What do you do when you can’t pay your rent?
Bay Area renters — and landlords — raise their voices for government help
As rent comes due today for the growing ranks of unemployed workers, anxious tenants and advocates have turned to rent strikes and lobbying for massive, new government funding to ease a housing crisis intensified by the coronavirus pandemic.
Renter and landlord groups are urging state and federal officials to provide billions of dollars, fearing a wave of evictions, financial failure of affordable housing projects and widespread housing insecurity in coming months. The nonprofit Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which supported the Moms 4 Housing movement, says 10,000 California tenants have signed an online rentstrike pledge.
State and local emergency measures have protected renters from evictions, but the uncertainty of mounting debts as shelter-in-place orders have shuttered businesses and left workers without paychecks has prompted demands for greater relief.
“To keep our community safe, people have to be housed,” said Amie Fishman, executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California. “We don’t want to have millions of people lose their homes.”
Hayward City Councilmember Aisha Wahad, a renter, said her family lost their home and business during the 2008 Great Recession. A repeat of that crisis without substantial government aid would devastate families for generations, she said.
“Cities can do more and our state legislature can do more,” Wahad said. “And that isn’t happening.”
Nearly 400,000 renter households in the Bay Area are expected to have at least one member lose income because of the pandemic, according to new research by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. Nationally, about 16.5 million renter households, where 50 million people live, have at least one worker employed in an industry hit by the pandemic, according to the Terner Center.
In the Bay Area, frustrated advocates are turning on Gov. Gavin Newsom, saying he has not taken bold enough action to prevent a housing crisis when emergency orders end. “Has he done enough? The answer is a big No,” said Tenants Together executive director Lupe Arreola.
The looming crisis is expected to hit housing-short California harder than other states. Residents of 2.3 million apartments and rental homes in the state are expected to be impacted financially by the crisis. Half of those California tenants already were considered rent- stressed, spending more than 30% of their incomes on housing.
Many of the renter households expected to be impacted in California have workers in the service, hospitality, entertainment and retail industries, according to the Terner Center research. “We were already in a crisis before this new crisis hit,” said research director Elizabeth Kneebone.
A large corporate survey suggests renters were making their regular payments during the first full month of the pandemic. More than 91% paid some or all of their April rent, a drop of just 4.5% from last year, according to a survey of 11.5 million units by the National Multifamily Housing Council.
Chase Harrington, president of real estate software company Entrata, said the influx of government checks and enhanced unemployment should help renters meet immediate obligations. “We’re optimistic about May,” he said.
But landlords expect more delinquencies in months to come as struggling tenants drain savings. The Bay Area’s shelter-in-place regulations have been extended through May, and the phased reopening of businesses and workers returning to jobs is expected to take months.
The housing council and statewide landlord organizations have called for the government to pump more money into housing subsidies.
The California Rental Housing Association this month called for a renter assistance program of up to $1 billion, depending on how long the crisis lasts. Association president and Berkeley landlord Sid Lakireddy said the government has not done enough. “We need to figure out how to keep people housed,” he said.
Lakireddy and other property owners criticized efforts to organize rent strikes, saying they prevent landlords from helping their most vulnerable residents.
But renters and landlords do agree on the need for big support from the government.
A coalition of more than 100 nonprofit housing and social service agencies this week wrote U. S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking for $100 billion in rental assistance for needy families, as well as another $75 billion for mortgage assistance and $14.5 billion for emergency housing grants and vouchers. The letter also calls for a uniform, national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.
Long term, the coalition wants $500 billion designated to build subsidized housing and expanded access to federal low-income housing tax credits.
Fishman said an aid package needs to be bold, addressing the needs of tenants and low- income homeowners as well as future housing development. “We need to keep pushing harder,” she said.
But the relief won’t come soon enough for many residents. Growing desperation has ignited calls for a state-wide rent strike.
Vanessa Bulnes, 61, lost her job as an early- childhood educator seven weeks ago. Her husband, Richard, is retired and on a fixed income, and the couple pays about 70% of their monthly earnings for their $2,600 a month rent in Oakland.
They struggled to pay last month’s rent. Bulnes is going on a rent strike. “We have no savings,” said Bulnes, a member of ACCE. “We will not be able to pay rent on May 1.”
She also wants landlords to get mortgage relief from banks, allowing both sides a temporary break until the economy returns to a healthy level.
If shelter- in- place orders continue, Bulnes figures the couple could owe more than $10,000 in back rent and have no way to pay it off. “That sort of debt would throw us into homelessness,” she said. “We need our rent to be canceled, forgiven, to be gone.”