🏡💚 As evictions rise, tenants strike back
January 19th, 2024
The pandemic introduced a number of unprecedented social safety net provisions, including an eviction moratorium and rental relief programs. And like other temporary measures, many warned about what would happen once those protections ended.
Those warnings were right: as eviction moratoriums phased out in 2022 and 2023, evictions have soared beyond pre-pandemic levels. The near simultaneous expiration of key pandemic aid programs, like food assistance and expanded Medi-Cal, has led to an “eviction cliff” that has overwhelmed the limited number of tenants’ attorneys and legal aid organizations. Unless you live in San Francisco, tenants do not have guaranteed legal representation for eviction cases — even though having representation significantly lowers eviction rates. It shouldn’t be a surprise that legal representation is not an issue for landlords: in Los Angeles, for example, just 3% of tenants have an attorney in eviction proceedings compared to 88% of landlords.
We also know that increases in eviction filings are associated with increases in homelessness, which then makes people much more vulnerable to a wide range of hazards and impacts, including climate impacts. I wrote previously about the connection between the homeless and climate crises, but the takeaway is simple: protections against homelessness and eviction are crucial for community resilience in the face of climate chaos.
But tenants don’t have to rely solely on legal protections as their only recourse. In California, a wave of tenant organizing is showing new and innovative ways to collectively fight back against evictions, and the corporate landlords who are behind them. Using old tactics of union organizing and new tools for collectivization, renters across the state and banding together to exert leverage and make demands.
One such new tool is the Tenant Power Toolkit. Developed in a collaboration between the Debt Collective, the Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU), the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and local housing justice lawyers, the toolkit is a legal mutual-aid tool designed specifically for tenants in California who have an eviction case filed against them. The toolkit provides direct assistance by helping tenants file responses to their eviction filing (what’s called an “Answer”), and connecting them to legal resources and tenants’ rights groups.
In addition to direct support, the toolkit has also been a powerful way to gather eviction data. Since it launched in July 2022, the toolkit has prepared over 6,000 answers for households comprising over 13,500 tenants. The data from these users show that over 70% of eviction filings come from corporate landlords, with AvalonBay, Essex Property Trust, Invitation Homes, and Equity Residential some of the worst offenders (if interested, you can also check out the worst evictors in the Bay Area). This fact is a reflection of both the increasing consolidation of rental properties into corporate real estate portfolios, but also the ways that corporate landlords are structured to evict at greater rates than smaller landlords.
With their consent, tenants who use the toolkit can also be connected to local tenant organizing groups. This is where the fight for tenant protections turns into organizing and power-building. Since rental debt is the biggest driver of evictions (toolkit data shows about 83% of cases), rent can used as leverage against landlords. But you may be wondering: how can debt give tenants leverage?
As corporate landlords expand their portfolios, they expand the number of tenants that could exert power against them and they typically use rental income as an asset in their capital stack. As René Moya from Debt Collective explains in this recent Hegemonicon podcast, the power of a rent debt collective is “getting debtors to come together to collectivize their demands and leverage the debt that for them is an oppressive reality on a day-to-day basis and to turn that into collective power to wield against their creditors.”
Withholding rent, or a “rent strike,” is another way to do this, one that is very actively playing out in San Francisco. In 2022, San Francisco passed the Union At Home law, which gives protections for forming tenant associations — much like protections for forming a labor union. After the passing of that law, tenants in 55 San Francisco buildings formed their own associations that called for a range of improvements, including quicker repairs, lower charges for utilities, and translation of materials for renters who do not speak English. The expansion of these tenant groups, many of which rent from the same corporate landlord, creates other opportunities to collectively exert tenant power. There is even a Veritas Tenants Association (VTA) of renters in units owned by the corporate landlord Veritas in San Francisco that leveraged their debt during the pandemic to win rent debt cancellation for its members.
There is a lot to be said about tenant organizing and what’s happening on the ground in California, and definitely more to come in future newsletters. But if there’s one takeaway from this, I hope it’s to inspire more thinking of how tenant protections are not just policies to win, but demands to organize around that can directly confront corporate landlords and real estate speculation. This kind of power-building orientation is essential for thinking about how we win structural change, connecting hyperlocal organizing in individual buildings to a broader campaign for social housing.
In unity there is strength. Source: Tenant Power Toolkit
WHAT WE’RE READING
PODCAST: Empowering Debtors to Organize, with René Moya (Hegemonicon) — mentioned above, a really great listen with California’s own René Moya
New Tools Are Helping More Tenants Than Ever Fight Eviction and Rent Debt (Jacobin) — more on the Tenant Power Toolkit
In San Francisco, Tenants Use Labor Tactics to Challenge Their Landlords (NYTimes) — article from this week discussing tenant organizing and Union at Home in SF
A Judicious Investment: Right to Counsel Is a Cost-Effective Way to Solve Los Angeles’ Affordability Crisis and Keep Angelenos Housed (SAJE) — another great report from SAJE, this one about the effectiveness of guaranteed legal representation for tenants
As California evictions boom, whether tenants get lawyers depends on where they live (CalMatters)
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