Scheming landlords dump millions to quash democracy
Scheming landlords dump millions to quash democracy
The rent is too damn high — to fund lies like this one
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
The many strikes, union drives, and mass worker actions have inspired eager labor advocates to call this month Striketober, a nifty hashtag-ready nickname that puts unions in the popular vernacular for the first time in ages. Galvanized by the pandemic and no longer willing to subsume their own well-being for dead-end jobs and countless indignities, workers are not just holding out for better pay and more rights in the workplace, they are reviving the spirit of industrial democracy. After 40 years of neoliberal “free market” orthodoxy reducing worker power to almost nothing, the uprising is nothing short of spectacular.
I’ve been covering this growing movement at More Perfect Union, producing video reports on strikes at John Deere and Kellogg’s as well as union drives at Amazon, Dollar General, and Starbucks, with more to come this week. I’ve also helped produce this report on striking NYC cabbies, who are demanding that City Hall take action to help alleviate the crushing debt that former Mayor Bloomberg and shady lenders deceived them into assuming.
The cabbie story is instructive in that it shows how broad coalitions of grassroots community groups can make a difference on the state and city level. Tonight’s newsletter takes us to the Midwest for another fight between municipal advocates and powerful moneyed interests.
In 2020, as progressive advocates and housing activists canvassed across St. Paul, Minnesota to raise awareness for a slate of five tenant protections that were then being considered by the city council, they found themselves facing the same question over and over again: Would any of the proposed provisions protect people from the skyrocketing rents that had for years been plaguing so many residents in minority and working class communities?
“Even in the midst of the pandemic, even when unemployment was so high, people were experiencing rent increases that did not correlate with any improvements or other logical factor,” says Tram Hoang, a policy advocate for Housing Equity Now St. Paul (HENS). “They were just getting economically evicted from their homes.”
Minnesota state law, the activists would explain, prevented municipal governments from passing ordinances to provide protections from egregious rent hikes; instead, those protections can only be enacted by citywide ballot initiative. So after successfully convincing the city council to pass the initial slate of tenant protections, the coalition got to work on a rent stabilization initiative that could be put to voters in November of 2021.
St. Paul has become a majority-renter city over the past decade, a result of gentrification and rising home prices that have given the Twin Cities metropolitan area the largest racial home ownership disparity in the nation. Nearly half of the city’s residents pay more than they can afford in rent. As a result, the 40 or so grassroots organizations that make up Housing Equity Now St. Paul had little trouble amassing the signatures required to get its initiative, which would cap annual rent increases at 3% across the city.
The real challenge has come over the past few months, as the state’s real estate, landlord, and private equity lobby has flexed its financial and political muscles in a full-throttle attempt to crush the grassroots housing justice movement that has made so much headway over the past few years.
Big Money Pours In
In February, the Minnesota Multi-Housing Association, the powerful landlord lobby, sued the city of St. Paul over the tenant protections passed in 2020. The law was put on hold by a judge as the case worked its way through the court system, just in time for housing prices to begin surging across the country.
The Stable Accessible Fair and Equitable (SAFE) Housing ordinance should limited security deposits to one month’s rent; required just cause for lease termination; required landlords to give tenants packets explaining their rights; and given tenants of affordable housing the right to be alerted of any pending change of building ownership. Instead, the St. Paul City Council in July caved and rescinded a law that it had passed unanimously the previous summer.
That the council made the call by a 4-3 vote underscored the tension surrounding the issue.
“Currently St. Paul tenants have no level of protection at all and that's why we took matters into our own hands,” Hoang says. “The city council includes two huge renter advocates, but the majority was not there to stand up for renters who make up the majority of our city's population.”
For all practical purposes, she’s referring to people of color. An astounding 82% of Black residents, 62% of Latino residents, 64% of Indigenous residents, and 58% of Asian residents in St. Paul are renters. On the other hand, just 40% of white residents send a monthly check to their landlord.
One of the many factors driving this discrepancy is the growth in single-family homes owned by LLCs in low-income, minority-majority neighborhoods where home ownership used to be far more prevalent. As a very recent study from the Urban Institute put it, “investors from outside the region took advantage of low-cost sales, such as on foreclosed properties, to increase their presence in the property landscape.”
Over the past few months, an organization called the Sensible Housing Ballot Committee has been flooding St. Paul residents with flyers, door-hangers, complicated mailers, TV spots, and digital advertisements urging them to vote against the ballot initiative. The mailing address linked to the Sensible Housing Ballot Committee just happens to be the same PO Box that’s listed for the Minnesota Multi-Housing Association, a dead giveaway that it is indeed a subsidiary project of the larger landlord organization.
The organization has already sunk $4 million into the campaign, a record spend for a ballot initiative in this city of over 300,000 people.
“The mailers include a lot of disaster narrative fear-mongering, pitting St. Paulites against one another,” says Hoang. “They're saying development will stop, maintenance is going to end, and we're just going to end up with decrepit buildings.”
The data suggests that each of assertions are flat-out lies and deceptions. Hoang cites new study conducted by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota that indicates that rent control had little discernible detrimental impact on the housing market or conditions of housing in the more than 180 cities that have enacted some version of the regulation.
St. Paul’s proposed cap may be slightly tighter than most cities, but the initiative also calls for the city council to work out some kind of exemption application system, so that landlords that make significant investments in their buildings or developers that build high-quality affordable housing at submarket prices can increase prices still have significant incentivizes.
“A lot of factors impact development, like local interest rates and labor shortages,” Hoang says. “We also know that economic cycles really dictate when investors want to invest in building housing and when they don't. Building is always changing, building codes are always changing and rent stabilization is just another thing to add to that list of regulatory changes, but it's not a large market force.”
Still, the sheer relentlessness and ubiquity of the landlord lobby’s campaign has succeeded in planting seeds of doubt in the heads of many St. Paulites, who are being hit with targeted mailers and digital ads that speak to their specific economic concerns. With the housing market already on fire, renters on limited budgets are wary of being burned.
HENS has raised a little over $200k thus far, and as a coalition of community organizations that advocate for people that can’t afford their own private lobbyists, much of their work is done at neighborhood meetings and the front doors of individual community members.
Getting the truth out is always hard work, and even more so when abject lies are so pervasive, but as the broader political environment indicates right now, mass communications always perpetuates fear-mongering more easily than optimistic messages. The best way to counter those astroturfed uncertainties, Hoang says, is with person-to-person, relational organizing and canvassing.
“We know from our voter engagement that having these real conversations with voters about their fears and anxieties and showing them the facts and the research about what does actually happen [when rent stabilization is enacted] is the best antidote to the money that's being poured into our city from outside donors,” Hoang asserts.
A similar battle is raging across the Mississippi River, where voters in Minneapolis are also being asked to vote on a rent stabilization initiative in November. This one is less specific, as it only asks voters whether the city council should be charged with devising some kind of cap on rent increases. But even this one is coming under fire from the same landlord lobby, which is a further indicator that its professed concerns about the provisions in the St. Paul ballot question are being made in good faith.
This is a quintessential example of grassroots, working class activism seeking to harness democracy for the public good as big money corporate interests try to crush them and maintain an inequitable status quo.
Make sure to select Housing Equity Now St. Paul in the “Recipient” category on ActBlue.
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