While COVID-19 numbers fluctuate, we are constantly surrounded by calls. Get back to normal But for household debtors, pre-pandemic “normal” was already a crisis.
Even before COVID 68 million Americans owned a home. debt in collections. Between 2009-2020, unpaid medical expenses grew to the largest source of unpaid debt18% of Americans owe $140 Billion in unpaid bills. Pre-pandemic student debt reached nearly $1.8 trillion dollars. It was already higher than $1.3 trillion. Carceral debt is also on the rise. 1 in 10For those earning less that $40,000 per annum, 1 in 8 Black peopleowe debts resulting from incarceration. Ten years before the pandemic. racist mortgage lending practicesThis led to an unprecedented wealth-stripping of Black and Latinx communities. After that foreclosure crisis, corporate landlords bought up housing across the countryThe rent prices have soared, leaving behind at least half of tenants officially rent-burdened in 53 of the 100 largest citiesBlack and Latinx women are the hardest hit.
This is not the normal we should return to.
Household debtors seem in agreement, and there has been a surge of debtor organizing since the pandemic. Members of the Debt CollectiveOrganised to Win over $6 billionIn student carceral debt cancellation during the pandemic alone; San Francisco’s Veritas Tenants Association took on the city’s largest corporate landlord and won pandemic rent debt cancellationAll tenants; and municipal, state federal agenciesPlaced payment moratoria for everything, from rent to utility bills to student debt payments.
These victories are a sign of the growing importance power of debtors. Alone, debtors are vulnerable to creditors’ legal and financial claims on them, but together they are powerful. This is the promise. debtors’ unionsThey can use the collective leverage of their collective power to renegotiate agreements, fight for debt cancellation and use their collective power and influence to change the way goods and services are funded (think free college or Medicare For All). As the nation’s first debtors’ union, the Debt Collective has organized student debtors across the U.S. to push student debt abolition and free college for all this far, and we’re just getting started on medical debt and carceral debt.
Although we don’t think of them that way, tenants’ unions are arguably the best-known form of debtors’ union. The power that organized tenants have over landlords is the power to refuse collective rent until they are satisfied. (A late rent payment is, in other words: a form debt.)
Because so much of the well-documented housing crisisThis country emerged from the unregulated and unregulated power of corporate landlords to turn people’s need for shelter into a speculative asset, tenants’ unions must be at the center of any refusal to return to pre-COVID “normal” when it comes to housing.
Tenants’ unions can provide a counterpowerto the financialization and exploitation of housing. As pandemic-related renter protections and eviction moratoria end, now is the right time to abandon the dominant paradigm which views housing as a speculative property and privilege for those with the means to pay it. social housing — housing that is permanently off the private market, available below market rate, and democratically controlled by municipal governments, nonprofit housing providers, and/or tenants themselves, in limited-equity cooperatives, land trusts or mutual housing associations.
Here’s one promising strategy we hope allies across the country can learn from. The Debt Collective has partnered to the Los Angeles Tenants UnionCalifornia, and tenant organizers and lawyers to launch it Tenant Power Toolkit. The first step in tenant organizing is to be able to fight evictions. 95 percent of landlords are represented by lawyers. However, more than half of formal cases involving evictions involve tenants losing by default. This is because they are unable or unwilling to file a legal reply to their eviction papers in the time allowed. The California statute of limitations is five business days. Florida is the only other state that has such a strict timeline. Tenant Power Toolkit is a tool that allows tenants to access the internet from anywhere in California to answer questions about their current situation and their eviction case. The Toolkit prepares all necessary legal documents and documents for the tenant to answer the complaint. In Los Angeles County — the state’s densest concentration of tenants — the Toolkit can even file the court papers electronically. The tenant can stay in their home after the papers have been filed. This allows them to access legal help and connect with other tenants who are facing eviction or local tenant organizers.
The eviction crisis was delayed due to federal and state protections against eviction. experts predictedAt the start of the pandemic. But those protections have just ended in California, and the state’s much-touted Emergency Rental Assistance Program has left tens of thousands of people with no help. These households millions of others across California residents who can’t afford rent are at risk of being evicted as rent prices rise across the state.
On the one hand, we can rightly see those millions of people as vulnerable — they are imminently at risk of eviction, displacement and homelessness. On the other hand, though, we can see them as potential members of tenants’ unions, and debtors’ unions more broadly. This potential power extends far beyond California.
Tenants owe an amount of estimated$14,971,000,000 in total rental debt, with 5,721,000 households behind in rent and 5,691,000 children within those households. This surging household debt can be organized — collectivized — into a form of power.
As union organizers we can ask: private equity landlordsTo whom are large amounts of this money owed? To put it another way, to whom corporate landlords does a tenant have the potential power to collectively refuse rent refusals?
A staggering $15 billion in rent debt is too much for families and individuals. However, if you can reframe rent debt and even eviction through collective organizing, they can be sources of potential tenant leverage over an system that has for too long prioritized housing as a profitable asset for investors rather than shelter for people. Tenant Power Toolkit will help you turn that potential into real leverage. It will also set the stage for similar organizing and debtor unionization efforts elsewhere in the country.
In a capitalist, financially-oriented economy, households are often in deep debt to cover their basic needs. debtors’ unions offer a new form of power. In exercising debtor power, tenants’ unions have long led the wayThe Tenant Power Toolkit is being released by the Debt Collective to strengthen this organizing and allow it grow to meet the crisis’s scale.
To target corporate landlords who view housing as a speculative investment and not shelter, we need to build collective tenant power. It is time for us all to realize that if we are to reject a prepandemic normal, then we must build power for the future we want. Our debts, paradoxically enough, can be the collective leverage needed to unleash that power.
