Half of America's poor pay at least 50% of their income on rent, while a quarter of them pay over 70%, and this trend is worsening as the number of affordable housing units continues to outpace Americans' abilities to pay for them. How did we get in a scenario where so many Americans are surrendering so much just to have a place to live? What incentives drive people to prey upon the needs we have for basic necessities? What does eviction actually mean? All these questions will be answered and we'll get to listen into a special interview with a guest joining us from Santa Cruz to discuss tenant organizing, legislative solutions, and how all of us could be making a difference in our lives and those of our neighbors in this intro episode to housing rights.
Subscribe now on: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Soundcloud | Spotify | RSS | or search "Ashes Ashes" on your favorite podcast app.
Thank you so much Michael Kaspark for this wonderful transcript!
I'm David Torcivia.
[0:06] I’m Daniel Forkner.
[0:08] And this is Ashes Ashes. A show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[0:19] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[0:33] Landlords have been set up to take advantage and exploit tenants. That is the role that they've been put in. And it's not necessarily, they didn't just wake up one day like, “oh, I wanna go oppress some people.” That’s not how our system works, right? They inherited some property or they just decided that this was the way that they're going to guarantee their retirement or whatever, and that put them in an economic position where they have control over another person's housing situation. And their interests are contradictory to that of a tenant. It's like your boss at a job is always going to have interests that are contradictory to yours. No matter how nice of a person they are, at some point what you need to survive is going to go up against how they make their income.
[1:13] Today, 50% of poor families in the US spend half of their income on rent. And 25% of poor families spend 70% of their income on rent, leaving little to nothing left over for basic necessities like food, healthcare, and transportation. As well get to, tenants are pushing back against the tactics landlords are using to keep them in precarity, but landlord themselves are utilizing their own techniques to enforce this status quo. This includes things like aggressive lobbying and political spending efforts. In fact, realtors spend three-quarters of a million dollars late last year to defeat a ballot initiative in Santa Cruz, California. And in California a statewide bill, Prop 10, that would have made it easier for local municipalities to regulate rental prices was defeated after investment firms, including Blackstone, spent $74 million to fight it. In 2016 landlords and other real estate firms raised over $250 million in political contributions. More than double what was raised by oil and gas.
[2:20] But these fights are not exclusive to the US, David. Just a few days ago tens of thousands of people marched in cities across Germany in protest against out-of-control rental prices and gentrification making it cost prohibitive simply to live with a roof overhead. So this is a show about housing, David, but you know there's so much that could be said about housing and the many, many relationships that go into creating the housing market and so we’re just going to spend, in this introductory episode, which we’re going to have to come back to this topic time and time again, we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking about the relationship between landlords and their tenants. Specifically, mostly landlords of big apartment buildings. And you know this topic is something that's been gaining traction, like you mentioned, something that's been hitting the news and in all the political struggles. There was a segment on the John Oliver show just a couple days ago in which he describes a little bit of the exploitative and almost criminal relationship that, landlords of mobile home parks have with their renters where [3:34] you have these big investment companies have been buying up these mobile home parks all across the country and the whole strategy is based on the fact that you can derive profit from a tenant that has no choice to go anywhere else. Because the way that they structure these deals is it’s not a typical renting situation where, you know, a person is renting a mobile home from a landlord. What they're actually doing is purchasing the rental home, so the family owns the mobile home, but what they're doing is they're renting the land underneath it. Of course, if the landlord decides to raise the rent on that land, it's not so easy for the poor, you know, family to just spend $5,000 or whatever it is to relocate their home. And this is something that has come out that these landlords have been discussing in meetings and seminars as the intent behind their strategy. To say “look, these people cannot go. They’re effectively prisoners in this home, so we can get away with raising whatever price we want and there's nothing they can do about it. And if they can't pay, well, maybe they can sell some plasma, maybe they can sell some blood, because it's not our problem.” And of course last week, David, when we're talking about facial tracking, it came up that landlords in New York City intensely track the tenants that are in their rent-controlled buildings for various reasons, you know, to kick them out or to control them in some way to generate profit. [4:58] This is a topic that so many people in the United States and abroad can relate to. This relationship between a landlord and the tenant. And so this is something we’re gonna explore a little bit and we will be joined later in this episode by Claire, an activist in organizer in California, specifically in Santa Cruz.
[5:17] Which is why we had to mention that little Santa Cruz fact right there.
[5:20] And it’s really worth sticking around to hear this interview. Claire did such a great job articulating things that I couldn't have said better myself. David, I don't know about you, but I was just really impressed and inspired by their perspective, and so we’ll get to that. But David there’s two papers that we’re going to be, just briefly, going through before we get to that interview. One comes out of Georgia State University, here in my city of Atlanta, and another one that came out of Boston, both this year.
[5:51] Well let’s look at some of this stuff, Daniel, and I started this episode by listing out just how much of people's income is going to rent. [5:59] And it's a huge, staggering sum, I mean, what did I say? 50% for a lot of people, 70% of total income going to rent alone for large portions of the American population. I mean, this is a staggering problem. And this trend, unfortunately, has just been getting worse as time goes on. As the number of low-income people demanding low-cost housing has risen, and this is because of things that we talk about on the show, these sources of economic inequality, while the supply of low-cost housing has at the same time fallen due to lack of federal funding for housing support. Between 2005 and 2015, the share of low income families receiving housing support fell by 3%. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but these are huge amounts of people who are now facing these difficult decisions of, “well do I buy things like insulin or food or continue to put a roof over my head?” At the same time, apartment construction and renovations of old buildings focused on high-end renters, these so-called luxury rehabilitations of apartments, and this results in higher rent which is a heavy burden for these low-income families. 19% of renters in the US in 1999 allocated more than half their income to rent, but by 2015 that had risen to 25% of renters. And at the same time divestment of older buildings means that many are becoming unlivable.
[7:22] So it's getting harder and harder for a large group of the population the United States to afford housing. More and more people are spending the majority of their income just to have a roof over their head which makes them financially insecure and, for these reasons and more, eviction is a dark cloud that hangs over the heads of so many people. So this one paper out of Georgia State University, it examines all 43 large owners of apartment buildings in Atlanta, each owning more than five large apartment communities and together controlling 33% of the market and 120,000 units, so these are big players, and the paper looks at how these landlords employ a certain practice called serial eviction filings. [8:09] And this is a process in which evictions are filed on the same tenant over and over and over again, by the same landlord on a tenant living in the same unit and often the landlord's intent in this practice is not even to remove the tenant at all. But before we get into why this is going on and then the significance of this, I think it's important to point out just how awful eviction is, David, I don't know if you've ever faced an eviction notice before but for anyone who's experienced an eviction or the threat of eviction, it's very serious because this is something that goes on your permanent record, so to speak. It can impact your ability to rent in the future and if you're already in a financially insecure situation this can, you know, exacerbate that to new levels.
[8:56] Well, Daniel, I've been fortunate enough not to have to face an eviction notice yet but I have worked with people who have and it is terrifying. I mean the legal struggles and complications aside, but just knowing that your home might not be yours for much longer and having to deal with that is, catastrophic. And not just to the renters themselves but to their family members, whether they have direct children, or something, or their indirect family who might have to support them in this time of difficulties coming forward. Did you see the cat thing? I sent it to like a bunch of people. It broke my heart. There's this tweet the other day that this cat was left in front of, this PetSmart and then somebody from the PetSmart who worked there came in at like, 7:00 and they found the cat. It was in a carrying case, and this person worked for like the ASPCA, or some sort of animal organization, and so they took it there to be adopted. But it had a note tucked into it that was written by this child. Oh my God, I just got to read it because it’s the saddest thing I've ever read. So here’s what the note said. [9:58] At the top it says Tigger - boy, and it's very clearly written by this child, which makes it harder to read but - “My name is Tigger. I'm 2 years old. My family got evicted with 24 hours notice. I'm an indoor cat, I like people but get scared easily. I like to get petted, sometimes I get nervous when I get picked up. I'm sweet and never bit anyone, I'm even scared of mice. I'm 75% Persian and 25% Tabby. My family is sad. Please find me a good home, don't let nothing happen to me, I have not had my shots because I was indoor. I'm scared of outside and I will hide. I know my name very good. If you read this note please give it to somebody that can help me. I also like to talk. Do not euthanize please, he's a perfectly good cat. He is young, only two.” [10:48] And this note was like tucked-in just the corner of this cat carrier and the cat is the saddest looking cat I've ever seen, like its eyes, just has these sad cat eyes. But I mean, the story is so sad for me because, first off, I'm a cat person and a sucker for cats but I mean like this, this kid like what kid needs to first off be forced to give up their pet that they very clearly loved so much but like, based on their handwriting they’re maybe like 8 or 10, maybe, if that, and then they have all these words that they shouldn't need to know yet, you know, “evicted, euthanized.” And they’re giving up this thing that they love so much because of this landlord.
[11:27] You know I recognize my own privilege in that story because my relationship with you know landlords and in renting an apartment. So it’s really just been, you know, I move when I when it's convenient for me, when I want to go somewhere, but it’s never been this situation of like, I feel torn from my own home. And yeah it’s heartbreaking to think about how, you know, from the landlord's perspective they think they're just making a business decision but on the other side of that is a whole family, a child, relationships that are affected in a big way. And these these evictions are of course one of the major drivers of those separations.
[12:06] Yeah and we can look at some of these stats because evictions absolutely do lead to a lot of problems. The effects can be homelessness, job loss, school turnover, deteriorated health, any of the mental illness, all of these have been linked back directly to evictions. It’s one of the most stressful things that can happen to somebody in their lives and it can spiral out from there. This is all from a paper called “Multi-family Evictions, Large Owners, and Serial Filings: Findings from Metropolitan Atlanta, March 2019.” That is a mouthful.
[12:38] Yeah, so you mention job loss, for example, the stats on that is those who are evicted from their homes have between 11% and 25% chance of losing their jobs.
[12:48] And of course that has consequences. But the eviction itself can push families “down market,” and that means those who get evicted statistically wind up in neighborhoods with a 5.4% increased poverty rate, and a 2% higher crime rate. Which of course this adds even more instability to their lives, puts further positive pressure on that poverty feedback loop.
[13:10] And of course we'll talk about how this relationship, the landlord, these practices of evictions, and the exploitative types of things that we'll talk about a little bit later, really cause problems for someone that they can be completely out of control. But, David, as someone who came from a real estate background, I want to share something I found from a website called biggerpockets.com, and this is a website dedicated to helping people become landlords. The whole idea is “hey, you want bigger pockets, you want passive income, let's form this community to together of landlords who are investing in single-family properties or apartment buildings, and let's talk shop, let's talk strategies, let's talk about how to optimize your financial plan to kick these tenants butt and get that money, that ‘mailbox’ money.” And I found a thread where someone asked “do you investors accept a tenant if they've ever had an eviction on their record?” [14:06] And because this is something I want to emphasize, when you get evicted, when you get that filing, when you go to court, when the landlord kicks you out, it goes on your permanent record. And anytime you try to apply to rent at a new place, I mean, this is on your credit score, any prospective landlord is going to know. Let's hear straight from them, what do they think about renting to someone with an eviction? Let's trade these off, David, because I wrote these down. This is one that I'm calling “the patronizer,” this is Larry from Rochester, New York: “I would take a tenant with a prior eviction, but I'd be looking for some combination of a good explanation why things will be different now. A solid income, and maybe first month, last month, and security check up front. You see, in my experience most tenants want to pay the rent, they really do. They may be terrible money managers and not make rent a priority, or they may hit hard times, but they want to pay. That knowledge helps us remember that they are real people, good people. I'm not their family, I can't be there to catch everybody when they fall. I'm not Social Services, I will evict, and I have to run this like a business, but I won't just write them off because of an eviction without the consideration.” You know I think Larry is actually not too bad, David.
[15:23] Where you reading these from, I can't find this.
[15:26] Oh they’re in the Discord.
[15:27] Oh okay. And this is Kyle a property investor from Northern California. [15:34] “One of my main criteria for applicants is no prior evictions. I do not accept anyone with a prior eviction history, period. I've had numerous calls from prospective applicants who wanted to give me a sad story about how them being evicted wasn't their fault but how am I to know whether they're telling the truth or not? And I certainly don't want to waste my time investigating their claims that it was all the prior landlord’s fault. Plus, once they’ve been through the eviction process once, they already know too much about how the process works and more importantly the delay tactics that they can use to continue living in your property for free.”
[16:10] Here's one that I'm calling the “once a criminal always a criminal.” This comes from Doug, living in New York, he says, “I personally believe that if anyone has a history of doing something, then their chances of doing it again rise dramatically when compared to someone who doesn't have a history doing that same something. If a prospective tenant is honest about a previous eviction then it is commendable. However as a landlord you want to do everything you can to ensure you receive rent each month, if you have to evict a tenant then you're in a terrible situation. It means they are not paying you but are still living in your property. This costs you money.”
[16:48] Well how about this one, Daniel, the “not falling for it.” So this is Allie an investor from New Jersey. “They’ll always blame the landlord. The most common reason I've heard is that their landlord didn't make repairs so they stopped paying rent. As Kyle also said, once they've been through it they know how it works, how much time they have, and they have no fear about going through it again.”
[17:12] Final one I want to highlight and I think this one really shows the mindset behind some of these. This is Matthew Olszak, a realtor from Illinois, basically explaining how the threat of eviction is a useful way to put fear in your tenant, and if they've already had an eviction- well here let me now, I'll just read what he has to say, I don’t want to give it away. “Too many other candidates with less risky borderline traits that I'd rather take a chance on. A huge deterrent to reaching the point of an eviction is a tenants fear. Where will they live with an eviction on their record? What will happen to their stuff. Will it be publicly shamed? Etc. For someone who has already been through it and been evicted they likely are more comfortable and familiar with the process and as such aren't afraid it'll happen. I don't care about the circumstances, I don't care how long ago it was, I don't care what has changed in their life. If I find someone was evicted it's an instant and easy no.”
[18:13] Well that doesn't make these landlords look very good.
[18:15] And the reason I wanted to quote those is just to point out how difficult it could be for someone who might have this on their record. And it reminds me of something that Michelle Alexander wrote in “The New Jim Crow.” Michelle Alexander is writing about how, to this day, minorities in the United States are still discriminated against from so much of our social structure, from accessing so much, and how they're still criminalized. And she brings up this point about public housing and how, you know public housing exists, ostensibly, to give the disadvantaged or those stuck in poverty a place to live, a place to call home, a place that they can afford, but as she writes: [18:57] “The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that, under federal law, public housing tenants can be evicted regardless of whether they had knowledge of or participated in alleged criminal activity. According to the court [19:10] William Lee and Barbara Hill were rightfully evicted after their grandsons were charged with smoking marijuana in a parking lot near their Apartments. Herman Walker was properly evicted as well after police found cocaine on his caregiver. And Perlie Rucker was rightly evicted following the arrest of her daughter for possession of cocaine a few blocks from home. The Court ruled these tenants could be held civilly liable for the non-violent behavior of their children and caregivers. They could be tossed out of public housing due to no fault of their own.” When I read this, David, this is just absolutely blew my mind. You’re telling me that in the United States today an elderly woman living her life in public housing, in an affordable place, can be thrown out with force because her own grandson got charged with a non-violent drug charge, a block away. This is just crazy to me, but it kind of puts into perspective how unproportional those landlords now sound to be so cold and to say “look I don't care about the circumstances. Oh you were evicted? Well you're not renting from me.” Just imagine the situation some of these people might find themselves when that eviction came. I mean, for a lot of people, public housing is a point of last resort, right? And the idea that they could have this eviction on their permanent record through no fault of their own and then find themselves forever locked out of housing.
[20:39] Well, I mean, speaking of Michelle Alexander, and of course that is an absolutely amazing book everyone should be out there reading it, but unsurprisingly research has shown that eviction rates do climb as a percentage of black populations in an area climb. And even worse than this, black women are targeted disproportionately high. Although the number of children present in a neighborhood results in higher eviction rates regardless of race. As if that stat couldn’t get any worse.
[21:08] And then of course, you know, parents who are evicted, there are marked health problems that can result with children, it significantly raises the risk of homelessness for the whole family, and I mentioned that this paper studied the role of landlords in Atlanta. These large landlords and the practice of something called “serial eviction filings.” This is where the story actually gets a little bit darker because at least those individual landlords that we quoted, David, they just didn't want to rent to somebody who they considered a risk. And in our current economic structure maybe we can only criticize them so much. But what if someone is using eviction as an exploitative tool to generate more revenue, by profiting off of the vulnerability that someone finds themselves in. And this is what the paper found, that some landlords start the eviction process, and that process looks different depending on the state you're in, [22:01] but this process repeats itself, and its when a landlord starts that eviction process not to remove the tenant - because in a lot of ways this creates a cost for the landlord now their unit is vacant, they might have to do some maintenance, they're going to have to go without rent for a month or two - so instead they use this as a way to get additional income, because it allows them to tack on late fees which are now enforceable through these eviction filings. What this means is that when the serial eviction filing process is employed, the victims of that will experience a regular 22% increase in their housing cost, a fact that the researchers call in their paper a “effective premium that tenants pay through late fees representing a systematic penalty that the lightly regulated rental market inflicts on those who are economically fragile not dissimilar from the interest rate penalties that subprime lenders inflict on those with previous credit challenges.” And so basically, to summarize, what's going on is these very large landlords have realized that “look, [23:07] we have all these tenants, they’re vulnerable, they don't want eviction notices on their record, they don't want to be evicted from their place, so what we're going to do is make it very easy for them to fail to pay rent on time ,or we're just going to employ this automated software to catch anytime they slip up, and then we will automatically start an eviction process.” They will get a letter on their door and they’ll say “we have filed an eviction notice on you and we've tacked on these late fees.” And the tenant will feel powerless so often, to do anything to fight that, because the sooner they can stop that eviction filing the better off they'll be. So a lot of them just go ahead and do it, and this trend is only going to get worse because we're seeing a consolidation of these large landlords that are taking over the market. Between 2002 and 2012, the largest landlords in the country went from 22% control of the rental market to 32%, and unsurprisingly these larger landlords file eviction at a 68% higher rate than smaller owners.
[24:11] Well that's that's a lot of rambling a little bit there, Daniel. I hope we haven’t lost anybody in this, but I mean, evictions, it's easy to get passionate about that and easy to say, you know, obviously we don't want people being forced out of their homes. But, some of those listening right now might be saying well, maybe landlords are sometimes justified in this, there's a contract there, it's social contract as well as a physical contract, if you're not paying your rent, well you shouldn't be living in the apartment. And though we may not all agree with that fact or maybe more complicated than it looks like just right on the surface, this ultimately begs the question of, well, you know if these poor people are getting evicted, why can they not pay the rent? Why does the rent keep going up? And what are the circumstances leading to this increase in evictions?
[24:57] Yeah that's a really good question because at the end of the day someone could say okay, just because evictions are going up doesn't necessarily mean that the landlords are doing something wrong. Maybe it's the tenants that are doing something wrong and that's why I really wanted to discuss this second paper. It's called “Do the Poor Pay More for Housing? Exploitation, Profit and Risk in Rental Markets.” It was written by two researchers, one out of MIT, one out of Stanford. They start out the paper with kind of going through the history, at least in the past 60 to 80 years of the sociological lens through which we look at [25:33] inequality, at least here in the West, in the United States, and how we define inequality and the places we look for the sources of that inequality. In the seventies it was popular to assume individual characteristics described inequality. From the paper, “social disparities came to be understood as the result of variation and individual characteristics without much reference to relationships between people, collective or organization, thus a father's occupational status was reinterpreted as an attribute belonging to the son whose success in the labor market had less to do with the behavior of employers then with his own attributes.” And we talked about this before, David, how in the seventies we had this massive trend of individualization, kind of going away from the societal view of things, but this kind of went the other way in the eighties. There was a book that came out that kind of captured a new perspective on how social structures might explain economic inequality and again, here’s from the paper, [26:38] “another body of work referenced large-scale social and economic dislocations as a source of inequality,” and the idea was that, well maybe the the social structures of racism and the economic transformation of America resulted in racial inequality and the urban poverty that we were seeing at that time. But this didn't quite tell the whole story either because this kind of assumes that poverty, these renters who are having trouble paying rent, these things kind of just emerged by the way we just happen to be structured as a society. [27:16] But then a new perspective kind of took hold in the late 90s, and this was expressed in a book called Durable Inequality. And the idea was that inequality might actually be a result of the social relations between people. Specifically, exploitative relations in which one group directly profits from the impoverishment of another, as opposed to the idea that poverty just emerges unintentionally. Now, it’s not to say that this was like a new discovery, certainly people had thought this before, but it was just a popular perspective in sociology at the time. It's a little bit ridiculous, I think, David, that, you know, here we are, in 2019 and it took researchers from Stanford and MIT 50 years to tell us that inequality is a result of exploitation. And that landlords exploit their tenants, which is really what this paper is about. In a way it's almost insulting, right? Like, you don't need a big Stanford a researcher to tell you that. All you got to do is just ask a tenant, that’s in a vulnerable and exploitative situation “does your landlord exploit you?” and they'll tell you.
[28:29] It's funny you mention that because this sort of idea has appeared so many times on this show. Recently on that philanthropy episode we did where Bill Gates had to spend a billion dollars researching [28:41] what parents, teachers, and students, already knew and could have told them but it had to be formalized, quantified, and explained, so that you can measure it all out at the cost of time, at the cost of this huge amount of money, at the cost of lives lost in this process while this is all being researched. And the same thing is here. I mean, any tenant knows innately that this is true, that they're being exploited and that's why they're being caught in this system. It's not even a difficult concept, is not a concept that you have to talk to tenants about. All sorts of political philosophy has been written about this. I mean, I don't want to pull out my little red book and like turn to Mao for a second, but I mean a lot of what happened in China around that was centered around just how exploitative landlords were and that's why so many ended up being brutally murdered. But these ideas are not new, fundamentally, they're not things that have to be discovered. I guess at the end of the day it is nice to have been quantified and that we can point to a journal article and say look here it is in the science, black and white, the statistics spell it out for you. You can't deny that this is some sort of cultural thing, or that we're looking at things in a biased way. Like, here is the science, peer-reviewed, there is no arguing. There is absolutely value in that but the fact that we can't take action or we can't look at this from any sort of solutions-based perspective until we have this, here at least in the United States, in the way that we approach these problems, is frankly ridiculous. But I'm getting very much off-topic, I think, here.
[30:08] Well it is I think important to kind of nail down because I think many people in our society in general is kind of stuck still on that social structural view of inequality. I think you hear a lot of people hold on to the perspective that, yes there is still a great deal of people who are racist in our country, yes people are greedy and we don't take care of people like we should, and yes some people enjoy more advantages throughout life than others. But David, I don't know if enough people consider how one group of people being in poverty might actually be the source of enrichment for another group. Not just a coincidence. Another example is more Americans are supporting the idea that the rich need to be taxed, right? This is something that has come up in the political discussions of our day. And many people are agreeing with that. That yes, we need to tax the rich, but the common arguments I hear follow along the lines of, you know, Jeff Bezos doesn't need that extra yacht. He's not going to miss one house out of the 20 he owns and-
[31:14] What about all those yacht jobs Daniel?
[31:17] Well that gets into a nuanced argument, but the idea is like yes, he worked hard and he got all this money but that money could be used to help prevent people from starving in the streets and wouldn't that just be a nicer way to spend that money? Right? But this kind of just implies that billionaires like Bezos should be taxed because we could collectively use that money better. Which in a way ignores the notion that Bezos is that rich, only through the active and intentional theft from and exploitation of people now trapped in poverty. You can't have one without the other, and if we're not aware that great wealth is stolen through exploitation, we don't need to engage some complex philosophy and math formula to determine if it is right or wrong for Bezos to have the billions he does. And so, that is why I think it's important for us to discuss this paper because like you said it does quantify, it does provide some hard facts for us to point to, to the push back against this idea that these billions that are being made by the rich don't come at the expense of those in poverty.
[32:23] We have this concept that we brought up several times on this show before, Daniel, and it's the fact that nothing is profitable. If we take into account all these environmental externalities, the things that we're doing to destroy the Earth, to strip it of its resources, to poison our ecosystems, to kill all these animals, and bring us to the brink of this mass extinction that we currently find ourselves in, well all of that has a value and thought it may be hard to quantify initially on our quarterly accounting papers it absolutely does. [32:53] That means that all this growth, the profit that we enjoy. Well it itself is imaginary, its borrowing on the future life of this Earth. And similarly to that, I want to extend this concept even further to not just the environmental and ecosystem and living damage that we've been doing to get this tricky accounting to make things look like we're profitable in the midst of this huge amount of growth but also extend that down to the lives that each and every one of us lives, and the suffering that exists because of this exploitation and because of this growth. The profit that we find in billionaires like Jeff Bezos, but even down to those of us who would be considered small business owners or property owners like these landlords is so often couched not just on the environmental destruction of this Earth but the destruction of the souls of all of us who live on this Earth. [33:47] Ripping us apart individually as people, exploiting us, turning us into nothing more than labor of resources that could be extracted, and ripped apart for somebody else’s own gain. That's where we find ourselves. And this is nowhere more apparent than the world of landlords, of this rent-seeking that we see, where the only thing a landlord has to offer is the fact that for some reason, often times through inheritance, because of no actions of their own, they happen to own a piece of property. And the fact that our property laws defend this above all else and gives this person essentially sovereignty over the way that we live our lives and the ability to end the way that we live our lives at any moment through this eviction process means that we are always on the brink of disaster. And this constant standing at the edge of precarity [34:36] that can find us falling off into the depths of poverty, is what leaves us so precarious in this day and age. And this is why we see all these diseases linked back to this constant threat. This is why we see people exploding in the numbers of the homeless out there. This is why we see dramatic increases in suicide and depression. This is why people are cast off, ripped apart from each other because they're forced out of their homes. Forced away from their families because they have to find a place to live and should you be so unlucky to fall outside of the good graces of the system whether through evictions, whether through criminal convictions, then you will find yourself an outcast, a pariah, somebody searching for a place to call their own and, in that process when you do find that home you are going to be exploited even more because of these landlords know that you are even more precariously positioned than anyone else and they can push you to the edges of your sanity. Can milk you dry to profit off the fact that they own a piece of property and you don't. And we all need a place to live, we all need food to eat and [35:46] the fact that we can't avoid those things allows somebody to step in and take advantage of us. This is not, at least in this nation, a question of lack of places to live. There are dramatically more empty homes and buildings in this country than there are people. It's not even close. We can house every single homeless person, every single person, in this country in a home, comfortably, and still have excess for the unhomed and dozens of other countries around the world. It's not a problem of supply-and-demand, it's a problem of greed. It's a problem of seeing how far we can push each other to exploit each other and that is a housing crisis.
[36:26] Well put David and I want to remind the listener that there's a little bit of hope at the end of this episode so you know if you feel a little helpless after that well stick around. But you did mention that nothing is profitable and to kind of showcase an example of that in this landlord context it was pointed out in this article that back in postwar America, when housing was explicitly segregated along racial lines, black people spent as much as 50% more in rent than white people in similar buildings, right? Even worse than that, landlords effectively created slums. The slums didn't emerge naturally, landlords created them by purchasing the properties that were the only places a black family could live legally and then the landlord would subdivide those properties so that they can stuff more people inside them. And then they would charge higher rents on these units than they were in comparable white buildings while at the same time [37:33] these landlords allowed the properties to dilapidate, creating a slum like environment, so that they could save on maintenance costs. And eventually, because these properties lost value through this dilapidation process, the landlord saved on taxes as the property values plummeted. And we've mentioned in the past David, how the World Bank itself calls slums a “sign of progress.” There's an article on the World Bank's website that literally says the slums, which are made of makeshift shacks, according to the World Bank, lack basic services like water, they’re places in which tenants can be evicted at a moment's notice. And yet somehow this allows them to be “better off than in rural areas,” to quote the World Bank, and that these places do help people to get ahead.
[38:23] Here’s some numbers, Daniel, I know I was just super light on anything except opinion and passion a second ago so let me redeem myself with some facts here. All these numbers come from data that is in a National U.S. Rental Housing Finance survey, as well as detailed data from Milwaukee's housing market in which over 1,000 tenants were interviewed over a three-year period, as well as apartment landlords who were surveyed about their cost, so what they found is that in poor neighborhoods where the poverty rate is greater than 50%, tenants are paying more than double, the so-called “exploitation rate,” which they defined as the ratio of rental rates to property values. So what that means is in a richer area tenants may only pay an annual rent equal to 10% of the property value. But the poor are paying closer to 25% of what the entire property is worth with their annual rent. [39:16] And the same discrepancies observed in neighborhoods that are majority black compared to neighborhoods that are minority black. To quote from the paper, “renters and poor in predominantly black neighborhoods do pay more for housing relative to its property value. Poverty has a particularly large association with exploitation in Milwaukee for the same general pattern holds nationally.” So yes the poor do pay more, but another important question is do landlords themselves make more profit off the poor? And that's where things get evil, right? But unfortunately again the answer is yes. Comparing data on apartment buildings, the data shows, it was only a small difference in the nominal rent that tenants pay, buildings in poor neighborhoods have up to three times lower taxes. They're often purchased outright at distressed prices and therefore incur no mortgage cost, and landlords enjoy lower maintenance and management cost in part because they offer fewer services like keeping sidewalks clear of snow. In Milwaukee specifically, a rental unit in a poor neighborhood can earn $318 in monthly profit, well a unit in a more affluent region earns less than $150 in monthly profit. [40:24] So that means, in a nutshell, it's actually more profitable to exploit the poor then it is to exploit the rich, and part of this because the rich are more mobile, they have more advantages in terms of looking for a reasonable deal to them, and poor people often times don't have that luxury and so are just ripe, as I said, to be exploited. However there is an important caveat to these trends. Milwaukee is a low-cost housing market and landlords make more money from the poor because the cost of operating those buildings are lower, but in super high cost housing markets such as my own New York City, landlords make less money from poor tenants because of the higher rents that they could charge, and because their properties experience rising values which increase their taxes. So we mentioned in last week's episode how New York City landlords are interested in using surveillance to kick their tenants out of rent-stabilized buildings so they can participate in gentrification in higher rents. [41:18] With that in mind, I think, we can generalize landlord intentions here into two strategies. Which in one, in poor and low-cost areas landlords make more money, by keeping tenants poor and under-serviced and in two, these rich high-cost areas like here in New York City, landlords make more money by eliminating for people from their properties. In both cases getting rich by owning apartments is a function of a landlord's relation to exploiting the poor, whether that relation is either conscious in terms of the direct exploitation. Or something more secondary in the way of trying to remove them from the equation so that they can take advantage of these higher rents that the market will support.
[42:00] I think this is a good moment to take a pause here take a step back, David, because, I think it would be unfair to simply point the finger at landlords and say this group, this class, is evil and exploitative. I mean, yes that may be true in certain cases, in a lot of cases even. But again, I'm typically coming from the perspective that individuals will always be replaced, in the same roles, so long as the economic and political structures for those roles exist. So, let's talk for just one minute before we get to the interview which I'm really eager to do. But I just want to touch real quick on economics, assumptions, and models. There's a book called Debunking Economics, and I like it because the author breaks down the models being taught in most economics curriculum at universities. Specifically what's known as neoclassical economics, and then he explains why these models are broken and wrong, which is great because I took macro and microeconomics in college and I have to agree that it's mostly complete nonsense. I really love seeing somebody break down that nonsense the way he does. A simple example: one of the most fundamental models to neoclassical economics is the idea of supply and demand. Your taught day 1 in microeconomics [43:23] that the price of a good is established by the intersection of a producer's incentive to make that good at a certain price and a buyers incentive to purchase that good at a certain price, that means that as the price of a good rises a producer is willing to make a higher quantity of that good, but at the same time a rising price means a consumer is willing to buy less and less, so the equilibrium price will be where these two competing desires intersect. [43:55] But then you'll pass that class and you'll go to macroeconomics which will step in and say to determine how supply and demand functions at the scale of the entire economy, not just these individual consumers and producers, all you have to do is just add up all the supply and demand curves for every individual and voila, you have the same model just made up of every individual. Now this, as Steve Keen points out in his book is a massive failure, because, what's true for a single individual immediately breaks down when you add more variables and consider the economy as a complex system because supply cost and price is no longer exist in isolation. As prices change, people's income changes, which directly impacts will they are willing to spend, and similarly production costs change in a nonlinear way depending on how much is being produced so there are certainly many instances in the economy where you can have rising prices and at the same time rising demand for those good or even falling production of those goods. [44:56] And the long story short is that the economy is a highly complex system. There's a lot of moving parts that each impact each other and other moving parts in these totally unpredictable and chaotic ways. And the simplification of this system by economists is what has in part led to economic crises like the housing market crash of 2008. Now to expand just a bit on that, another key concept in neoclassical economics is that financial markets are “efficient.” Meaning that investors, for the most part, have the same information as every other investor and, since financial values are determined by information, assets like company stocks, house values, mortgage contracts, all these things, according to economics, should be priced according to their true value because all the investors determining that price are making their assumptions on the same information, on the same formulas. And it is on this assumption, this flawed assumption, that free-market proponents have pushed for and successfully caused sweeping deregulation of financial markets. Because finance has been reduced to a simple model of valuation as opposed to an actual influencer of values in the first place, which is what finance so often is. [46:16] Housing values exploded to unsustainable levels leading up to the crash, the stock market, the mortgage crash directly because of financial speculation. Now, I know it sounds like I'm rambling a bit here, and maybe I am, but the point is: modern neoclassical economics attempts to reduce the economy to simple models that don't take into account how as a complex system, prices, finance cost, incomes, these all influence one another. So to bring it back to this topic of this housing market crisis, [46:52] there’s another fundamental assumption, an economic model, that is presented to us and that is of “risk and return.” Right, we've all heard this and it's a simple idea. The idea is that the more risk that is inherent in a particular investment, the more an investor will seek to be compensated for that risk, for taking on that risk, because of the probability for loss. But in the context of housing that means that landlords will charge poor people more money, relative to the value of their property like we talked about, but they're charging poor people more money than more well-off people because poor people are considered to be at a greater risk of not being able to pay their rent. Now if you follow these simple economic models that makes perfect sense, you'll never bat an eye at that, and that's why those landlords on BiggerPockets don't think there's anything wrong with this idea that they would never rent to someone who has had an issue at some point in their past. But we should stop and think about this in light of what we've talked about, these positive feedback loops of poverty. Just think about, for a moment here, that poor people are being charged more. And this is nothing new, we discussed predatory lending and vulture funds in episode 59 “Bankrupt Ethics.” [48:08] But they're being charged more precisely because they have a more difficult time paying. Which means that a landlord seeking higher compensation is actually creating the risk as much as he or she is responding to it. And that's really important because so often these economic models are presented to us as if the actor in the situation isn't actually influencing anything but merely responding to some law of economics, right? The law of the market. But in fact we see that landlords are the one creating that risk for the tenants in the first place. This exploitative relationship is what creates that precarity, that financial insecurity. And then that of course leads to those higher eviction rates, which then go on permanent records, which makes it harder for those tenants to have housing, which makes it harder for them to keep a job, which means they can't afford transportation, which means they can't get to where they need to go to get the money to pay the rent. And we see how this risk spirals out to no fault of that tenant. But as you pointed out, David, these landlords, if they were truly taking on more risk then [49:12] in totality, in aggregate, we should see they would not be making so much more profit than these more stable investments, because that risk should balance, out that risk should take away from the profits of other landlords in the system. But the fact that they continue to profit means that something is going on, something is amiss here, and what is amiss is that that risk is being put on society. That risk is being put on the tenant. Yes, there is risk in investing in these properties, but its not being felt by the landlord because the landlords just compensate for that risk by charging everybody more. And then when we find out that we have homelessness problems, when we find out we have crime problems, we find out we have people who can't afford to live and we have to create communities around just getting people fed. These are costs that we as a society bear. It’s directly because that landlord, this economic relationship, has created those problems by forcing people out of their home. [50:13] But again I think we're still pointing the fingers at these landlords and, at the end of the day the investors create the risk that those in poverty experience but that doesn't necessarily explain why these landlords, why these investors, exist in this exploitative relationship in the first place. And to do that we would have to rethink, in the first place, the very structure of basic property ownership rights. This thing that has been embedded in our consciousness that seems to be an immutable fact of, or law of, our economy. But in reality there's there can be a better way. And, yeah we could talk about, David, all these tenants rights movements popping up in Boston and Denver and in California, Rhode Island, Oregon, Minnesota, all these tenants coming together to fight their landlords and to to demand a better way, and a different way of considering property ownership
[51:10] Let's not get ahead of ourselves here though, Daniel. Because while we are happy to ramble on about this at all points we have, in just a moment, an expert here. Somebody who's really in this, even more than we are, who can talk to us about this. Because when it comes to talking about all this stuff, these theories, these statistics, it's easy to get lost from people who are actually doing work on the ground, of the lives that are being touched by this all everyday. So instead let's talk, like I said, to somebody on the ground, and without further ado let's turned to Claire.
[51:45] All right. Are we all three of us on the call?
[51:48] Claire this is David, nice to meet you.
[51:50] Nice to meet you, David.
[51:51] So we got Claire on the phone. Claire has been involved in the tenants’ rights movement in California for some time now. How you doing, Claire?
[51:59] I'm doing good today, thank you for having me on y'all.
[52:02] Well tell us a little bit about the struggle that you've been involved in. How long, and what's going on?
[52:09] Yeah so I am out in Santa Cruz, California. I’m in my early 20s, and I've been doing different kinds of political organizing since 2016. And then in 2017, I got involved in the tenants’ movement here just as it was starting to get fired up. [52:30] I got involved because Santa Cruz is the fourth least affordable city to live in in the world, in terms of how much money people make versus how much the average rent cost is, and we’re the least affordable city in the country due to that. And so everyone in town feels that, feels the weight of rent prices, of their housing situation. And I grew up here and so I’ve just seen most of my friends have to move away. I'm constantly seeing people suffer trauma from their housing situation because they’re forced to stay somewhere they don't want to or forced to leave their home when they don’t want to. And I got into tenant organizing because me and some folks that were fired up about this spoke to some organizers from the LA Tenants Union. And they, you know, explained the difference between just kind of this vague idea of doing work around housing and actual tenant organizing. So tenant organizing has a distinct focus on tenant rights and the relationship between a landlord and a tenant and the identity of a tenant. And so we define the identity of the tenant as somebody who does not control their housing situation. So it's not just people that we think of usually as renters, but somebody who lives with a family member because they can't afford to move out, somebody who's in prison, somebody who is homeless, people that don't actually control their housing situation. And so all the people working on this, we were all tenants and so that made a lot of sense to us. And we decided to start to figure out what to think organizing would look like, and we started meeting other people in the community that were already doing this work. There is, I’m not going to say names on here, but there was folks that deserve a huge shoutout and a ton of [54:16] credit for having been doing tenant organizing for years before we got into it. People who ran tenants’ rights hotlines and stuff like that. It was other groups that started to get into it in 2017, they were focusing on canvassing a lot of them, knocking on doors every single week to get their neighbors together to figure out what the biggest concerns in their neighborhood was. It was always rent prices, it always went to the top of the list. And so all of these different groups trying to figure out tenant organizing started coming together and coordinating a bit more. Myself and people I was working with were knocking on tenants doors and asking, you know, “we’re also tenants, do you have any other problems with your living situation? Would you be interested in doing something about that, about your landlord not fixing problems about how high your rent prices are?” And overtime all of these different kinds of work coalesced into rent control campaign in late 2017. And so we actually, a whole bunch of Santa Cruz tenants got together and wrote a piece of policy. A tenant protections bill that includes rent control and what were called Just Cause eviction protections. And ran a grassroots campaign from scratch. I don't want to talk only about that campaign or too much about it but I definitely learned a lot from that.
[55:41] Yeah couple things stood out to me. Number one, and I remember, David, you mentioning, I think I was like episode “What Can We Do,” how we hear the word organizing and it's kind of scary, you know, it's like it seems official sounds like you need a lot of experience. And the point David made is organizations usually are formed by people just doing things and the organizations and the structures kind of come later and it sounds like this is similar, what happened, to your group in California. Just neighbors going door-to-door saying “hey, like we've all had problems with landlords, do you have similar problems, let's do something about it!” And it was later that the structure emerged and the, you know plans, to fight for legislation. Is that about right?
[56:21] Yeah, I mean, that's totally right. Whenever this stuff happens there's going to be people involved that have more or less experience with, you know, scary organizing. But no movement starts without just a bunch of people that have no experience deciding they want to do something about it. And especially, I've seen with tenant work, that is where people, you know, are coming into the movement with basically no experience and just like a lot of energy and frustration with their housing situation.
[56:50] Right. Another thing I thought was interesting, so you kind of redefine [56:56] what a “tenant” is verses a “renter.” And so the people you're dealing with, the people who are organizing seem to be in a state of vulnerability? Is that right?
Yeah.
And I'm curious, and in that situation are landlords taking advantage of these people in ways that they're not with people who are not so vulnerable? Or are they just caught up in, you know, the general housing market that just is unfavorable to people who are not financially secure? Or is there something else going on?
[57:24] I think that's a great question. And the tenant landlord relationship is such an important things to focus on here, and this comes up a lot in this work but, you know, a lot of times what will happen is a big fight, when there’s something like a rent control fight. There’ll be a big argument like, “the renters are calling everyone bad landlords. And say they’re all taking advantage of the renters” And, you know, the tenants will say, you know, look it’s actually a lot more complicated than that. Landlords have been set up to, like, take advantage of and exploit tenants. That is the role that they've been put in, and it's not necessarily, they didn't just wake up one day like “oh I want to go oppress some people.” That's not how our system works. Right? They inherited some property or they just decided that this was the way that they're going to guarantee their retirement or whatever and that put them in a economic position where they have control over another person's housing situation. And their interests are contradictory to that of a tenant. It's like your boss at a job is always going to have interests that are contradictory to yours. No matter how nice of a person they are, at some point what you need to survive is going to go up against how they make their income. [58:28] And there are, you know, there's landlords involved in the right control fight. There’s landlords that saw this messed-up contradiction, are like, we do everything I can to make this more fair. And I think that its really important we have those allies. And then there are really bad landlords. Right? There’s people that I would call evil, that you know, ended up in the position of a landlord. There's one guy in particular I'm happy to say his name on this podcast, Darius Mohsenin. He owns 50-something properties in Santa Cruz, he is a huge racist. He made very racist flyers during the rent-control campaign, basically saying that rent control would bring a bunch of Latinx immigrants into the community. And putting out flyers of Latinx people as criminals like, “oh, meet your new neighbors,” and there’s landlords like him where he got to the point where we had to have a march against him.
[59:17] Darius, you're not being a good neighbor in this situation.
[59:20] Darius is not being a good neighbor, correct. Like, “Darius is my neighbor, meet my new neighbor.” So you know, there’s always going to be ones like that, but the important thing to be clear on is like, no matter how good of a person a landlord might be they’re in a position of economic power over a tenant. And that's, you know, that's a messed up thing in and of itself.
[59:42] I was just chatting with David before we jumped on a call, and, I think, what your point, about “its necessarily that all these individuals are evil but they're in the structure that kind of forces them to play this role.” And I was a little bit surprised, but actually not surprised, that a lot of our property law in the United States was built on old English codes, or modeled after these codes. Including things like absolute liability for rent which meant that a tenant was responsible 100% for rent even if the property were to burn down or something like that. And I guess in many ways were still, you know, we’re still living with that legal legacy and trying to reshape our whole notion of what property rights and property law should look like.
[1:00:29] Yeah I mean that legacy, is very very foul. Especially in places where the housing crises are worse. I was actually talking to my mom during the rent-control campaign. And she was a supporter of it, and she was like you know she knows me, a lot of people that weren't, and she was like, “you know look I think the hard thing here is that you're actually making all of these people that have never thought about this have to reframe how they think about property rights versus, you know, human dignity and people's inherent right to have a safe, healthy place to live”, and a lot of why our thoughts on some property rights are messed up is because the law has just been always protecting the property owner for so long.
[1:01:10] Well that's actually interesting. So the way you made it sound, like, organizing with tenants, you know, just going door-to-door saying “hey, do you have a problem with your landlord? Let’s organize.” It seems pretty straightforward, and it seems, like, I mean who wouldn't jump on that? Right? Who's not angry about the rent that they have to pay? But, at the same time, me over here on the East Coast, I don't know about David in New York I know they're-
[1:01:33] I can speak to that in just a second.
[1:01:35] Yeah but for me the idea of tenant organizing is something I've never grew up hearing about and I'm wondering are there challenges going door-to-door and trying to have this discussion? Do tenants push back, even if they're clearly in this exploitative situation?
[1:01:53] Yeah I mean it's it's really hard and I don't want to make it sound like it's as easy as going door-to-door and suddenly everyone's together in a movement. We have the benefit, I don’t want to say the benefit, but we're in a place where the contradictions are really high because of how bad the right situation is which I think gave us a leg up in getting people at the door. But there's a ton of challenges. I think one of the biggest ones just goes back to like how isolated we all are and how hard it is in our society, especially in the in the US, how hard it is just to imagine the concept of acting collectively. And you know for many working people its gotten to a point where we don't see a way out. We can't imagine what a better world to live in would look and feel like. So, like, organizing with your neighbors is a really foreign concept, [1:02:39] especially if you don't know your neighbors. So we've definitely gotten a lot of people at the doors who are, you know, they're suspicious of us. They don't know what we're trying to sell them, many times I think we work for the landlord and they're in such a vulnerable position they think this is a trap. And so one of the challenges is if you're knocking on doors that aren't in an apartment complex you live in, it's not somebody you already have a relationship with, just that lack of trust definitely prevents people from stepping into it. And one thing the rent control campaign did do well was give people a sense that there's a legitimate thing happening that they could be a part of, whereas going door-to-door and being like “hey, we're just a group of tenants trying to do something about this,” it feels less real to people, right? And so that's a big challenge. People who are tenants also work full-time, basically all of them. And if they don't there’s usually a reason for that that also prevents them from putting a lot of time and energy into a project. And so people will cite time, they’ll cite their children, they’ll cite all these reasons they’re not able to get involved. And then the threat of retribution from your landlord is really, really, real. There are laws in place to protect you when you're organizing tenants, but the laws don't protect tenants already, right? People don’t feel like tenant law isn’t doing them a lot of good. So even if you tell them “look, you have laws to protect you if you come to this meeting,” they would rather not take the risk.
[1:04:07] Well the big thing that we've run into here - so I do some work with the Ridgewood Tenants Union which often times meets literally right outside my doorway, which is helpful, we put up posters and it's a great way to organize people. They have rallies on street corners. And people get interested but often times fallout and don't end up following through and New York, we have a lot of strong renter's laws. We do have rent control we do have rent stabilization though they're hard to get into, there’s lots of loopholes and things. So we do have a strong tenants law base already but there are also very strong informal networks at the landlords run with themselves, and you can end up on what are basically blacklists that landlord share among each other, often times illegally. But if your name ends up on that then it becomes very hard to rent in this city if you for whatever reason lose out on your lease at the moment. So trying to come over these informal networks of power, these informal balance of powers, another big thing that people are always asking us: “well, what happens if I end up on this list?” And we, unfortunately, right now don't have great answers to that because these lists really shouldn't exist in the first place. [1:05:19] But, reminding everybody, you know that coming together, and if everyone is working on this, the solidarity that comes from these communities coming together puts a lot of that power that landlords have in being able to target individuals aside. It's much harder to target groups of people than it is single people.
[1:05:38] Yup, 100%. And I'm sorry that's happening to you, that’s just really awful. During and after our rent control campaign there were plenty of evictions of organizers. And there it's really hard to prove intent on some of these things, you know, because it's not always just like an eviction in the middle of the lease. It’s like, “oh, your lease up and you’re all you, but I'm not going to tell you why.” And so, like, that kind of retribution is scary and common. And you're totally right, David, that the only way they we’re going to fight that and make any of this better is together.
[1:06:10] Yeah do you have any, say like, best practices or blueprints? If I'm here in Atlanta, and I live in an apartment building and this is all new to me but it sounds good, are there any Do's or Don'ts to tenant organizing? You know I'm sure there are local organizations or national organizations that someone can contact in terms of getting, you know, potential pro bono or legal help but what do you think are some of the most important steps to take if someone's about to embark on this organizing journey?
[1:06:45] Yeah, I definitely want to speak to that. So the first thing I want to name is just sort of a maxim to carry into this work and that is as you start doing it, you need to strike a balance between developing actual relationships with people, especially your neighbors and people that you share a landlord with, and learning your rights. Your fellow tenants rights, the legal ramifications of organizing, all of that stuff. And the reason you strike a balance is because, you absolutely need to be organizing with other people. Just knowing all the law won't do everything that you need to, knowledge is not the same as power. Like, organized people is what will give you that power. But on the other hand, if you don’t know the laws you won't be able to explain the true risk for people, and when it comes down to it, so many of his tenant fights, the victories that we get are won by a landlord breaking the law and tenants proving it. [1:07:37] There's tons of stuff that exists outside the legal realm we need to be careful about leaning too heavily on this law that is totally against our favor. And this legal system that is just stacked against us, you know, in terms of the quality of lawyers that landlords get and just how everything is written. So it's like, not leaning too heavily on the law, and making sure that we’re organizing fellow people, but also making sure we know the law to talk to people about it. So another thing about knowing the law, it depends on the state you're in. So I'm not going to go into like specific laws and stuff because it varies state-by-state. I believe that most states have a guide on tenants’ rights somewhere on their state website. I know that California does. And you can just look up, like you know, “California tenants’ rights” guide and it's pretty easy to find. A non-governmental website for this is Nolo.com. They have great, great, tenants right’s guides I'm not sure that they have every single state, but I know they kind of have overall laws and they have them for a lot of states. For most people, unless you have a legal background, I would not suggest just pulling up the tenant law and reading the legal code. It's very, very hard to actually piece things together in my experience. [1:08:47] And then something that is going to be immensely helpful is, like you mentioned Daniel, looking for a legal aid organization. This doesn't always just have to be, like, a tenant law organization. In Santa Cruz we have something called the California Rural Legal Assistance. And they provide free legal aid in rural areas to anyone that's under a certain, like, basically the poverty line or under a certain income amount. There’s also a similar organization for seniors, for people over 65 years old. [1:09:15] And so if you look up, like, free legal aid organization it's very likely that you can find somebody to get in touch with and just tell them you want to learn about this stuff. Some will be more interested than others in helping you if you're just trying to learn about this, but if you have a specific problem and you qualify you generally get a lot of help straight from a lawyer. Another thing to look for is tenants rights organizations in your area. A big thing that tenants rights organizations do is have workshops on your rights. And also, if you're in California, and I think everyone's check this out, they’re great organizations, but especially if you’re in California looking at the LA Tenants Union website, and the San Francisco Tenants Union website. They both have great, great explanations of your rights as a tenant. I think some of it specific to your local jurisdiction, but for the most part those are just really great guides and great organizations. And then, like, I would say that as you find these resources that's a great place to start to bring one of your fellow or a few of your fellow tenants in to learn these things. And what I’ve seen be an effective way to do that is if there's a specific thing going on, like your landlord is refusing to answer your text to them about fixing a pipe that keeps leaking, make that the focus of your project. Decide this is the problem we're having, I want to find out what the landlord’s responsibility is here, you know, get a couple of your neighbors together, anyone you know that's in this with you, and, you know, make a collective process out of learning legal rights.
[1:10:43] Yeah. That sounds like the perfect strategy to me. Have a common problem, then just get some people who care about that problem together to talk about it. And through that process you'll naturally get to know each other, you'll build trust, and all of a sudden that second problem, when it crops up, the group has more confidence, has more experience going about it and I can see how the responsibilities would just expand from there, and the ability to fight even bigger problems would grow through that type of relationship building.
[1:11:15] Yeah, yeah definitely. And so, building relationships is harder, just going to be real about that, and a lot of the way most of us have been socialized is like, “oh, I can go research this thing and do this thing on my own but meeting new people is scary and hard.” Like that’s really valid. So my experience is it's always harder organizing people that aren't your neighbors, that don't share a landlord with you, that you can't say, like, “look I’m your neighbor, and you know he never fixes the pipes, huh?” That connection right there makes it a lot easier. But that being said, that is something you can do is go organize tenants somewhere else. But if you live somewhere where you and other tenants are having any kinds of problems or landlord, even if it's just high rent, which is a serious problem in itself, having some kind of social gathering or a series of them, like a dinner, a BBQ, a night at the bar, if you have children, like, getting the children together to hang out. Those are all really good space to express complaints and a desire to address those issues together. And, you know, it doesn't have to be something that you do dishonestly. You can tell people upfront like “look, I think we all need to get to know each other better and part of that reason is that I'm having some concerns about this complex we live in.” That’s up to you, how you want to approach that. But generally making it a natural social event, not making it all about talking about the situation, but if you want to be working with your neighbors you got to get to know them as people. You got to get to know where they came from, and why they might care about staying in their housing situation or having a better situation so much. [1:12:44] And I will say that if it is a very serious problem, like everyone in the building just got a rent increase, that is a time to move very quickly because that is a time where you're much more likely to get people together. I have seen one fired up person organize all of their neighbors in the complex very, very quickly when everyone gets a rent increase, because they don't realize that every single person got one. That’s what I’ve seen.
[1:13:09] Well that reminded me one thing that happened to me, this was like a year or two ago, and I wish I had been in a different frame of mind, but I was living in an apartment building and it got taken over by a new owner and we were using an automated system to pay the rent. When the new owner came on that automated system just mysteriously stopped working for like a month, and one was notified, and of course my rent payment was late cause I didn't know. I got a letter on my door saying, you know, you owe rent plus here’s $500 late fees or you’re going to be evicted. I was like “what's going on?” So, of course I go to the management office and I'm talking to him and I'm really fighting them on this. I'm saying this is ridiculous, you know, this is y'all's fault or whatever. And eventually they said “fine, just pay your rent and, you know, it'll go away.” But I noticed, when I was having that fight with them, there were other people coming in to have that same argument and agents would kind of push them into different rooms and tell them “hey.” And I could see, like, mothers like, really upset about this and were just giving up and just paying because the threat of being kicked out was so unthinkable that they just kind of gave in. And I realized, you know, what if I had just gone around, door-to-door and said “hey, yeah I saw you got that letter on your door. I got the same thing. This is not right, let's go in together.” And instead of having that small victory for myself, that wasted two days, but I avoided that late payment, I could have maybe helped somebody else in that process.
[1:14:38] Yeah, that would have been like a really key moment I think. A really effective moment to get together, and have people all respond as one. And it makes such a big difference if just a few of the tenants, or if all of the tenants, or most get together and speak to a problem. And so, yeah, I think with building these relationships, being aware that once you get together, like I said earlier, you can learn your rights together. If you know the law is being broken, or you just really feel that the thing happening is unfair you can write your landlord a letter saying so and have everyone who's on board contact, or I mean, a sign that letter. And it doesn't mean everyone has to be in a meeting together. What I've seen work is getting maybe half the tenants together at a meeting, and then you draft a letter, and then you go door-to-door and say, “All I’m asking for you is the sign your name on this letter. We're sending it, we’re saying this increase is unfair, this new automated system screwed us over, whatever.” [1:15:35] And writing that letter tells the landlord that you are all now standing together, and that many cases, especially if the law is being broken, is enough to get the landlord to pull back. And if it isn't, you've done the first step in basically forming like a tenant association, which is, the legal definition of, a group of organized tenants. And so under tenant law at least in California is what I'll speak to, if you have some record of having organized for your tenants rights together, and that record could look like an email confirming that you're all meeting or you all just met, it could look like a paper sign-in sheet you all filled out. If you have some physical record you all got together to organize your tenants’ rights, you are now considered a tenants association under tenant law and retribution against you for having formed that association, for having talked about your rights, is completely illegal. [1:16:28] And so stuff that happens after that, if you can prove that you had all met and been talking about this, it puts the landlord in a really, really risky position to be trying to evict people, to be trying to raise rents, and harassing people. I'm not going to say that that law will always protect people. Again, it’s just not built for us. But I think getting people to that point where you are legally considered a tenants association is really really key. One more thing I want to say about getting people together, and I think this is really key, is I wouldn't make it always about just the just fighting the landlord on these problems. Because there's little things in this world that we need to be fighting, absolutely, and there's also, like, a positive vision of what we can be doing for each other if we build these relationships. And so if you get everyone together, what you'll generally learn is that there's also problems that your neighbors are having that you yourself and your other neighbors can address. Somebody might not be able to clean the apartment for one reason or another and you can make a day out of having neighbors clean their apartment, or cook them food, or watch their kids for a day. You know there's a lot of forms of mutual aid that people need. And if you start meeting that together as neighbors, that's a huge part of what tenants organizations do besides fighting their landlord and fighting for tenants rights is just helping each other. And I think that will build relationships more effectively than anything else.
[1:17:52] Yeah, yeah, those are all great points. I think you left a lot for our listeners to think about and chew on. Is there anything else you'd like to say Claire before we before we let you go.
[1:18:05] Yeah, yeah there definitely is. I’ll do a shorter version of this. So yeah I just wanted to name that when we’re in these living situations, when our rent is high, when a washing machine doesn't work, we have mold, rats, or, God forbid, an eviction notice, like, it's really easy to accept this as just how things are. Or even worse, think that we deserve it so not being- not working hard enough, or being successful, and like, that is the mindset that I want everyone to break out of, that we all need to break out of. And it's really, really, scary to fight when we get an eviction notice. It's scary when you have so much else going on, so much is at stake, so I don't blame people when we don't fight. But we aren't living in a vacuum, and none of us are in this alone, and every time we let an unfair eviction go through, every time we don't get our problems fixed by our landlords and we just let these things slide, that gives these people who profit off of how we are living, like, more power over the next person. More power over the other tenants, and it lets the system continue, and it leaves people who are already fighting with less allies. So we need to understand as tenants that like, we're on the front lines of a sort of battle whether we choose to engage in it or not, and we are in this together whether we choose to engage in it or not. And so at some point we need to say enough is enough, I’m learning the law, I’ll ask my neighbors if they got a notice too, I’m emailing the local news, I’m joining the local Tenants Union. [1:19:23] Great people across the world are doing this right now it's making a difference. And every single little active resistance is an act of bravery and compassion for ourselves, for our neighbors, for everyone in this housing market. And the key thing for me is, like, in doing we break out of this isolation. And the people I've met through this work are some of my dearest friends and these are people who I'm going to cherish my relationship with as long as I live. And as somebody who’s spent, like, much of my life struggling with isolation and addiction and depression, it's this kind of work that saved me from that, and saved my life and let me feel like a whole person again. And so, that's what I'd love to leave the listeners with, is I don't think there’s any stronger encouragement than that. A chance to break out of our isolation and a chance to, like, support our fellow neighbors in this really, really messed up world.
[1:20:11] I think that's such an amazing point and I really appreciate you bringing that up because you know we did an episode specifically on isolation and you've talked about that a bit here. That was episode 62, “Separate Ways.” And, you know, I think so often we feel helpless. You know, it's like I'm lonely, I'm unhappy, how can I solve that problem? But so often we can't solve that by pursuing it directly. It's through doing something else, it's through this organizing, its through collecting around a common problem that all of a sudden we realize that through that process, “oh wait we're not lonely anymore.” Because we have a common struggle. And another reason why I think it's great you brought that up is a lot of people give up before trying something like this because they look at the opposition and say, “how am I going to win against a landlord that owns 50 apartment buildings in my state, and 1,000 across the country and has the law and all these, this army of attorneys behind them?” [1:21:15] And the truth is maybe you won't completely win. Maybe you won't pass that legislation, but if in the process you create a community that is now aware of this common opposition you might discover that you solved a whole host of other problems that you didn't set out to solve. Right? But just the type of things that get done and go away when there's a community that's now responsible to and for each other and cares about each other. As I think that's something also worth thinking about going forward.
[1:21:52] Yeah, absolutely, I couldn't have said it better myself. You know, I appreciate the show so much, and people listening, because there's so much weight to process in all of the episodes about the way our world is broken. And like, coming out of the other side with some hope is really, really hard, but the only people that benefit from us losing hope are those that are already running things, right, the people that don't even need help. If people take anything from this interview, I just want it to be some fucking hope because I believe a better world is possible. LIke, I can feel that in my bones. And there's so many ways to contribute to creating it and so I really believe the people listening to this, the two of you making this show, are going to be instrumental in building that world. And so all my love and respect goes out to the two of you and the people who choose to just, like, imagine a better way of living.
[1:22:37] Well at the end of the day, no one's doing the more important work than people like you, Claire, out there on the streets making it happen. So thank you for that work and for inspiring us to do the same.
[1:22:48] Yeah thank you so much, I can't wait to hear the episode.
[1:22:51] All right have a good one.
[1:22:53] Thanks so much Claire.
[1:22:57] I think that conversation, David, leaves us with more than enough to consider in terms of what we all can do. And so I suppose that's a lot for us to think about going forward.
[1:23:07] As always, Daniel. But think about it we hope you will. You can find out more about all the topics we've covered in this episode, find links to those two papers as well as the rest of our sources, and read a full transcript of this show on our website at AshesAshes.org
[1:23:26] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible and we will never use ads to support this show. So if you like it, would like us to keep going, you our listener can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend, carrying these discussions on with you into your community, and you can support us directly on patreon.com/ashesashescast. And we do have an email address, it's contact (at) ashesashes.org. We encourage you to send us your thoughts. We read them all and sorry, but sometimes we take a while to get back to you. But that doesn't mean we're not thinking of you.
[1:24:04] We're also on all your favorite social media networks at AshesAshesCast. Next week we've got a great episode taking us back to the first topic we ever covered on this show. Sea ice, the Arctic, the North, and the disaster that is slowly unfolding up there. So we hope you'll tune in for that, it's very important topics and it's sure to be an interesting show, But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.