Bad tenants, better neighbors
Rent strikes, tech-oligarch cities, and a 1.4 percent apartment vacancy rate
“Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are,” write Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. “Our lives are wrecked and wrung by price gouging, eviction, and displacement.” The statistics should shock us, the authors point out: “In Los Angeles alone, 600,000 people spend fully 90 percent of what they earn keeping a roof over their heads.”
This week at Public Seminar, our contributors explore strategies for making our cities more livable.
Rosenthal and Vilchis join Gabriela Rendón for a conversation about rent strikes, imaginative coalitions, and the erased history of tenants taking charge of their rights.
Taking a different approach, Richard McGahey discusses New York’s newly adopted “City of Yes” zoning package and the problem with progressive narratives about housing policy.
And Nolan Young takes a closer look at how locals are fighting back against Próspera, a city that might be located in Honduras but which is co-governed by a private company—Honduras Próspera LLC—registered in Delaware.
Honduras Fights Back Against Global Oligarchy
Nolan Young
Off the coast of Honduras, a group of Silicon Valley investors has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what they hope to become a deregulated techno-utopia—a place called Próspera, where visionary entrepreneurs can innovate and forge a better future, unburdened by the constraints of a typical nation-state.
The goal? To model “the future of human governance: privately run and for profit.”
If Eviction Is Personal for Us, It Should Be Personal for Our Landlords Too
Gabriela Rendón, Tracy Rosenthal, and Leonardo Vilchis
Tracy Rosenthal: I'll tell one story from a 2017 strike we call the “Mariachi rent strike.” This was a 26-unit building, two blocks from Mariachi Plaza [Boyle Heights, Los Angeles]. A third of the tenants were mariachi musicians, which means they rely on going to the park to pick up work.
A new landlord, a man named Frank BJ Turner, bought their building, and he started handing out rent increase notices. Even though the tenants had lived in this building for ten, twenty, in some cases thirty years, this was not a rent-stabilized building, so the landlord could raise the rents to market rate. That was a perfectly legal scenario that tenants face all the time, all across the city of Los Angeles, across the country, and the world. But these tenants decided that although the rent increase might've been legal, it wasn't right. In some cases, rent was going up $800 a month. So these rent increases were, in many ways, eviction notices. And for some, to lose their housing would have meant to lose their jobs. It would've meant losing their neighborhood of Boyle Heights, in Los Angeles, which is a historic Chicano neighborhood and bastion of resistance in our city. This is in the context of accelerating gentrification, where there have been new transit stops, new zoning laws passed, and new police patrols. It’s really important to continue to underline the role of policing in raising property values in the neighborhood.
For more on tenants fighting back, read an excerpt from Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, courtesy of the authors and Haymarket Books.
Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage
Richard McGahey and the Center for New York City Affairs
With its sights set on developing 80,000 new housing units over the next 15 years, “City of Yes” is simultaneously a big deal and also inadequate for addressing the city’s housing supply and affordability gaps.
On the plus side, the City Council supported significant zoning changes that should lead to more housing construction, which in turn will help affordability through increasing supply. On the minus side, the plan was scaled back to accommodate single-family housing, cuts development options near transit sites, keeps too much parking, reduces combined commercial-residential projects, and over-regulates so-called “accessory dwelling units” (ADUs), like stand-alone backyard living quarters [sometimes called “mother-in-law” apartments].