 2000s, leading to the constant and explosive growth of rents. It’s not that the government is going against landlords — it’s only because you have stable majorities demanding expropriation that make the rent caps look like a compromise.
There is a bigger strategic lesson in this. If you want real reforms that improve people’s lives, then you need to fight for revolution. The only reason we won the eight-hour-day in Germany is because capitalists were terrified that they would be completely toppled in the revolution. As the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James put it: “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”
And that is why it is worth fighting for expropriation now. If the property of these financial vampire squids is put into the hands of publicly-owned housing companies, Berliners will have more comfortable lives and pay lower rents. And even if it’s not successful, we can terrify landlords and get them to lower our rents.
‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in early September that it was establishing a temporary ban on evictions across the country.’
Chris Gelardi
Activists gather to protect encampments and demand that the city transfer buildings to a community land trust.
It’s the beginning of the month. Do you know your neighbors?
I
have several questions for you. Can you imagine a society where the
prospect of a forced eviction is considered completely barbaric, and is
virtually or entirely unheard of in practice? Can you imagine the United
States becoming one of those societies? And have you joined a local
community group that is considering these questions where you live?
I’m
a founding member of a new network I and others are working on
expanding here in Portland, called Portland Emergency Eviction Response,
which is basically a rapid response team to go participate in eviction
defense actions, activated by text message, in the tradition of the
telephone trees of the twentieth century, or the tin horns of the
nineteenth century.
I’d like to give you my answers to the questions I posed above.
Can
I imagine a society where the class war is not carried out in such
vicious ways, with millions of renters across the country getting
evicted every year, with the disruption, dislocation, destruction and
chaos that ensues in community after community, year in and year out?
Yes,
that’s easy. Many countries in the world already don’t allow this
feudal practice. I travel in them and perform in them regularly, and
have done so for most of my adult life. There are many ways landlords
can seek restitution aside from the forced eviction of tenants.
Can I imagine the US becoming one of those societies, where eviction doesn’t happen?
Although
it is currently a more unequal place than it has been since the Age of
the Robber Barons, this fact is not only a curse for so many struggling
in poverty, but it’s also an opportunity. As bad as the housing crisis
was for both homeowners and renters before the pandemic hit, it is
exponentially worse now, particularly since the federal government has
been unable to take any meaningful action since the end of Pandemic
Unemployment Assistance — although the new move by the Centers for
Disease Control to ban evictions for anyone making less than $99,000
until the end of the year at least kicks the can down the road until
then, when the past rent will suddenly come due for tens of millions of
people who will have avoided eviction until then. The patchwork of
state and local eviction suspensions is now, finally, largely supplanted
by a nationwide ban. But one which, like almost all the other
temporary eviction bans, does nothing to address the underlying problems
that existed prior to the pandemic, or the divisions that have been
exacerbated by the pandemic. So unless further, major action is taken,
everything now comes crashing down at the beginning of 2021, instead of
this month.
With the situation being as bad as it is, a lot of
people are realizing that the capitalist system and the ever-increasing
cost of housing that has been the situation for a long time now, but
much more so since the last financial crisis, is untenable. People are
no longer going along with the program. Landlords seeking to evict
tenants, from New York to California, have faced spontaneous and angry
gatherings of their neighbors, that have caused them to back off and go
away. This is how it starts.
Even a criminally unequal society
still requires a certain degree of the consent of the governed in order
to function. Police brutality alone won’t work – not when the people
being evicted increasingly include members of the extended families of
cops across the country, just as they increasingly includes so many
other segments of society, with Black and brown people being
disproportionately impacted everywhere. People are spontaneously
reacting against this madness when they’re confronted by it.
Increasingly, clearly, the consent of the governed is being withdrawn.
This
is why the time is now. This is why people who have been involved with
every other political movement that has ever existed in my lifetime are
back out in the streets today. All those folks involved with the global
justice movement, Occupy Wall Street, the climate justice movement, and
so on, also believe that Black lives matter, and that now is the time to
fight back against institutional racism, and all the other institutions
that perpetuate it, such as the police, and also the venture
capitalists and their facilitators in the state legislatures across the
country that allow for the kind of ethnic cleansing that has taken place
in cities like Portland, where more than half of the Black population
here has been priced out of the city since I moved into it.
I have
seen the same thing happen in every city I have lived in in this
country, and I’m not the only one who is sick and tired of it. Being
sick and tired is becoming widespread. There are only so many times one
can experience this pattern before you’ve had enough – moving into a
diverse neighborhood, only to see it get whiter and whiter, until only
the most recent newcomers with six-figure incomes can afford to live in
it anymore, and the vast majority of Black and brown residents, along
with the vast majority of professional artists and so many others, are
once again forced out. The ranks of those who are fed up with this shit
is growing fast.
Which brings me to my third question – have you joined a neighborhood network of some kind?
Spontaneous
outpourings by neighbors are essential, but we can’t depend on that
alone to end something like the phenomenon of forced eviction. Forced
eviction was banned in Chicago during the last Great Depression in no
small part because people organized eviction defense squads. Somewhat
more recently in New York City, many squats and other buildings were
saved through similar kinds of mobilizing – even during the very
authoritarian Giuliani administration in that city. In the UK, eviction
defense actions in Glasgow were essential to fueling a successful rent
strike and ultimately a nationwide rent freeze, a century ago.
History
is full of such examples. Although for the bigger ones you sometimes
have to go back a ways to find them, this is because of the confluence
of circumstances people were facing at those times – which bear so much
similarity to today. Sudden economic crashes on top of an already
terribly divided, stratified society, met by incompetent political
leadership.
Changing the world always seems impossible at first, I
hear. The obstacles always seem insurmountable at the outset. Getting
started is the hardest part. But once one eviction has been prevented,
and then another, momentum can build very quickly.
Those of us who
are working on the initiative we’re calling Portland Emergency Eviction
Response are looking at this basic approach: if you are facing eviction
in the city of Portland and for whatever reason(s) you have decided you
want to try to stay in your home and resist this eviction order,
contact us, so we can be in touch well before the cops actually show up.
When the police do eventually show up, which they tend to do on their
own time, you tell us, and we activate the text mob. But first, if
you’re in Portland, you need to sign up, to this or another such
initiative. If you do, you’ll meet some of the best people you’ve ever
met, while you’re defending someone’s home together.
Go to
artistsforrentcontrol.org and scroll down to the bottom of the screen to
sign up. Another world is possible, and another Portland is possible.
David Rovics has been called the musical voice of the progressive movement in the US. Since the mid-90’s, Rovics has spent most of his time on the road, playing hundreds of shows every year throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Japan. He has shared the stage regularly with leading intellectuals, activists, politicians, musicians and celebrities. In recent years he’s added children’s music and essay-writing to his repertoire. More importantly, he’s really good. He will make you laugh, he will make you cry, and he will make the revolution irresistible. Check out his pamphlet: Sing for Your Supper: A DIY Guide to Playing Music, Writing Songs, and Booking Your Own Gigs
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 3, 2020 ~ Happy New Year – here’s your eviction notice. That’s how tens of millions of struggling Americans have been set up to fail as the one percent on Wall Street, propped up by unlimited money from the Fed, ring in the New Year with Tiffany flutes of Dom Perignon in their Greenwich mansions. According to a recent study published by The Aspen Institute, 30 to 40 million Americans will be at risk of eviction over the next several months. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been dragged into the eviction morass because Democrats and Republicans in Congress cannot find common ground on a meaningful plan. On Tuesday, the CDC issued an order that bans landlords from evicting tenants that cannot afford to pay rent due to a pandemic-related job loss or income reduction. The CDC action follows an … Continue reading →
As another month of rent came due September 1, tenant organizers were greeted with a rare bit of good news. The Trump administration announced a sweeping moratorium on residential evictions through the end of the year, providing an unexpected 11th-hour reprieve to millions of renters who had run out of options.
It is a stunning move from a president who began his career in a family business synonymous with housing discrimination—and an unmistakable pivot meant to draw voters’ attention away from the Trump administration’s disastrous mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic in advance of the November election.
The order, which was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), represents the farthest-reaching eviction protection to date. The agency justified the move as an emergency measure to stop the spread of Covid-19. The CDC’s authority to take this kind of action will likely be challenged in court, but for now, all tenants who make less than $99,000 per year appear to be covered, as long as they attest they’ve made their best effort to pay rent.
“Housing organizers have been fighting for protections like this for months,” says Jake Marshall, an organizer with the Chicago-based Autonomous Tenants Union, which has been urging Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to extend the state’s eviction moratorium and use his emergency powers to offer broader relief to tenants. “While the CDC’s order is just kicking the can down the road, it’s frightening that Trump seems to be kicking it more effectively than most Democratic officials.”
Since the start of the pandemic, a national tenants’ movement has been gathering strength and clamoring for action. In gentrifying cities like Oakland, Calif., New York and Chicago—historic hotbeds of housing activism—tenant unions, rent strikes and takeovers of vacant buildings are on the rise. And places like Kansas City, Mo., upstate New York and central Florida—places not known for this kind of activism—have seen the growth of their own housing organizing campaigns, sometimes drawing strength from Black Lives Matter protests.
“The Trump administration has been quick to celebrate the national eviction moratorium as his offering to working families,” says Tara Raghuveer, housing campaign director for the national grassroots group People’s Action. “But it must not be attributed to Trump. This is a victory for tenants.”
Raghuveer and other advocates stress, however, that it’s a temporary victory. Without further federal action, which Trump and other Republicans have fought tooth and nail, millions of renters still face an “eviction cliff” at the end of December.
In August, as $600 weekly federal unemployment payments expired and evictions proceedings restarted in more than 30 states, a report by the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project warned than that 29 million people could be at risk of eviction by the end of 2020. That outcome would be unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Estimates put the number of unhoused people in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash at up to 2 million. Around 10 million people were forced out of their homes after the 2008 financial crisis.
It is impossible to predict how this current crisis will play out, says Zach Neumann, a Colorado attorney who founded the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project to connect tenants with volunteer legal counsel. “But if even a third of the people at risk of eviction become homeless, I think we’re going to be living through something magnitudes larger than the Great Depression, in terms of the transience, the family separation, the devastating and lasting impact on every aspect of our communities.”
A patchwork of protections
Before the pandemic, nearly half of U.S. renting households spent more than a third of their income on rent, and 40% of U.S. adults reported they couldn’t cover a $400 emergency. When the U.S. unemployment rate hit 15% in April, it was obvious that rent payments were going to be a problem.
More than 40 states and territories did act to limit or stop evictions, according to Emily Benfer, a visiting law professor at Wake Forest University who has been tracking the orders in a publicly available spreadsheet.
But to date, almost none of these moratoriums had halted all stages of the eviction process, leaving many landlords free to file new court cases against tenants, proceed with hearings or seek enforcement of past eviction orders. Simply educating tenants about how to navigate the maze of partial protections has required a herculean effort from legal aid organizations.
According to Benfer, the CDC’s September 1 order prevents landlords from pursuing eviction cases for non-payment of rent until January 2021.
This a key public health intervention, Benfer says. “The CDC’s emergency action is critical to protecting public health and preventing the spread of the virus both in and across states,” she adds. “Eviction increases the risk of Covid-19 and results in long-term poor health outcomes.”
However, the moratorium does nothing to prevent tenants from racking up thousands of dollars in back rent and fees owed, nor does it help homeowners and small landlords who depend on rental income to pay their mortgages.
“While this is an extremely important measure, without rental assistance to cover the mounting debt, it will only delay eviction, shift the harm to small property owners, and result in devastating consequences,” Benfer says. “Congress must quickly bolster this necessary public health intervention with rent relief to sustain the housing market and finally end the eviction crisis.”
The CDC order also continues to allow evictions for reasons other than non-payment of rent, such as lease violations, leading to fears that landlords will find ways to skirt the moratorium.
“We know that landlords will find ways to evict and retaliate against their tenants because it’s already happening,” Tara Raghuveer says.
While the federal moratorium opens the door to criminal penalties of landlords who violate it, it also remains to be seen how rigorously the order will be enforced. Existing protections didn’t save Sara Cruz, 27, from losing her home in August. Cruz says she was already living paycheck to paycheck before the pandemic, working as a server in Vero Beach, Fla. She lost her job in March. Despite qualifying, she has yet to receive assistance from Florida’s unemployment system, one of the slowest in the nation. Cruz found a local agency willing to cover her rent but says her landlord refused it.
In July, Cruz was served an eviction notice. Under Florida law, one of the harshest in the nation for renters, tenants must respond in writing within five days or face a default judgment. Cruz says she did, but a police officer came to her door with an eviction order the next day. While even filing evictions potentially violates Florida’s statewide order, compliance varies widely depending on jurisdiction.
Cruz used the rental assistance her landlord rejected to secure the first available apartment she could find, leaving behind many of her belongings. She says she has no idea how she’ll pay for September.
According to Cruz, in central Florida, you “have the rich, and then you have the people who serve the rich.” She adds, “until the economy is back on track, they should not be allowed to be kicking people out.”
Following her eviction, Cruz connected with Organize Florida, which runs one of the largest grassroots voter registration operations in the state. The group has been flexing its muscle to stop evictions.
In addition to joining a statewide push to cancel rent and mortgage payments, Orlando-area housing organizers are joining the call from Black Lives Matter to defund police departments, says Vanessa Keverenge, an organizer with the group. Activists are targeting the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, which has requested a $15 million budget increase for 2021.
“That money could be going to help people at imminent risk of eviction,” Keverenge says. “We’re being told there’s no money, when the money’s right there.”
Building tenant power
The looming wave of evictions is expected to hit communities of color especially hard. Data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey suggests nearly half of Black and Hispanic renters were unsure they would be able to pay August rent on time, a figure twice as high as that of white renters. The risk is especially acute for Black women, who in 17 states already faced eviction at double the rate of white renters, according to an analysis from the ACLU.
“I don’t think we can talk about Black lives mattering without talking about eviction,” says Jenay Manley, a member of the housing rights group KC Tenants in Kansas City, Mo. Manley, who is Black, says she and her two children have struggled financially during the pandemic after she left an abusive relationship. “We need to talk about Black lives mattering before the point where we are brutalized or killed by police,” she says.
Manley was one of two KC Tenants members arrested and charged with trespassing during a July 30 action. The group successfully shut down eviction hearings, which had resumed in Jackson County after a two-month pandemic pause.
Since launching in February 2019, KC Tenants has grown into a formidable force in local politics. After helping make housing a central issue in local elections in the spring, the group capped off its first year with the passage of a groundbreaking tenants’ bill of rights in the Kansas City Council. It establishes a new Office of the Tenant Advocate and expands protections against discrimination and retaliation by landlords.
As the Covid-19 crisis began in March, the group helped form the Coalition to Protect Missouri Tenants, comprised of about 50 community, labor and faith organizations from across the state. Demanding a ban on evictions, foreclosures and utility shut-offs, as well as suspension of rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis, the coalition staged a series of actions targeting Republican Gov. Mike Parsons. In April, protesters lined up along the shoulder of Interstate 70, stretching from Kansas City to St. Louis, and posted signs every five miles reading, “Governor Parsons is killing the poor.”
In May, they marched to the governor’s mansion and posted their own eviction notice.
KC Tenants member Tiana Caldwell, 42, was among those initially scheduled to appear in the Jackson County eviction court July 30. A two-time cancer survivor with congestive heart failure, Caldwell pays about $300 in out-of-pocket medical costs each month. Caldwell fell behind on rent after she and her husband were furloughed in March.
As soon as the eviction moratorium expired in May, Caldwell’s landlord filed to evict. Caldwell, her husband and their teenage son had already spent six months without a home following a 2018 eviction, when Caldwell was too sick to work. The prospect of repeating the ordeal was gutting.
In June, Caldwell’s husband returned to his job as a maintenance worker and their long-delayed federal stimulus checks arrived. They were able to work out an arrangement with their landlord to pay $4,000 in back rent and fees, in exchange for dropping the case. They scraped the money together by their June 30 deadline.
But in July, Caldwell received a court summons. She called the company that owns her home and was assured she had nothing to worry about. Caldwell attended the scheduled video hearing anyway, only to discover her landlord was seeking the money she had already paid. The case was dismissed after Caldwell produced receipts—but had she taken the landlord’s advice, she might have lost a judgment by default.
Caldwell believes her experience belies guidance from state and local elected officials, who have called for landlords and tenants to negotiate in good faith in lieu of formal eviction moratoriums.
“They’re telling us to make arrangements with our landlords, but the landlords aren’t being honest,” Caldwell says.
Caldwell says she’s heard scores of similar stories from renters who call the KC Tenants hotline. A group of about 15 volunteers fields as many as 200 calls a week, connecting desperate renters with legal representation, mutual aid and community support. Caldwell talked to one tenant who had come up with back rent, only to be evicted for a minor lease violation. In another call, a single mother described being sexually propositioned when she told her landlord she had lost her job and was unable to pay.
“We decided as a group that we’re not going to throw anyone away,” Caldwell says.
Cancel the rent
Temporary protections cannot substitute for further federal action, desperately needed to prevent communities from hurtling over the eviction cliff. While the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a $100 billion rental assistance fund—as part of May’s HEROES Act and as a standalone bill—it’s dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled Senate.
By halting evictions, President Donald Trump went a step further than his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, who in August released a statement urging Congress to enact an emergency housing program, but offered few specifics. Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), had called more specifically for a one-year eviction ban and has introduced a bill that would fund legal representation for tenants facing eviction.
Many tenant organizers argue that, in the midst of the pandemic, even a massive rental-assistance fund like the one supported by Democratic leadership would be inadequate—likely with long delays (similar to unemployment assistance) and leaving out undocumented immigrants and vulnerable groups.
The best solution, they say, would be to just cancel rent.
In April, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced a bill endorsed by KC Tenants, Organize Florida and dozens of other grassroots groups that would suspend rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis, with landlords and mortgage holders receiving federal aid to cover their losses if they agree not to evict tenants without cause, among other conditions. For landlords who want out of the housing market, the bill would create a fund for nonprofits, public housing agencies, cooperatives, community land trusts and local governments to acquire their properties.
The bill has not yet attracted widespread support in Congress but is inspiring progressive state legislators.
In July, Democratic New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou introduced a new bill to cancel all rent and certain mortgage payments, after a similar bill faced opposition from Democratic leadership. In this version, landlords would be required to show they are experiencing financial distress to continue collecting rent, says Rebecca Garrard, campaigns manager for housing justice at Citizen Action of New York, a grassroots group.
“We don’t need a public bailout of billionaire Wall Street landlords in New York,” Garrard says. “We hope that this approach will signal to other states and the federal government what positive solutions could actually look like.”
The push gathered momentum from grassroots organizers in Ithaca, N.Y., which in June became the first city to pass a resolution calling for rent cancellation—though the measure requires action from the state to take effect.
While it was previously “unfamiliar terrain” upstate, “tenant organizing has really bloomed,” Garrard says. “If there’s a positive, unintended consequence of the pandemic, it’s that there’s a fierce energy from tenants to mobilize and defend each other.”
According to Genevieve Rand, a member of the Ithaca Tenants Union, that energy evolved out of an active network of workplace organizing. Rand worked at a cafe prior to the pandemic and formed a union in May 2019. She then helped organize weekly meetings with other service-sector employees to talk about wages and local working conditions.
As in many other cities with a high concentration of low-wage service workers, Ithaca now has a high unemployment rate—and a brewing eviction crisis. Rand herself faces eviction. But the Ithaca Tenants Union has been expanding exponentially.
“Every single person” who was involved in the workplace organizing network has taken part in both tenant organizing and Black Lives Matter protests, Rand says.
On August 6, as local housing courts reopened, about 50 members of the Ithaca Tenants Union staged a blockade to prevent attorneys and landlords from entering. The same day, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an extension of the eviction moratorium.
These are small steps, but according to Rand, they send a message to those in power. “We’re getting ready,” Rand says. “We’re not going to let our neighbors be tossed out on the street.”
At least a dozen other groups nationwide staged physical blockades of courts and homes in July and August to protect tenants. In Prince George’s County, Md., more than 50 people showed up with only a day’s notice after the DC Tenants Union and other groups spread word that a landlord planned to change the locks on someone’s home—the kind of illegal eviction that organizers warn may persist, even with an eviction moratorium.
In Chicago, the Autonomous Tenants Union, Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, Chicago Teachers Union and other community groups took turns occupying a plaza outside the city’s eviction court in mid-August. The action resulted in an extension of Illinois’ eviction moratorium, but organizers say self-styled progressive leaders must do more to avoid the unthinkable—being outflanked by Trump on housing.
“Democrats should prove their commitment to housing justice by bridging the gaps in the CDC order,” Jake Marshall says. “Pursue ‘just cause’ for eviction legislation, legislate to cancel rent and make sure each and every tenant knows their rights.”
We present here a webinar that is part of a series coordinated by LevFem and Transnational Social Strike Platform, following up the first webinar organized before the summer. The discussions are based on exchanges taking place within a new emerging network called EAST (Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational). Recognizing that European initiatives cannot be built without looking …
The nationwide eviction moratorium announced Tuesday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will provide immediate and welcome relief through the end of the year for certain renters, but housing rights advocates say the move is woefully inadequate because it fails to provide any payment assistance to renters.
Tenants will still owe back rent plus interest and fees once the moratorium ends in January.
The HHS/CDC eviction moratorium goes further than the moratorium in the CARES Act passed in March, which only applied to renters using federal housing assistance programs or whose landlord had a federally backed mortgage. The move by the Trump administration follows weeks where anti-eviction activists shut down eviction courts in New Orleans, as well actions in 15 cities protesting the failure of Congress to provide rent relief. It also comes following a week of criticism after a Department of Housing and Urban Development official deceived New York public housing residents into appearing in a Trump campaign video without their consent.
The news is a welcome respite for the 30 to 40 million people estimated to be on the brink of eviction. As Deborah Thrope, deputy director of the National Housing Law Project, pointed out, “Housing access is critical to stem the effects of the coronavirus.” But the moratorium merely delays the evictions crisis, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing. Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the coalition, said in a statement that, “while an eviction moratorium is an essential step, it is a half-measure that extends a financial cliff for renters to fall off of when the moratorium expires and back rent is owed,” and called for at least $100 billion in emergency rental relief to properly address the crisis.
This new eviction moratorium is in effect from September 4 through December 31, 2020, and is expected to face legal challenges by landlords. It applies to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, with the exception of American Samoa, which is excluded for now as it has reported no cases of COVID-19.
In order to qualify, renters must meet four requirements. First, they must expect to face homelessness, or expect to move into “close quarters” with others if they are evicted. Second, they must be unable to pay their rent either due to a loss of income or major medical expenses. Third, they must have “used best efforts” to find government assistance for rent. Finally, they must either have received a stimulus check, not filed a tax return in 2019 or make less than $99,000 (or less than $198,000 if filing a joint tax return).
Tenants will still owe back rent plus interest and fees once the moratorium ends in January.
If a renter meets all of these criteria, they must sign a written declaration to their landlord, under penalty of perjury, stating they meet the requirements. (A declaration form can be found on the last few pages of the HHS/CDC notice). Needing to supply this written declaration directly to their landlord may prove difficult to renters whose only access to a computer or internet is through a smartphone — which is about one in five U.S. residents. Those without easy access to a printer (especially with the closure of libraries due to the pandemic) may also have difficulty getting the required documentation to their landlord. “Any time you impose even minimal documentation requirements to qualify for a protection like this, it raises an impediment for people to comply,” said Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project. The documentation requirement may also create opportunities for landlords to say what tenants submit isn’t sufficient.
Ending the moratorium on December 31, 2020, could create a new evictions cliff. If Trump loses to Biden, the new administration won’t begin until after inauguration on January 20, 2021. This could mean renters ring in New Year’s Day with a sheriff evicting them from their home — with a three-week gap before the next administration could extend the moratorium.
Democrats have advocated a more aggressive approach: a $100 billion emergency rental assistance fund. Providing funds to renters sidesteps the problem of tenants owing back rent once the moratorium is over. The bill, the Emergency Rental Assistance and Rental Market Stabilization Act, is led by Representatives Maxine Waters (D-California) and Denny Heck (D-Washington), and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). It is widely supported by the Democratic Caucus: co-sponsored by 41 Senate Democrats and 160 House Democrats.
Unless Congress or the Trump administration takes further action, millions may be spending New Year’s Day being kicked out of their homes.
To truly respond to the ongoing evictions crisis, we need a way to properly track it. Currently, there is no federal evictions database, just as there was no foreclosure database during the 2008 subprime crisis — and there remains no foreclosure database more than a decade later.
Democrats have proposed fixing this problem with the Housing Emergencies Lifeline Program (HELP) Act. Proposed by Representatives Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-California), the bill would create a much-needed federal evictions tracking database, so that lawmakers can track this ongoing crisis and make informed decisions about the scale of help required. There is also a bipartisan bill that would also create an evictions database, the 2019 Eviction Crisis Act led by Senators Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio).
The nation’s housing and homelessness crisis exacerbates the threats of our health crisis. This new eviction moratorium will provide temporary relief for millions, but it delays the core problem. The evictions crisis is still waiting for us, and unless Congress or the Trump administration takes further action, millions may be spending New Year’s Day being kicked out of their homes.
Nawal Arjini
The director of the KC Tenants explains the radicalizing power of housing activism.
Organizers and community members in at least 15 cities across the United States are set to mobilize Tuesday to “storm the streets in front of the homes and offices of Republican leaders, occupy eviction courts, and hold teach-ins on tenant protections for a nationwide day of uprisings to protest the Senate’s failures to provide relief during the biggest eviction crisis the U.S. has ever faced.”
The website of the #ReliefIsDue campaign, spearheaded by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), notes that “our rent and mortgages are due, our bills are due, homelessness is skyrocketing, small businesses are going bankrupt, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican senators continue to sit at home and do nothing.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has upended the national economy, with 57.3 million workers filing for unemployment over the past five months and millions of families struggling to meet basic needs.
On its campaign website, the CPD summarizes the reasons for Tuesday’s planned day of action:
McConnell, backed by the Republican-controlled Senate, has failed to pass the House’s HEROES Act or an alternative that would provide the support we need to stay afloat during this pandemic.
Republicans have refused to extend the $600 Covid-relief unemployment insurance, and some unemployed workers remain ineligible to receive any cash assistance. Without rent cancellation or support, millions of people across the country are facing eviction and foreclosure.
People are unable to find testing sites, and are avoiding treatment because they can’t afford it. Hospitalized Covid patients worry about their medical bills instead of their recovery.
Republicans are letting small businesses go bankrupt while big companies receive PPP loans. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses shuttered by Covid-19 are unable to keep employees on payroll and are at risk of closing for good without direct subsidies.
With rent due on the first of the month and temporary protections expiring for many tenants, an eviction crisis looks imminent.
According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, as many as 40 million people could be displaced from their homes in the next several months. This scenario is precisely what organizers are attempting to prevent.
Rent is due tomorrow. My question is this: with 40 million facing the threat of eviction, how in the world does Sen. McConnell think they’re going to cobble up enough income to keep a roof over their heads during this crisis?
“While our families are struggling to make ends meet, Republican leaders have turned their backs on us,” Ashley Broshious from Charleston, South Carolina, said in a CPD statement. “We are coming together to fight against any evictions happening in our communities and demand that all rent be canceled until this crisis is over. It’s time for us to hold Republicans accountable for all the suffering our communities have gone through because of their inaction. Relief is due and the Senate must act now.”
Organizers in at least 15 states have coordinated mass demonstrations targeting a variety of actors who participate in the eviction process, including banks, corporate landlords, marshals, sheriffs, and the courts.
Examples of specific protests include rallies and car caravans outside of housing courts; a march to McConnell’s house in Washington D.C.; teach-ins on tenant protections and eviction defenses; and in Little Rock, Arkansas, tenants will serve eviction notices to U.S. Senators.
Throughout the nation, demonstrators will “call on eviction and housing courts across the country to remain closed and for evictions, rent, and mortgages to be cancelled for the duration of the crisis and a recovery period.”
In addition, activists are calling on the Senate to:
Cancel rent, cancel mortgages and extend the eviction moratorium;
Extend the $600 unemployment insurance;
Provide cash assistance for all;
Provide free testing and healthcare for all;
Provide grants to small businesses to keep workers on payroll and small businesses alive; and
Provide students all the support they need to learn from home until it’s safe for schools to reopen.
Sept. 1 will mark the fifth straight month of protests against evictions. While thousands of people have taken part in protests, CPD says that “anger and frustration are reaching a breaking point as the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Senate have failed to extend housing relief.”
A full list of local events can be found at reliefisdue.com.
