As April 1 looms, desperate renters are ready to strike
Revvy Broker has lived in the same townhome for five years and on Wednesday, as is the case on the first of every month, he owes his landlord $1,160.
Broker is a videographer by trade and is unable to work right now, or even leave his house in unincorporated Arapahoe County outside of emergencies, because he has a pre-existing respiratory condition that makes him extra vulnerable to the coronavirus.
“I don’t have any way to come up with the money that the landlord’s asking for,” he said Thursday.
Asked how he expects to cover that continuing expense, and others, while he’s out of work, Broker added, “To be honest, I have no clue. I’m just as lost as everyone else right now.”
At this point in an average month, about 0.5% of Colorado renters will have reached out to their landlords about their inability to pay rent for the coming month, said Peggy Panzer, a vice president for Laramar Group, which has 2,300 housing units in Colorado. Panzer’s been leading a coronavirus response
task force of roughly 60 housing providers in the state, and as of Friday, the proportion of renters who’ve said they can’t pay for April was between 5% and 7%, she said.
“We do expect as we get closer to April 1 that there are going to be more,” Panzer said.
That’s a safe bet. In the last two weeks alone, more than 3% of Colorado’s labor force has filed an unemployment claim amid coronavirus-fueled business closures, shattering state records. Many are set to receive some combination of unemployment insurance and federal cash assistance in the coming weeks, but low-income and outof-work renters interviewed by The Denver Post say that aid isn’t enough to cover the rent, not to mention other critical expenses.
People in such desperate situations are entirely at the mercy of their landlords, in a state where roughly 35% of the population rents.
Gov. Jared Polis said last week that landlords “generally want to keep their tenants, and generally know that if their tenants are out of work for a month or two, they need to work with them to keep them there.” The Colorado Apartment Association says he’s right.
“We have a tremendous amount of sympathy for people. It’s a terrible situation,” said Michelle Lyng, a spokeswoman for the association who herself is a landlord. “For the people who’ve lost their jobs, I recommend that they go and talk to their housing provider. A lot of housing providers are willing to work with people.”
But, crucially, there’s nothing compelling them to do so right now. The governor has urged, but not ordered, the suspension of evictions and foreclosures, and the Apartment Association issued its own best practices to members, including: waive all late fees through the end of April, create payment plans for residents who need them, refrain from pursuing evictions through the end of April and avoid rent increases.
“Asking people to work together”
Dozens of letters from landlords to tenants shared either with The Denver Post directly or via the new Facebook group Colorado Rent Strike and Eviction Defense show that landlords are taking a wide range of approaches. Some have promised to freeze rent levels for a few months. Many are offering payment plans and saying they’ll work with tenants facing hardship.
Others are continuing to charge late fees and threaten consequences. “We WILL exercise to evict you for non-payment ASAP!!!” reads one letter shared with The Post.
“My landlord sent out a mass email saying they are expecting rent on the first, that they’ll still be processing evictions,” Broker said. “It almost feels like my landlord doesn’t care about my life, that they would rather see me die than give me a month of free rent.”
Landlords, for whom few aid sources seem available right now, in many cases say they can’t afford a rent freeze — something advocates have called on Polis to support, but that he’s not backing.
“If people don’t pay their rent, who pays the housing provider’s employees, or the provider’s vendors, cleaning crews?” Lyng said. “Who pays the landlord’s debt obligations, mortgage payments? We’re all just part of this ecosystem. We’re all asking people to work together.”
A rent freeze, said Kurt Firnhaber, housing director for Boulder, “would put our housing authority out of business in two months.”
Desperate renters are, for now, shielded in part by the fact that sheriff’s offices across Colorado are temporarily refusing to carry out evictions. Many courts where eviction proceedings play out are closed.
But evictions and foreclosures can and almost certainly will resume at some point in the coming months, and some in dire economic straits say they expect they won’t be able to pay back the rent money they’ll need to stave off such action, whenever it comes.
“We need a freeze”
Desiree Kane, of Estes Park, a freelancer who lost all nine of her contracts in the sudden economic decline, said the current situation is untenable for people who can’t make rent. Over the course of four days, she said, six of her friends in northern Colorado also lost their jobs, and so the group organized a Facebook page for people demanding leniency, and even planning to refuse to pay rent. That group has grown to nearly 2,000 people in less than a week.
“I don’t think people have a choice, and neither do our leaders,” Kane said. “It’s going to be a rent freeze or a rent strike. That’s how it’s going to be.”
There is no indication that officials at the state level or in Colorado cities will pursue a rent freeze. City attorneys are convinced, in fact, that the governments they serve don’t even have the authority for such an action, since leases are legal agreements that town boards and city councils cannot simply rip apart.
Activists will keep trying. “We need a freeze, not a deferment,” said Kane, who said allies are actively organizing now, in at least five Colorado cities, for rent strikes
Lyng said a rent strike would be “divisive” and “counterproductive.” Kane responded, “I think that’s quite classist.”
“Safe and affordable”
What makes this crisis especially hard on all sides is that it’s entirely possible that it could drag on for months. There will likely be thousands more Coloradans living in poverty by the time May’s rent is due.
“There’s no way this is a onemonth problem,” Firnhaber said. “Even if we go back to work in a month-and-a-half, there are people who are going to need six months or a year to recover.”
Several Colorado lawmakers lamented that because the legislature is not meeting right now — the Capitol was shut down two weeks ago over coronavirus fears — it has no ability to respond nimbly to this and other crises. State Rep. Jonathan Singer, D-Longmont, said that if the session were going on now, he’d push a bill for a temporary moratorium on evictions and foreclosures for people who’ve suffered income loss.
State Rep. Dominique Jackson, D-Aurora, said she’s been kept up at night thinking of the thousands now teetering on the cusp of homelessness.
“I’m working with as many as my legislative colleagues trying to gather stories so that we can be prepared, when we come back to the Capitol, to see what types of legislation we might be able to pass,” said Jackson, who was homeless as a teenager.