On July 30, on a humid Friday night in Washington, D.C., Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, gathered a sleeping bag and snacks and hunkered down to sleep overnight on the marble steps of the U.S. Capitol building. Earlier that day, the House of Representatives started a three-week-long recess—without having renewed the federal eviction moratorium established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was set to expire at the end of July.
Bush, who has herself been evicted three times (once after a violent domestic assault), launched the protest in defense of the millions of renters facing housing insecurity due to the pandemic. “I’ve lived out of my car for months with my two babies. I’ve seen my belongings in trash bags along my backseat,” Bush later wrote. “I’ve wondered who was speaking up in D.C. for people in my situation.”
Across the country, housing advocates and organizers are pushing for bolder and stronger policy recommendations, such as the campaign to “cancel rent,” and doing the day-to-day work of connecting renters with the resources they need. Now, as the anti-eviction protections enacted during the pandemic are being eroded, their work is more critical than ever.
Bush’s protest continued for five days, and she was joined at times in sleeping out by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, both fellow Democrats, and other Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts stopped by to offer support. While President Biden insisted that the legal basis for extending the moratorium was shaky—the original order was based on a single clause in a 1944 health bill—he relented, and the CDC on August 6 issued a new, albeit limited, extension that covered up to 80 percent of U.S. counties. Without the visible protest of Congressional progressives, it’s unlikely that even this stopgap, which was shot down by the Supreme Court three weeks later, would have happened.
On the day before the SCOTUS ruling, The New York Times reported that only 11 percent of the $46.5 billion in federal funds allotted for rental assistance had been distributed by states and local governments. Among the nearly three million households that applied, only 500,000 had received aid—and that doesn’t include the 60 percent of vulnerable renters who had not yet filed an application.
While in place, the moratorium functioned as a sort of buffer, buying renters time while the federal government slowly distributed aid. About 40 percent of landlords and more than 50 percent of tenants were unaware of government relief programs, according to a survey conducted by the Urban Institute in May, a monumental failure of public policy.
In some cases, local housing advocates have been able to provide tenants with digital assistance. “A lot of our work has shifted,” says Shoshana Krieger, project director at Building and Strengthening Tenant Action, or BASTA, a housing justice group based in Austin, Texas. “Some of our [tenant] leaders, even a year and a half later, need help because of digital literacy issues. We now have a Chromebook- lending program.”
With evictions resuming, the repeal of federal protections means that as many as 750,000 renters may lose their homes by the end of the year, with Black women especially at risk. And as the Delta variant spreads at a rapid pace, being evicted during a pandemic is a potentially lethal blow.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, estimated that in a six-month span in 2020, the expiration of several state-level moratoriums contributed to 430,000 additional coronavirus cases and close to 11,000 deaths.
At the beginning of May 2020, when many businesses were shuttered and unemployment reached levels not seen since the Great Depression, 20 percent of tenants were behind on rent. The two major federal rescue plans—the CARES and HEROES Acts—have failed to provide enough support. And the country was on the brink of a massive eviction wave, precipitated by a skyrocketing rental market, a refusal to invest in affordable public housing, and decades of redlining and other forms of residential segregation.
Amid this grim scenario, tenant organizers across the country called on thousands of renters, whether they could pay or not, to withhold rent from their landlords. Grassroots groups such as Housing Justice for All in New York, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and Kansas City Tenants popularized the campaign through the social media slogan #CancelRent, and won endorsements from high-profile progressive politicians including Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. In April, Ilhan Omar introduced a bill to “cancel all rent and mortgage payments during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
On the ground in New York City, where 12,000 renters had signed the #CancelRent pledge, banners that read “Can’t pay, won’t pay” and “Rent freeze now” were hung from apartment windows, culminating in what is believed to be the city’s largest tenant action since the rent strikes of the 1930s. Although it’s impossible to track how many renters participated in the campaign, in New York City or elsewhere, the movement to cancel rent—much like calls to defund the police and efforts to pass the Green New Deal—broadened the imagination of the left, widening the scope of the demands it could make.
The pandemic has exacerbated an already unjust housing system, creating a sense that minor reforms will not be enough to address the systemic issues that allow for mass evictions. “It’s in moments like these,” said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator with Housing Justice for All, in an interview with Curbed, “when we can really push the envelope to envision a totally different world.”
The rent strike in May of last year showed that organizing tenants has the potential to change cultural sensibilities toward the idea of housing as a human right, rather than a commodity. The Homes Guarantee campaign, a coalition of tenant activists formed in 2019, has taken up this charge by pressing for a National Tenants’ Bill of Rights, alongside the construction of twelve million social housing units.
At the local level, despite the absence of a federal moratorium, a broad spectrum of tenant unions continue to fight evictions as well as push for political action. In early September, New York became the first state to extend its moratorium into this January. Five other states, including California and Illinois, as well as Washington, D.C., have moratoriums that are set to expire by the end of 2021.
The New York state legislature’s decision can be credited to anti-eviction activists. At one protest in Brooklyn in late August, two New York City Council members and two state legislators were arrested alongside thirteen other demonstrators.
Elsewhere, tenant organizers have had to come up with creative ways to resist mass evictions. In early July, an eviction notice went up at the Rosemont at Oak Valley apartment complex in Austin; it said that the Rosemont’s eighty-seven residents had only until the end of the month to vacate the premises due to lingering property damage from the winter storm that struck Texas in February.
“I read [the notice] like four times before it sunk in,” said resident Kecia Prince. “Because they actually say—if you’re not out by the thirty-first, they are going to remove our things.”
As the federal moratorium (which was still active at the time) only protected tenants from evictions due to the nonpayment of rent, Rosemont’s landlord—the Housing Authority of Travis County—attempted to “use the winter storm damage as a loophole,” says Krieger, of BASTA. In response, BASTA connected Rosemont’s tenants to other resident associations in the area that had successfully staved off lease terminations following the storms. Through these networks, Rosemont’s residents formed a tenants’ council and presented a list of fifty demands, which included the right to return once the repairs were finished, to the apartment’s owners. (So far, only thirty of these demands have been met.)
For most of the pandemic, the focus of government policy—at least after it was pushed by activists to embrace moratoriums and emergency funding—hinged on ensuring that renters could remain secure in the present. But beyond temporary measures, whether during the pandemic or not, Krieger says, “We should care about people having a roof over their heads. We have a choice as a society to say, ‘How can we re-envision our existence to make sure that people are as stable as possible into the future?’ ”