Tens of millions of wage earners lost their jobs when the coronavirus shutdown large parts of the economy, driving small businesses into the ground. Some of these newly jobless have to make hard choices between buying food and paying rent. Thousands of these cash-strapped Americans took part in the May 1 national rent strike. What is next for this fledgling movement?
Consider a bill in Congress. Rep. Illhan Omar (D-Minn.) of the so-called “squad” of progressive Democratic women representatives has introduced the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act. “We must take major action to protect the health and economic security of the most vulnerable, including the millions of Americans currently at risk of housing instability and homelessness,” said Rep. Omar in a statement.
What if opponents in both or either parties kill or stall her bill? The Progressive Populist contacted Tara Raghuveer, based in Kansas City, Mo., who directs the “Homes Guarantee” campaign at People’s Action, a national network of grassroots advocacy groups that help struggling renters across the US.
“If Congress fails to pass rent/mortgage cancellation,” Raghuveer told TPP in an email, “millions of tenants across the country will be facing debts they simply cannot sustain. Hundreds of thousands may have to leave their homes.”
In other words, housed people will become unhoused. There were 150,000 homeless people in California alone at the end of 2019, according to the federal Housing and Urban Development department.
Evicting renters unable to pay due to the pandemic would worsen the crisis of affordable shelter. Raghuveer continues.
“We will experience displacement on a scale that we have never seen before,” she said. “Meanwhile, private equity firms and big corporate landlords will do the same thing that they did in the wake of the Great Recession.”
We turn to Nomi Prins, an investigative journalist and author of “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World” and “All the Presidents’ Bankers.” “The financial crisis of 2008 revealed the extent to which Congress, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve were willing to go to save the banking system,“ Prins told TPP, “while thousands of families suffered financial ruin from which many had not even fully recovered. We must not let that happen again.”
Maurice BP-Weeks is the co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) in Atlanta. ACRE played a central role in the nationwide May 1 rent and mortgage strike.
“We need to continue to push no matter what happens with Rep. Omar’s bill,” he told TPP via text. “Several organizations were engaged in crafting that bill and those organizations will move towards influencing different legislation if Omar’s bill is defeated.”
In California, there is a move afoot to amend the state Constitution to make housing a human right. Expect the state and local real estate lobbies to oppose that amendment with big dollars flowing to lawmakers in the Golden State.
What other tactics do activist groups such as ACRE and People’s Action have to address potential evictions of renters?
“As states open for business and people get eviction threats,” according to Raghuveer, “we will have to recall tactics from history, like eviction blockades. It may take community members moving their bodies to disrupt the displacement.”
The Great Depression of the 1930s sparked collective actions to prevent tenant evictions, according to historians Jeremy Brecher and the late Howard Zinn. Labor unions, and communist and socialist parties were front and center defending renters in those eviction abolition actions.
“Our focus is on building power to make sure that tenants are not the ones who will pay,” Weeks said, “but instead wealthy corporations, real estate, and rich landlords.”
These moneyed interests have been first in line for taxpayer dollars via, for example, the Paycheck Protection Program 1.0 and 2.0. It is not socialism, just how American capitalism works for a few at the top to the harm of many below.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2020
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