Chicago, IL – On Monday morning, June 29, a crowd representing dozens of organizations stood together with Mayor Brandon Johnson to announce the introduction of the Protecting Renters Ordinance (PRO). The press conference happened downtown across the street from city hall, where the PRO was formally introduced at a meeting of the Committee on Housing and Real Estate later the same morning.

“Housing is a human right. That cannot just be a rallying cry. That must be the reality for every Chicagoan,” Mayor Johnson declared. “We must use every tool available to us to keep Chicagoans in their homes.”

Lisette Castañeda, commissioner of the Department of Housing, explained the five components of the PRO: the creation of a tenant bill of rights, a citywide rental registry, an office to investigate and enforce renter’s complaints, legal representation for tenants facing eviction, and just cause for eviction or nonrenewal of leases.

“This will give the department the power to hold bad landlords accountable,” Castañeda explained.

Johnson criticized previous administrations that “kept organizers at arm’s length.” His approach of working with organizers showed in the variety of organizations present in support of the PRO.

Tulsi McDaniels, an organizer with Metropolitan Tenants Organization, shared the experiences of tenants who are currently vulnerable to arbitrary fees and eviction.

“Even in situations where a tenant has done everything right and used the current RLTO law to the fullest extent, it isn’t enough.” McDaniels said. The PRO would be the first major rewrite of the Residential Landlord Tenants Ordinance since its introduction in 1986 during the administration of Harold Washington.

Public comments were divided between landlords and renters. Landlords are against the PRO because it would not allow them to charge junk fees, excessively increase rent, or evict people for no reason. In her comment, Chicago Teachers Union member Rose Taylor urged committee members to think of working-class people who usually can’t make it to city council meetings on a weekday morning.

“As an educator I’ve seen firsthand the impact housing insecurity has on a child’s education,” high school social studies teacher and CTU Housing Committee chair Kevin Moore said in his public comment. Moore also described the benefits the PRO would have for the health and safety of his students outside of school.

The PRO will be voted on in the fall and, if it passes, will go into effect on January 1, 2027. With landlords putting their time and money into opposing the ordinance, it will be important for renters and working class people to fight for the PRO.

#ChicagoIL #IL #PeoplesStruggles #BrandonJohnson #Housing #Renters

While it is true that the biggest rent increases are for new tenants, and most tenants don’t face such large increases, the burden of rising rents is the single biggest factor in the 40-year high inflation rate cutting working people’s purchasing power. Almost one-fifth of inflation comes from rent increases, more than the more widely mentioned gasoline or cars.

Working-class and oppressed nationality/national minority (African American, Chicano, Latino, Native American, Arab American and Asian American) households are hardest hit by rising rents. We are more likely to rent and tend to pay a greater part of our income on rent than others.

An important reason for rising rents is soaring home prices. As homes become less affordable, landlords can more easily raise their rents, knowing that their tenants have less of an option of buying. With home prices up almost 20% over the last year, it is no wonder that rents are rising too.

Another factor in the rise in rents is the growth of corporate landlords. This is a hot new investment for Wall Street. One such firm, Blackstone, made $6 billion in profits over the last year, a sixfold increase. About half of these profits came from real estate.

Not only are these corporate landlords raking in massive profits, but they are also more likely to evict tenants behind on their rent. Evictions did fall from the 3.7 million per year before the pandemic because of the moratorium on evictions by the federal government. This has now expired, and even those states that extended their own eviction bans are ending. A few cities have introduced their own eviction ban, but landlords are pulling strings at the statewide level to stop these local eviction bans.

In many states, including New York, landlords can evict at will, without having to show any cause. New York renters owe the most in back rent of any state, and with their eviction moratorium having ended in January of 2022, more tenants are at risk of eviction than any state.

A needed change is rent control, which caps rent increases. Berkeley, California which had a strong form of rent control that limited rent increases to the rate of inflation plus any documented repair costs. But this law, along with a handful of other smaller cities, was overturned at the state level by landlord-backed politicians.

Despite the difficulties, tenants and their supporters are fighting evictions and rent increases across the country. These struggles will only grow as tenant are squeezed by rising rents and wages that are not keeping up with inflation.

#SanJoséCA #HousingStruggles #renters #inflation

While the average homeowner spends about a quarter of their income on housing costs, the average renter has to spend one-third of their income on rent, leaving less for food, transportation and other necessities. The plight of renters was overlooked by much of the mainstream media who have focused only on the growing difficulties facing homeowners, showing again the media’s bias towards more well to do households.

Nor did any of the mainstream media use this report to expose how the official government measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, understates the true increase in the cost of living. According the CPI for urban wage earners and clerical workers, housing costs have risen 15.6% over the past five years. The CPI housing costs are based on the cost of renting a single-family home, when the vast majority of households are either buying a home or renting an apartment. The true increase in housing costs between 2000 and 2005, using an average of actual data on renting and cost of owning a home, would be 19.3%, or 3.7% more.

The Department of Labor claims that workers’ wages were up 1.5% between 2000 and 2005 after taking inflation into account. However, using the actual cost of housing, the increase in purchasing power would be only one-half of one percent (0.5%), or just about no increase at all. This is, of course, no surprise to those workers who are struggling to make ends meet and who often end up borrowing when unexpected medical bills or job losses happen. In contrast, CEO salaries and the income of the rich have soared over the same five-year period.

In the last year rents have risen at an even faster pace. For example, here in the San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area, rents are up 7.5% over the past year, more than twice the general rate of inflation (3.6%). Fewer people can afford to buy homes with rising interest rates on mortgages, increasing the number of renters. At the same time there are fewer apartments available for rent as many were converted to condominiums during the past few years. Over the last two years the vacancy rate for rental housing has dropped, giving landlords even more power to raise rents.

#SanJoseCA #capitalistCrisis #renters #housingCrisis