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Foundations help support new movement of renters’ activism In wake of pandemic, organizers push for new tenant protections Sara Herschander CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY
After years of rising rents, a group of Kansas City, Missouri, renters came together in 2019 to form KC Tenants, armed with an annual budget of $30,000 and demands for a bill of rights to protect renters from rising prices, unjust evictions and landlord abuse. Four years and one pandemic later, KC Tenants is a nonprofi t tenants union with a budget that grew almost twentyfold and a track record of advocacy victories. For instance, the group got its bill of rights enacted by the city and is working to make sure all tenants have the right to a lawyer when facing evictions. Tenants unions are membershipbased groups that advocate for the collective rights of renters, often at the local level. Many operate similarly to labor unions by charging member dues, off ering member benefi ts and appointing tenant leaders. The progress at KC Tenants comes as a growing number of foundations are working with a revitalized tenants movement to confront the nation’s housing crisis. The current wave of organizing is the country’s most signifi cant since the 1970s, when infl ation and momentum from the Civil Rights Movement led to rent strikes across the country and new policies like rent control. Now rents are rising again, and tenant organizers, who led the fi ght for pandemic-era eviction moratoriums, have turned toward new permanent protections for tenants. The pandemic “exposed a live wire about the lack of protections and vulnerabilities tenants face,” says Jennifer Angarita, of Funders for Housing and Opportunity, a grantmakers group. After losing their jobs during the pandemic, many tenants struggled to pay rent and would have lost their homes without eviction moratoriums. Angarita says an increase in national grantmakers’ support for local tenant movements is part of a broader shift in philanthropy that prioritizes support for the people most closely aff ected by social issues. In 2021, HouseUS, a national organizing fund that supports local tenants movements, launched with $7.5 million. It received $5.5 million from the Ford Foundation and $2 million from
Members of KC Tenants, a nonprofi t tenants union, protest in Kansas City, Mo., last year. Recent progress at KC Tenants comes as a growing number of foundations are working with a revitalized tenants movement to confront the nation’s housing crisis. SAM BLAUFUSS VIA AP
“The rights and privileges that we take for granted now came about as a result of grassroots organizing that was deeply unpopular at the time.” Denise St. Omer Board member of the Kansas City-based Hadley Project
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has since awarded another $4 million. The fund – which supports KC Tenants, Colorado Homes for All, the Nevada Housing Justice Alliance and others – has continued to attract money from other large foundations. It raised more than $4 million in the past three years from grantmakers such as the Oak Foundation, which provided $2 million, and the Melville Charitable Trust, which gave $200,000. “Nothing pulls people in quite like momentum,” says Kevin Simowitz, codirector of HouseUS.
The national tenants movement has helped make recent changes across the nation: h Keep LA Housed, Inquilinos Unidos and others won Los Angeles City Council approval for protections that require landlords to provide clear causes, like nonpayment of rent, for evictions and relocation assistance for tenants displaced by rising rents. h In New York, Housing Justice for All, a coalition of nonprofi ts, successfully fought for new laws and protections such as limitations on security deposit charges and requirements to noti-
fy tenants before making certain rent increases. h The Miami Workers Center, a tenant collective, won approval for a countywide bill of rights protecting renters from housing discrimination based on prior evictions and a guarantee they’ll be notifi ed if a building shifts ownership. “Communities have been preparing for a moment when they can realize change, and I think we have it now,” says Meshie Knight, senior program offi cer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “I see philanthropy as being able to contribute to that reimagination of a new and more equitable future.” During the pandemic, KC Tenants became an advocate for emergency tenant protections, including a temporary eviction moratorium in the state. The group, with a budget of nearly $600,000 from both local and national grants, See RENTERS, Page 3H
Eviction ban in California cities about to end Janie Har ASSOCIATED PRESS
People rally to end the eviction moratorium outside City Hall in Oakland, Calif., April 11. Some landlords have gone without rental income for more than three years after Oakland approved the moratorium in March 2020. JEFF CHIU/AP FILE
SAN FRANCISCO – Retiree Pamela Haile has paid property taxes, insurance and other bills on a house she lets out in Oakland, but for more than three years her tenants have paid no rent thanks to one of the longest-lasting eviction bans in the country. The eviction moratorium in the San Francisco Bay Area city expires next month and Haile can’t wait. The 69year-old estimates she is owed more than $60,000 in back rent, money she doubts she will ever see. Moreover, the tenants have trashed her house and it will cost tens of thousands of dollars to make it habitable, she says. “It’s unbelievable and it’s like, how can they have the nerve to just let something like this happen? If this happened to them, how would they feel?” Haile said of her tenants. “Dealing with this whole thing gets me so upset.” Eviction moratoriums were put in place across the U.S. at the start of the
pandemic in 2020 to prevent displacement and curb the spread of the coronavirus. Most expired long ago, but not in Oakland or neighboring San Francisco and Berkeley, all places where rents and rates of homelessness are high. While it’s more common to see tenants converging on city halls in California to demand greater protections, in Oakland and surrounding Alameda County small-property landlords staged protests earlier this year demanding an end to the moratoriums. Many of the landlords were Black, like Haile, or Asian American, and they said the eviction bans had saddled them with debt and foreclosure worries while their tenants, who have jobs, live rentfree. They scolded elected leaders for allowing tenants to self-certify that their inability to pay was tied to the pandemic. Unlike large corporate landlords, these small-property owners said they didn’t have the means to evict, and were See EVICTION, Page 3H
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