Renters Are Organizing To Fight Evictions, Just Like They Did in the 1930s ~~ Zacharias Szumer

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/australian-renters-evictions-organizing-1930s-covid

In the wake of the pandemic, Australian renters are once again facing the threat of mass evictions. The militant renters’ struggles of the Great Depression are an excellent model for the movement that’s taking shape today.

In June 1931, a Sydney hospital admitted a seven-year-old boy with a severely injured toe. When asked how he’d acquired the injury, the boy told doctors that another child had thrown a brick at him during a game. “We was playin’ evictions and I was a policeman,” he said, pointing to another small boy, “and he was a communist.”

The boys’ game was inspired by a real battle they had witnessed ten days earlier. It was one of many anti-eviction actions organized by the Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM) across Sydney to resist a wave of homelessness triggered by the Great Depression.

Unemployed and on The Street

During the early 1930s, in working-class areas of Sydney and Melbourne, unemployment peaked at more than 30 percent. Because welfare recipients were paid in goods or coupons, rather than money, and few owned homes of their own, the result was a wave of evictions. In poor suburbs, it was common to see bailiffs (today called sheriff’s officers) dumping furniture — and families — onto the road.

The confrontation that inspired the children’s game occurred on June 19, 1931, in Newtown, Sydney. As Iain McIntyre describes in his book Lock Out the Landlords! Australian Eviction Resistance 1929–1936, members of the UWM had barricaded themselves inside a house with sandbags and barbed wire to defend a family facing eviction.

When police attempted to force their way into the house, UWM members pelted them with bricks and stones. Eventually, the police broke through and violently ejected the UWM members. One man was shot and two others were hospitalized with fractured skulls. A crowd of locals — reportedly numbering in the thousands — heckled police as they attempted to leave the scene.

During the first years of the Great Depression, the UWM coordinated many actions like these. They set up local anti-eviction committees, approached renters at risk of eviction, and provided food, childcare, and help with moving. If the tenant wished, the UWM would organize an eviction defense. In the lead-up, the UWM would usually visit the landlord or real estate agent to warn them that an attempted eviction would be resisted. If landlords tried anyway, the UWM would chalk messages on footpaths or send bicycle riders around neighborhoods banging on tin cans, to stir up a crowd.The UWM wasn’t only active in Sydney. In July 1930, in Brunswick, Melbourne, hundreds of unemployed split off from a protest march to prevent an eviction. According to firsthand accounts, a bailiff was already in the property marking furniture to be seized and sold when protesters flooded the house, pushing the bailiff onto a couch while “an enterprising gentleman tipped a dish of water over him.” The bailiff was then “bundled unceremoniously down the passage and thrown out of the house where they were seized upon by a crowd numbering several hundred.”

The UWM’s tactics were so successful that they won every single eviction case they took on during the first half of 1931.

The COVID-19 Rental Crisis

Just like the Great Depression, the COVID-19 crisis has hit tenants hard. A recent survey of fifteen thousand renters carried out by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) found that the vast majority of respondents reported that COVID-19 had adversely affected their employment, living environment, and ability to pay rent. Seven hundred and fifty respondents reported having received an eviction notice since the start of the pandemic.

Only one in three respondents had requested a rent reduction or deferral, or were planning to ask for one. Forty-two percent of those who applied were granted a rent reduction while another 30 percent had their request declined outright. Another 17 percent entered into a rent-deferral arrangement, effectively kicking mounting arrears down the road. When some tenants asked for a rent reduction, agents sent financial hardship forms, demanding personal information and often misleading tenants about their legal rights.

An earlier report from Tenants Victoria found that rent reductions were “hard-won” and generally lasted three months or less. It also found that real estate agents refused more than a third of requests, justifying their rejection with “no reason given.”

According to AHURI, despite near-universal hardship, the majority of renters were reluctant to ask for a rent reduction. This was mainly because tenants anticipated refusal, fearing that the request would jeopardize needed repairs or result in a tarnished rental record. Some real estate agents even sent tenants emails and letters telling them not to bother asking for any relief, and warning them that they would be penalized for falling behind on payments.

After state governments announced an eviction moratorium, the Tenants’ Union of New South Wales’ website received a year’s worth of traffic in a few days. Tenants Victoria experienced a 400 percent increase in people seeking help, many of whom were renters issued with notices to vacate after advising their landlord they had lost their job.

The year 2020 has highlighted renters’ relative legal powerlessness. Unlike banks and other financial institutions, landlords are not required to provide flexibility to a tenant facing hardship — although civil tribunals have some power to force their hand, pending a lengthy process. Indeed, Australia is one of the few developed countries that allows “no grounds” evictions, which some landlords have used as a loophole to boot tenants during the moratorium. Notices to vacate are still reportedly being issued, with the intention of evicting tenants the day after the moratorium is lifted.

Governments could have legally mandated rent reductions across the board, as some housing experts urged. Or they could have mandated rent reductions proportionate to loss of income, which were granted to commercial tenants. Instead, federal and state leaders simply asked landlords, real estate agents, and residential tenants to negotiate “in good faith,” despite the systemic insecurities and imbalances in the private rental market. 

When the Moratorium Ends

The Renters and Housing Union (RAHU) was first conceived of during a national rent strike staged in 2020, which attracted seventeen thousand pledges to withhold rent and mortgage payments in its first month. Following a local organizing drive across Melbourne, RAHU was formally established in May.

Unlike Tenants Victoria — a government-funded body that provides legal advice to tenants — RAHU is a self-representing body of renters. They’ve already chalked up a few wins, in some cases helping tenants secure the waiving of debts as high as $12,000 by their landlords. They have also helped to block evictions through the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

Yet the fiercest battle for RAHU may come in March next year, when the final cuts to the JobSeeker and JobKeeper income subsidies hit, and when most eviction moratoriums expire. It’s a convergence that may set off a wave of evictions — especially if landlords and agencies keep rents high and enforce the payment of deferred rent.

RAHU secretary Eirene Tsolidis-Noyce says that if it comes down to it, RAHU is willing to resort to the type of tactics the UWM employed in the 1930s:

We live in a different society to the 30s, but fundamentally we still need a strong union. We need all renters to be organized collectively and join the union, to know their local fellow members, and to network together to protect each other against eviction . . . and if it requires a picket, that’s what it’ll take.

Fortunately, we don’t need to search as far back as the 1930s for proof that direct action is an effective anti-eviction strategy. In early 2018, Brisbane Greens councilor Jonathan Sri organized a picket that prevented the eviction of a single mother and her five children.

More recently, Sydney’s Housing Defence Coalition mobilized at the house of a recently unemployed New Zealand citizen and blocked her imminent, and potentially illegal, eviction. They also won rent suspensions and reductions at Sydney University Village and a commitment from the University of Sydney that no students would be evicted from university housing.

Will the Government Prevent an Eviction Crisis?

As researcher Vanessa Whittington notes, the eviction crisis of the early 1930s led to a few pieces of progressive — albeit short-lived — legislation. In NSW, the 1931 Reduction of Rent Act mandated a statewide 22.5 percent reduction in all rents. The 1931 Ejectments Postponement Act prohibited eviction without a court order.

However, following complaints from landlords and their representatives, the Ejectments Postponement Act was repealed a year later, after the Lang Labor government was sacked. The incoming Conservative government also weakened the Rent Reduction Act in favor of landlords. It remains to be seen whether state and federal governments today will have the courage to side with tenants against landlords and real estate agents — but the precedents are not encouraging.

This is why RAHU has issued ten demands including a twelve-month eviction ban, the waiving of all rental debts accrued during the pandemic, rent-reduction agreements set at below 30 percent of tenants’ income, and the application of penalties for landlords or agencies who refuse to negotiate with renters in good faith or breach renters’ rights. The demands of the Victorian Federation of Community Legal Centres are slightly less radical, but follow similar lines.

Nevertheless, RAHU has begun to flex its muscle. On November 30, the young union organized a peaceful protest against the potential eviction of forty people from an inner-city Melbourne hotel, which has been used as emergency accommodation during the pandemic.If governments don’t step up, tenants will have no option but to fight back. Organizing this type of resistance will be difficult in communities that have lost much of the social cohesion working-class neighborhoods had in the 1930s. Homeownership has also significantly increased since then, making renters a smaller and less powerful social force.

RAHU says that most of those forced to leave emergency accommodation this week will have no alternative but to sleep rough, contradicting recent statements by the state government that anyone eligible for social housing would “remain in hotel accommodation until a supported home is leased or purchased specifically for them.” RAHU also warns that many have already been evicted or are at imminent risk of eviction, given that state government funding for emergency pandemic housing has now dried up.

As Tsolidis-Noyce says:

Due to insecure work, neoliberal policy and a global pandemic that has sent us into a decades-long depression, the stakes are higher than the 30s, but the power imbalance still remains.

Yet early indications show that RAHU is swimming with the tide. Just as in the Great Depression, community solidarity can force the government and landlords to back down — and save renters from eviction and homelessness.

================

Also, an article on the unfolding eviction crisis that the US will face earlier in the new year

https://blackagendareport.com/how-prevent-40-million-people-being-evicted

Tens of millions of Americans struggle to pay rent as unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium near expiration ~~ Alex Findijs

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/pers-d04.html

~~ snip ~~

The September 11 terror attacks, which killed 2,977 people, were used to launch wars costing some $6 trillion and to implement sweeping attacks on democratic rights, all on the basis of a supposed national emergency. Now that the equivalent of a 9/11 is happening every day, death on such a massive scale is effectively treated by the US political establishment as inevitable. And amidst the greatest social crisis since the Great Depression, there is supposedly nothing that can be done to alleviate mass impoverishment.

-----------------------

Also see:  

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/08/rent-d08.html

A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that 7.5 million renter households (23.5 percent) that had at least one person working in February of this year have experienced unemployment at some point between March and August. They warn that evictions will increase 50 percent next year as millions struggle to pay back months of rent and utilities at once.

So far, more than 60 million workers have filed for unemployment this year, with 11.1 million currently collecting state benefits.

With these considerable disruptions to the labor market, the International Labor Organization estimates that North American workers have lost 15.3 percent of their work hours. In the United States, two-thirds of this cut in working hours came from job losses, with half of that coming from unemployment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 159 million workers in November 2019, with an average hourly wage of $28.3 an hour. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that the American working class averages 1,779 hours worked a year per worker.

Using these figures, it can be estimated that American workers worked a total of 282.86 billion hours this year and lost approximately 42.4 billion hours during the pandemic, worth an estimated value of $1.2 trillion, or $10,000 per household.

With such substantial monetary losses for the working class, with the poorest and most disadvantaged certainly bearing the greatest cost, it is no wonder that so many families are struggling to pay their bills and a testament to the failure of the capitalist system to support them.

The Cares Act was signed into law on March 27, providing $300 billion in direct cash payments and $260 billion in supplemental unemployment insurance benefits. The enhanced unemployment benefits lasted for four months, after which rates returned to normal but with a 13-week extension to the maximum number of weeks allowed by each state.

According to data from the Department of Labor, the average weekly unemployment benefits for the second quarter—April, May and June—were just $318, even with the funding for extended benefits.

Four weeks of this sum is not even enough to cover rent alone in many cities. A review by Clever Real Estate found that workers could survive on unemployment insurance in just 12 out of 109 metro areas.

Now, with millions of Americans suffering from the pandemic, the Democrats and Republicans negotiate over pennies, taking turns rejecting deals that do not even come close to alleviating the crisis.

The Republicans, true to form, have offered nothing for housing and utility assistance. The Democrats proposed $50 billion for low-income renters. Ultimately, a $25 billion compromise was reached as part of the $908 billion stimulus package currently being discussed in congress.

Twenty-five billion dollars is a grossly insufficient amount. Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, estimates that there will be $70 billion in unpaid debt by January.

The political parties of the ruling class have demonstrated their complete indifference to the plight of the working class.

In 2019, US renters paid $512 billion for housing. With millions out of work and hundreds of billions of dollars in wages lost, it is impossible to expect workers to somehow conjure their debt payments from thin air by January.

To the extent that the US government offers anything, it is only to prop up the profits of the capitalist system, funneling trillions into the stock market and providing millions to big business through the Paycheck Protection Program, while small businesses owners and workers are left with nothing.

Even with the meager assistance that the federal government is offering, it will be extremely difficult for workers to pay off their debts.

Between 2001 and 2018, the median wage of a renter rose just 0.5 percent while median rent rose 13 percent. More than 8 million renter households pay more than half of their income toward rent, affecting 23 million people.

The Census Bureau’s most recent Household Pulse survey found that 83 million adults reported struggling to pay for essentials such as food, housing, transportation and medical care. Now, 66 percent of people receiving unemployment benefits will lose them on December 26 and face eviction at the end of the month.

All evictions must be halted, workers must be given full income support, essential workers must be granted substantial hazard pay and adequate utilities must be provided to all people without charge.

This is what is required to fight the pandemic and ensure that no person is forced from their home. Neither the Republican nor Democratic party can be trusted to provide workers with relief. Only an independent movement of the working class based on a socialist program demanding financial assistance and an end to evictions can save lives and bring the pandemic under control.

Nearly 1,000 Homeless People Died in LA in 2020 as 93,000 Homes Sit Vacant ~~ Alex Ferrer, Terra Graziani and Jacob Woocher

https://portside.org/2020-11-02/nearly-1000-homeless-people-died-la-2020-93000-homes-sit-vacant

We must see real estate market for what it truly is: an institution rooted in settler colonialism that allows land (and the housing that sits atop it) to be distributed and controlled by those who have enough money for their preferences to matter.

In many major metropolitan areas across the United States, there are far more vacant homes than people experiencing homelessness.

This is true in New York City, it’s true in the Bay Area, and as our new report shows, it’s true in Los Angeles. Here, there are 93,000 vacant homes compared to just over 41,000 unhoused people.

Our report, the product of a collaboration between UCLA School of Law and the community-based nonprofits Strategic Actions for a Just Economy and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, is perhaps the most detailed look yet at the characteristics of residential vacancies situated in the broader speculative housing market in any city in the United States.

With the news that at least 959 unhoused people have already died on the streets of Los Angeles in 2020, it’s never been more critically urgent to understand how cities like LA end up with a surplus of luxury homes existing alongside tens of thousands of desperately poor families without roofs over their heads.

Our findings strongly suggest that we cannot rely on the operation of the market to fix our problems, whether it be housing or any other social need, because the capitalist market is the problem.

While those committed to pushing pro-market housing policies tend to argue that there will always be some vacancy as homes sit empty between residents, our numbers show that this cannot explain the vacancy LA is experiencing.

We found that out of 93,000 total vacant homes, over 46,000 units are held in a state of “non-market” vacancy, meaning they’re not just in between residents waiting for someone to lease or buy them. Of these, over 12,000 homes are categorized by the census as “for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use” — in other words, vacation properties for the rich that mostly sit empty.

Importantly, vacancy disproportionately occurs at the top of the market, with our analysis showing a very straightforward relationship: the higher a unit’s rent, the more likely it is to be vacant.

In Los Angeles there are 93,000 vacant homes compared to just over 41,000 unhoused people.

In LA, like other booming cities, what’s getting built is in this top end of the market — the incredibly expensive homes that most Angelenos cannot afford. For example, 97 percent of the units currently under construction in the city’s downtown area fall under what CoStar categorizes as the “4 & 5 star” class, with average rents over $2,800 per month. According to CoStar’s calculations, these types of units have a massively high vacancy rate of over 16 percent, compared to a rate of under 5 percent for units not under this super-luxury designation.

A 2019 report by the city’s Housing Department comes to similar conclusions. The authors find a “dramatic difference in vacancy rates” between high-end and mid- or low-end units, and that while thousands of units are being added to the supply of high-end housing, the stock of more moderately priced units is actually falling. The city’s “hottest housing markets” have the highest vacancy rates, with neighborhoods like Hollywood and Venice potentially seeing rates as high as 15 percent. The data suggest “prolonged periods of housing units sitting idle in these neighborhoods,” which cannot be explained by the time it takes to lease-up newly constructed units.

Another important trend we document is the increasing financialization of urban real estate. According to data from the LA County Assessor, 67 percent of all residential units in the city are owned by corporate entities and other nonindividual investors, which is 2.5 times the national average. Corporate entities also own 76 percent of all vacant lots in the city not owned by public entities, accounting for 22 square miles of vacant land.

More than ever, owners in LA see housing and land as a speculative investment, an asset to profit off of in the future instead of a home to house someone now. And the consequences for ordinary people are disastrous.

Neoliberal housing advocates — like “YIMBYs” (Yes In My Backyard) and market urbanists that tend to dominate mainstream accounts of the crisis — suggest that we can build our way out of this crisis of tenancy, of people chronically not being able to access shelter. But if we look critically at what is getting built, we see that it will never provide relief for poor, or even middle-class Angeleno renters.

We cannot rely on the operation of the market to fix our problems because the capitalist market is the problem.

Our data suggest the benefits of producing housing at the top will not “trickle down” to the masses. With so many units sitting vacant, the “filtering” theorized by these advocates — essentially the idea that homes at the bottom will become available and more affordable as wealthier people move into newer housing — fails to materialize.

Even if we assume that the pro-market boosters and their economic theories are right about the trickle-down effects of increasing market-rate supply, the supposed benefits will never come close to matching the scale of what is needed. Take downtown LA again as an example, which has been pointed to by local real estate journalist Steven Sharp as a model for the entire region due to its building boom. But Sharp’s own numbers reveal how weak his argument is: The coveted prize from all this building is that rents in the neighborhood have “remained flat,” while elsewhere they’ve gone up. Similarly, an article from Curbed LA earlier this year admits that despite the “incredible amount of units” built in this neighborhood over the past years, rents are just down 1 percent.

With over 600,000 households in LA spending over 90 percent of their income on rent, the poor don’t have time to wait for new construction to trickle down to lower average rents. The most vulnerable tenants need to be sheltered from the capriciousness of the market, not subjected to it. The idea that building super-luxury homes that poor people cannot afford is actually good for them is a fiction that must be dispensed with as soon as possible.

Our report ends by calling for a strong vacancy tax, among other policies the City of LA could pursue, and clarifies the legal framework that would allow cities in California to do this despite restrictions on taxing property in the state’s constitution. A vacancy tax would both incentivize owners to fill their units and raise revenue that could be put to use for social housing. Essentially, a vacancy tax would make it more unaffordable for owners to use housing as a speculative investment.

But we need to go much further, something that has been made especially clear as the COVID-19 pandemic has combined with the racialized precarity of the capitalist real estate market to create what is possibly the greatest ongoing wave of mass evictions and homelessness our country has ever seen.

We must see the real estate market for what it truly is: an institution rooted in settler colonialism that allows land (and the housing that sits atop it) to be distributed and controlled by those who have enough money for their preferences to matter. That vacant homes coexist alongside people sleeping on the street is a disturbing truth in many of our cities across the country. It is imperative to not only reflect on this as coincidence, but to understand both vacancy and houselessness as co-produced by the larger system.