Just as Americans are being instructed to stay home, it’s becoming one of the hardest things to afford.
On March 31, about 300 tenants received an email from their apartment management company. The email listed resources for tenants struggling financially during the coronavirus pandemic, but the sign-off message was clear: The rent is still due.
But whichever employee of Saturn Management, the Los Angeles property management company, sent the message to the 300 or so tenants across their various properties forgot to hide the email addresses of the recipients. Almost immediately, tenants started responding, replying-all.
“A few people chimed in saying they were down for a rent strike, and more and more people started chiming in,” Alex Mercier, a 26-year-old in Los Angeles who recently lost his job due to the coronavirus crisis, told me.
The email thread moved to a Slack channel, where people have been talking, organizing, and discussing ever since. Mercier said they’re still trying to figure out the best course of action. A rent strike for May is among the options, but they don’t want to do anything haphazardly, or anything that might jeopardize anyone’s housing situation.
Saturn Management declined to comment on the record but provided Vox with the follow-up email the company sent out this Monday, which apologized and acknowledged “that our most recent email from March 31st caused some confusion, stress, and anger for many of you.” The email said that “safeguarding your health and well-being” was the company’s first priority and encouraged tenants to reach out with concerns.
But the management company’s initial email had already created a bond among a community of people who’d just lost their jobs, people who worried they’d be next, and people who were just stressed about an uncertain future.
“We are a literal microcosm of things that are potentially to come,” Mercier said. “Because, what, 10 million in the country have applied for unemployment in the last two weeks? This is going to continue to grow, those numbers are going to continue to grow, the need will continue to grow, people’s situations — the dire seriousness of their situations — will be amplified.
“It’s important to know we’re all in this together,” he said. “It’s important that people understand what’s possible, what we can do together, if we have the numbers — when we have the numbers.”
As Mercier said, about 10 million unemployment claims were filed in the US in just the past two weeks, and that’s expected to rise as the economy remains shut down because of the coronavirus. And at a time when all Americans are being urged to stay at home, if not explicitly ordered to do so, having adequate shelter is literally a public health priority.
Rent strikes, like the one Mercier and his fellow tenants are considering, are more of a tactic than an end goal. They’re meant to put pressure on landlords to make concessions for struggling tenants, and to force landlords to join in the pressure on lawmakers to get more relief to renters. (The federal government’s stimulus package includes some relief for people with federally backed mortgages.)
A rent freeze is another option, one that would at least prevent landlords from raising rent during the crisis. And some are pushing for governments to cancel rent altogether, at least until the immediate public health crisis around the coronavirus is resolved.
But both experts and advocates say the pandemic hasn’t created a housing crisis. It is merely exposing, and exacerbating, the problems that already existed.
“I think this moment highlights the precarity of people generally, and how important housing is to all of us,” Vincent Reina, assistant professor of urban economics and planning at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “And I think it highlights the limited safety nets we have in place.”
But because of the coronavirus, this crisis is now unfolding all at once.
The rent crisis is here now. But it should surprise no one.
Nicole, 33, worked in fine jewelry production. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, she saw 99 percent of her business dry up. She had to let her one employee go. She’s trying to figure out what to do next, but even if she can get unemployment assistance, she’s uncertain how long she’ll be able to meet her expenses on it.
Besides her rent, she has credit card bills, loans, utilities, food, car payments. “So that’s not going to leave me with much to hold me over then, right?” she said.
Her landlord, she said, declined to give her a break on the rent; she’d asked for a discount for two months until she and her roommate — a student, who also can’t afford to stay in their Los Angeles apartment if she’s not attending classes — figured out their situation. Nicole says she brings groceries to her elderly parents. Her mom has cancer and is therefore particularly vulnerable, and the idea of finding another roommate in the middle of a public health crisis terrifies her.
They have a plan: A friend of her roommate’s from Chicago has agreed to take over her roommate’s spot in May, though who knows if that will still make sense a month from now.
But the full rent is still due.
Versions of this story are playing out in cities across the United States. The country has now experienced the same amount of job losses it did during the Great Recession — but in the span of just two weeks. That strain will continue as cities and states and the businesses within them stay shut down or scale back, leading to pay cuts, furloughs, or layoffs.
As bills pile up for food, health care, and utilities, the rent (or mortgage) can sometimes be the hardest expense to pay, especially in cities like New York or Los Angeles where the cost of living is already high.
This crisis, though, is not unfamiliar to many Americans. Of the country’s approximately 43 million renters, more than 40 percent are already considered “rent burdened,” spending more than 35 percent of their income on housing and utilities, according to US Census data.
Cea Weaver, a campaign coordinator with Housing Justice for All, a coalition of New York State advocacy groups pushing to cancel rent and immediately rehouse homeless people in vacant housing, told me that, weeks ago, it was already apparent people were one major life event away — like a parent getting sick, a car breaking down, a job loss, or a medical emergency — from not being able to afford housing.
What’s happening now is that that life event is happening to everybody at once,” Weaver said. “And it’s happening across the country.”
The increased economic pressure people are facing is also colliding with the critical public health imperative that everyone stay home. This is already a catastrophe for homeless people or people in unstable housing. Now, in a matter of weeks, the country’s best tool to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus — sheltering in place — has also become the thing that many people suddenly can’t afford to maintain.
“Eviction equals death,” Julian Smith-Newman, a member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, a member-funded housing advocacy group, said. “That’s never been more obvious than at this moment and in the public health crisis that we’re living in.”
And the informal safety nets that can sometimes help people through difficult stretches are not necessarily available right now. It’s a lot harder to stay on a friend’s couch temporarily, or move in with older parents, because of how the virus spreads, and who is vulnerable. Moving is still happening (many states have designated movers and storage facilities as essential services), but even downsizing apartments or finding an extra roommate to split the bills with becomes far more precarious during a global pandemic.
James Stockard, an expert in affordable housing at Harvard University, said that people losing their housing now would be disastrous. “More people would be in the streets or doubling up with their relatives,” he told me. “Every other solution to your housing, if you don’t have shelter in your own apartment, is going to bring you into closer contact with other people. And so it’s going to make the pandemic worse.”
Lawmakers and state officials do seem to recognize that keeping people housed is critical, which is why many states and localities have adopted eviction moratoriums, either instituted by lawmakers or put into place by the courts, which are shut down in many places. The federal government has also issued a 120-day eviction moratorium for tenants in federally subsidized housing (or with federally subsidized mortgages).
These eviction moratoriums vary in length and strength between states and localities, and in many cases do not mean that tenants can’t be evicted after these moratoriums expire. Some places are trying to strengthen those protections: New York state, for example, is trying to outlaw evictions for nonpayment for anyone unable to afford to pay their rent during the moratorium’s 90-day period, plus six months after.
Source: VOX
