The Evictions Cliff

A two-part series looking at the looming evictions cliff, feat. Dan Threet of the National Low Income Housing Coalition; Jay Willis, senior contributor for The Appeal; and Tara Raghuveer, director of the campaign for a Homes Guarantee and founding director of KC Tenants. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

The coronavirus pandemic has made it abundantly clear that housing is health care. Yet while the pandemic is far from over, in communities across the country rent is coming due, as a growing number of eviction moratoria that have been keeping people in their homes are coming to an end. The numbers of people at risk of going over what some are calling an “evictions cliff” are staggering: According to the Census Bureau, an estimated 45 percent of adults live in renter households affected by recent job or income losses, and nearly half of all renter households were struggling to make ends meet even before the virus hit.

Meanwhile, a new report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition puts new numbers to just how out of reach housing is for U.S. workers. In 2020, the report finds, not only is the minimum wage not enough to afford housing in any county in America…. but a U.S. worker would need to work three full-time jobs at the federal minimum wage in order to earn enough to afford a modest apartment at fair market rent. The National Low Income Housing Coalition, who updates this analysis every year, calls this the national “housing wage” — what a worker needs to earn to afford rental housing in the U.S. — and this year it rings in at nearly $24/hour.

Whether millions of renters fall off the evictions cliff and lose their homes during a pandemic will in part be determined by our federal, state, and local policymakers, through timely decisions like whether to renew or end local eviction moratoria, and whether Congress opts to extend the $600/week in supplemental unemployment insurance benefits past July 25th or allows this lifeline to expire for 30-some million Americans desperately trying to stay afloat.

But importantly, it’s not just a lack of money that will prevent many renters impacted by the pandemic and downturn from staying in their homes. It’s also America’s broken and overburdened civil legal system — which allows people to be evicted from their homes simply because they can’t afford a lawyer.

So for a two-part look at the looming evictions cliff, the tremendous and widespread housing insecurity that long predated COVID, the difference a right to counsel could make, and a deep-dive on the local and national push to enact policy solutions that would get us closer to recognizing housing as a right in the U.S., Off-Kilter sat down with:

Part 1:

• Dan Threet, research analyst, National Low Income Housing Coalition and author, “Out of Reach 2020: The High Cost of Housing”
• Jay Willis, senior contributor at The Appeal, and author of “A National Evictions Cliff is Coming. America’s Failing Legal System Will Make it Worse.”

For more from Part 1:

• Dig into the full NLIHC report: “Out of Reach 2020: The High Cost of Housing”
• Read Jay’s most recent piece for The Appeal, “A National Evictions Cliff is Coming. America’s Failing Legal System Will Make it Worse.”

Part 2:

• Tara Raghuveer, director of the Homes Guarantee campaign at People’s Action and founding director of KC Tenants

For more from Part 2:

• Read more about KC Tenants’ People’s Housing Platform and read their summary of the Tenants Bill of Rights they wrote and passed, which took effect in June 2020.
• Learn more about the campaign for a Homes Guarantee

TRANSCRIPT: PART 1

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The coronavirus pandemic has made it abundantly clear that housing is healthcare. Yet while the pandemic is far from over, in communities across the country, rent is coming due as a growing number of eviction moratoria that’ve been keeping people in their homes are coming to an end. The numbers of people at risk of going over what some are calling an evictions cliff are staggering. According to the Census Bureau, an estimated 45 percent of adults live in renter households affected by recent job or income losses. And nearly half of all renter households were struggling to make ends meet even before the virus hit.

Meanwhile, a new report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition put new numbers to just how out of reach housing was for U.S. workers even before the pandemic. In 2020, the report finds, a U.S. worker would need to work three full time jobs at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in order to earn enough to afford a modest apartment at fair market rent. The National Low Income Housing Coalition, who updates this analysis every year, calls this the national “housing wage.” It’s effectively what a worker needs to earn to afford rental housing in the country. This year, that housing wage rings in nearly $24/hour.

Whether millions of renters fall off the evictions cliff and lose their homes during a pandemic is a choice. It will, in part, be determined by our federal, state, and local policymakers through timely policy choices, like whether to renew or end local eviction moratoria and whether Congress opts to extend the $600/week in supplemental unemployment insurance benefits passed July 25th or allows this lifeline to expire for 30-some million Americans desperately trying to stay afloat.

There are other choices, as well that Congress and other policymakers have to make, but importantly, it’s not just a lack of money that will prevent many renters impacted by the pandemic and attendant downturn from staying in their homes. It’s also America’s broken and overburdened civil legal system, which allows people in this country to be evicted from their homes simply because they can’t afford a lawyer.

So, this week, I’m thrilled to sit down with Dan Threet, author of the Out of Reach report I mentioned before from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, where he is a research analyst. And Jay Willis, a senior contributor at The Appeal, who’s recently been reporting on the intersection of this access to justice gap that we have in this country and how it’s fueling our eviction tsunami or eviction crisis, evictions cliff, whatever we want to call it.

Dan, Jay, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. I’m struggling for the right words to describe what we’re currently seeing play out in this country amid the pandemic. And Jay, I think that’s really kind of where we need to start right now. Talk to us about how we’re seeing families on the brink of homelessness right now in tremendous numbers as eviction moratoria lapse. Where do things stand right now? Give us some of the numbers about what we know.

JAY WILLIS: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And none of these numbers that we can discuss to describe this problem are good. About a third of households missed their July housing payments. And it’s important to understand that not everybody who is at risk of homelessness will experience homelessness in the months to come, right? But the bigger the numbers of people who are at risk, the more dire the problem that we could experience down the road. So, for example, one analysis put out by a team at UCLA says that in Los Angeles County, I believe it’s even if just a third of those who are at risk of homelessness eventually experience it, that’s still 120,000 households. And those include about 184,000 children. If you can’t pay rent sometimes for several months in a row, there’s probably not going to be money to hire a lawyer to defend you in eviction court.

So, what you’re going to see is a lot of people going into court without legal representation, without any knowledge of their rights, the process, what’s going to happen. This already overburdened civil legal system, it’s just not prepared for just sort of the scope of human suffering that it’s about to encounter. We’ve seen these evictions moratoriums, you know, well intended, trying to prevent a housing crisis in the middle of a pandemic. But as you said, the pandemic’s not over. And it turns out that unless there’s further action taken, these moratoriums may have just delayed that crisis by a few months.

VALLAS: And Dan, I want to bring you in here, because I mentioned up top, you authored a report that actually just came out this week. It’s an annual report. To me at one of the more important reports that comes out of organizations that do work on poverty, on housing, on homelessness, and related issues. And that report, which comes out every year, as I mentioned, it updates a number, that housing wage, that really, it sort of puts numbers to the gap between housing prices, which have been skyrocketing and wages, which have been staying flat or even declining in real terms, for particularly low-wage workers, but median workers as well. Talk a little bit about that report and what it tells us about what things looked like before COVID and before we were talking about an evictions cliff caused by a pandemic.

DAN THREET: Certainly. And thanks for having me on and for your kind words about Out of Reach. Out of Reach is an annual publication that we put out at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. And each year, it highlights the gulf between what wages people actually earn and the price of decent rental housing. And we show this for every state, every metropolitan area, and every county in the United States. And that central statistic, the housing wage that you mentioned, it represents what a full-time worker would need to earn in order to be able to pay for both rent and utilities at a fair market rent. And this year, as you pointed out, the two-bedroom housing wage nationally is $23.96/hour. And the one-bedroom housing wage is $19.56/hour. The average hourly wage for renters, however, is just $18.22/hour. And of course, the minimum wages across the country are even lower.

I want to say two things about what that housing wage represents to answer some common questions that people frequently have about what we mean by the housing wage. So, built into that are two important assumptions. First, when we talk about what a household can afford, we’re relying on the assumption, which is also reflected in federal housing policy, that no more than 30 percent of a household’s gross income should be consumed by housing costs. And second, when we talk about the price of decent or modest housing, that reflects that we rely on HUD’s fair market rents, or FMRs, to estimate what a household moving today could expect to pay for rents that are at the median cost or below for an area. So, each year HUD produces new FMRs, and they set those base rents for the FMR in each area at roughly the 40th percentile of standard quality gross rents. So, the rents that are represented in these housing wages are for homes below the middle of the market, not for luxury housing.

So, we found this year, just like we’ve found in previous years, that there are millions of low-wage workers who don’t earn enough to be able to afford their housing. These households, low-wage households are in a precarious position every year. And of course, with the precipitous collapse of the job market this spring, many of them are going to be severely housed and cost burdened and unable to hold onto their housing without some immediate interventions.

VALLAS: And I want to dig a little bit into the elements that you were describing that go into factoring this housing wage, right? So, you talked about wages. You talked about housing costs. In a lot of ways, the reason I find this report to be so valuable every year is because it reminds people that it isn’t just about skyrocketing prices, right? I think folks are widely familiar, you know, well up the income ladder, just how much rents have risen over the past several years. You’ve got middle-class families well aware of it because of their college graduate kids moving back in with them when they can’t afford rents, particularly in cities on the other side of college. This awareness, I think, is really high on the sort of price side. But when it comes to that wage side of the equation, I think there’s so much less awareness, so much less familiarity, and so much less, I think, salience in the national conversation when it comes to housing about the role that wages play in housing being unaffordable. Talk a little bit about how we got to a place where we have such a combination of a market failure as well as a policy failure. And I ask that, in part, because I think a lot of folks who hear these kinds of alarming statistics, they then wonder, well, isn’t that what housing assistance is for?

THREET: That’s all precisely right. We hear this story quite frequently about high-cost housing markets like San Francisco and Miami or Austin, Texas and very often don’t hear about the problems with the housing market across the rest of the country. But even though there is variation by state in the housing wage, there’s no state in which the rents that average renters make are sufficient for those two-bedroom housing wages. So, even in Arkansas, which has the lowest two-bedroom housing wage this year of $14.19/hour, the average renter in the state still only earns $13.92/hour. So, it is a pervasive problem.

You were asking about how we got to this place where we have a market failure and a policy failure. I think that’s a great question. In another annual report that the National Low Income Housing Coalition puts out called The Gap, we make clear the extent of this shortage. So, we have about 11 million renters in this country who are extremely low-income. That is, they make incomes that are at 30 percent of the area median income or less, or the federal poverty level. And for extremely low-income renters, there are only 4 million homes that are both affordable to them and available to them. That is to say, not occupied by renters who make more than that. And as a result of that, we have lots of renters who are severely cost burdened, spending far more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent. So, there’s long been a structural problem: the market does not supply enough homes in the private market for these renters. It’s not profitable to go into that segment without further assistance. And there’s just not a sufficient amount of federal assistance to help build those units. There’s also not enough federal assistance for the renters themselves.

I think there’s a really important point that not everyone knows, and that’s that currently, the Housing Choice Voucher Program, which supplies low-income renters with a voucher that they can use to go onto the private market and rent. That’s not an entitlement.

VALLAS: Some people call that Section 8. That’s probably the name folks are more familiar with: the vouchers you’re describing to go buy private housing with, with assistance. But keep going. Just for folks who aren’t familiar with the term.

THREET: That’s absolutely right. Thanks for that. Yeah. So, the Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers Program, it’s not an entitlement program. You’re not guaranteed access to that, even if you are eligible by income. At the last estimate, it was, I think, the case that only one out of every four eligible households actually received that assistance.

So, there are a couple of problems there, right? There’s this market failure, in that it’s just not profitable enough to go into the market and construct homes that would actually be affordable to the lowest-income renters. And there’s a policy failure because the government hasn’t actually provided assistance to those households either. So, there is a long-running problem here.

VALLAS: So, Jay, bringing you back in here. As I said up top, lack of money is definitely part of what’s going on. We’ve got rent quite literally coming due and a lot of folks not in a position to be able to afford it in ways that have been exacerbated dramatically because of job loss or health-related impact during this pandemic. And all of which had sort of grown the tremendous housing precarity that we saw in great numbers prior to the pandemic on steroids. But in addition to lack of money — and this is where your recent reporting for The Appeal really digs in, provides a lot of the history — lack of access to legal representation is also a tremendous part of what’s going on here. And I noted up top in kind of framing some of this up, just like with the debate around unemployment insurance, or are we going to see more direct payments for those $1,200 checks? Are we going to see that done again? This is a choice, too, and that’s actually what kind of you and I were talking about before we started rolling the tape here. The fact that the United States chooses not to guarantee legal representation in eviction cases is a choice. Talk a little bit about the history of how we got to a place where we have a right to counsel in criminal cases, but not in civil cases, even when the stakes are so high as when one’s housing is on the line.

WILLIS: Yeah. So, most folks are probably familiar from the Law and Order extended universe hearing the Miranda warnings that if you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to you in criminal court. But neither the Supreme Court nor Congress has ever extended this kind of categorical, absolute promise to cases in civil court, which include eviction. And that’s true even though the stakes there might be higher, right? Like, imagine a choice between spending six months in jail or losing custody of your kids permanently. Parents are, I’d say most parents are, likely to pick that first option, right? But the courts, Congress, American law says that you get a lawyer only if you’re facing that prison, that jail time, but not with respect to custody of your children. So, what the court has said in civil contexts is it’s generally only if your liberty is at stake if you’re facing incarceration. So, for example, civil contempt of court. But even then, they’ve said it’s OK. It’s still OK if you don’t have a lawyer there if there are alternative procedural safeguards, is the phrase they use. Basically, if a judge decides that the process is fair enough.

What this means is if in a court’s subjective opinion, your interests aren’t serious enough to require the appointment of a lawyer, you don’t get one. And it’s really just another part of this two-track system of justice in America. There’s one system for people who can afford to meaningfully participate and one for folks who can’t.

And I want to talk a little bit, too, about what this looks like for somebody facing eviction, especially in this particularly dangerous and uncertain time. So, the number of tenants who have counsel in eviction cases, I’ve heard estimates of as low as 1 percent, and I haven’t heard anything higher than 10 percent. And then on the other end, for the landlords, it’s between 80 and 100 percent. So, you have this wide gulf, this wide disparity of information and power. Now, just imagine the impossibility of having to defend yourself in an eviction. You get a notice in the mail or on your door that you may or may not understand. You don’t know the law about evictions or about defenses. You don’t know about things like housing discrimination law or warranty of habitability and repairs: things that might allow you to negotiate, to make a case to stay in your home during this pandemic. You don’t know about rules of evidence necessarily or what evidence looks like. How do you prove or not prove that you paid the rent? What pieces of paper do you bring to court? What documentation is that? I’m a lawyer. I don’t know that stuff. I don’t know how somebody who’s not one, who’s not specialized in this can be expected to have a meaningful shot at defending themselves.

And then we’ve also talked a little bit about the different moratoriums that are in place. There are local, state, federal ones, and they each have overlapping conditions and provisions. It can be really hard to parse that. Like, for example, how are you supposed to know if you live in a building with a HUD-backed mortgage that you can’t be evicted from? Again, it’s hard for lawyers to figure that out. And then finally, it just practical stuff. If you’re going to go to court, you’re going to have to find childcare, maybe take valuable time off from work. And what we see is consistently, about half of people who are facing eviction just don’t show up. And it’s not because they don’t understand the stakes. They are very aware of the stakes. They just know that participation in this system is meaningless. It’s not set up to help poor people. And to the extent that there is quote-unquote “process,” it’s perfunctory and procedural, not substantive.

VALLAS: I have to say, when I was reading your piece, I was reminded of a viral Twitter thread that was making the rounds on Twitter recently that just so thoroughly proved the point and put a face without names on so many sort of case examples of what this looks like in eviction court, the just complete erasure of any sort of rights or dignity because of the lack of legal representation on the tenant side of the table. The Twitter thread is from a tenants’ rights organizer who uses the Twitter handle @AnarchoTrash. I want to read just two of the tweets putting a face on some of these courtroom observations. “A man being evicted is asked by the judge if he has evidentiary issues with the argument that he owes rent. Tenant says he doesn’t know what that means, but his wife died and he hasn’t gotten his COVID payment yet. Judge asks again, does he have evidentiary concerns, grants the eviction.” Next tweet, “Next, young man also doesn’t understand the evidentiary question. Says he’s been trying to work with his landlord, but they won’t talk with him. He just needs a little more time because he lost his job in the pandemic. Judge asks again if he has evidence to submit, grants the eviction.”

My first thought as a former legal aid lawyer, as I was reading some of these cases, literally with tears starting to form in my eyes thinking about how many thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people are about to be in this situation, was then to reread these tweets and to imagine these cases with an alternate ending, kind of like a Choose Your Adventure book. And my alternate ending, as a former legal aid lawyer, was to imagine what if we had a right to counsel in eviction cases, not even in all civil cases, right, but just in eviction cases, how would these cases be ending? And something as simple as, you know, “Do you have evidentiary concerns or do you have evidence,” this is the stuff which anyone who has been in housing court knows, I mean, this is what it looks like, one after the other, a kangaroo court with people quite literally not understanding what they’re being asked. And therefore, as you said, I think, so aptly, not being able to fully participate. That is what we’re talking about by calling this a failing civil legal system or a broken civil legal system. Which I don’t find to be hyperbolic word choice at all.

And Jay, you describe some of the push for a right to counsel in this country that has long been going on, long before the coronavirus pandemic. But you also describe, and I feel like it’s worth giving you just a minute to share some of the facts of the case, because the details, I think, are so relevant to actually kind of this modern-day iteration of this broken legal system and the consequences of this lack of right to counsel. But you, as a lawyer who does a lot of reporting on the Supreme Court, trace some of this actually back to a case called Lassiter, the facts of which, as you put it, “illustrate in devastating, poignant fashion how vital representation is to a meaningful shot at justice.” Talk about the Lassiter case and who the person was in that case, who saw her rights trampled all over because she didn’t have a lawyer.

WILLIS: [chuckles quietly] Certainly. And I laugh because that Twitter thread you referenced, I actually spoke with that organizer, Talia Smith, for the piece. And we talked about how some of these same dynamics that we see in this Lassiter case from, I believe it’s 1981, she saw in housing court two weeks ago. So, Lassiter was a case about Abby Gail Lassiter. She was a young, Black single mother incarcerated in North Carolina. And she received a notice of termination of her parental rights from the state for her young son, William. I think he was about four or five. So, state law allowed her a hearing, but it didn’t guarantee her someone to help her through it. And the Supreme Court ruled that she was not entitled to a lawyer in this context. But the dissent goes into some of the facts that make clear just how unfair that is in practice. So, again, she’s a young, Black single mother. We know she didn’t have very much formal education. We know she was lower-income. She tried to cross examine a social worker, and the judge kept interrupting her, disallowing some of her questions because they weren’t in the proper form. They were arguments, not questions. Basically punishing her for not being a trained attorney who knows the rules of how cross examination worked. The dissent goes into the fact that she missed weaknesses in the social worker’s testimony that a lawyer would’ve recognized, didn’t object to hearsay evidence.

And then also there’s just some of these social-cultural prejudices that we see in courtrooms, for for lack of a better term, for interlopers, for people who aren’t members of the legal profession and especially poor and nonwhite people. In courtrooms, having a lawyer is often seen as a proxy for having a meritorious case. So, judges, opposing counsel, they can maybe feel less of a professional obligation to take an unrepresented person seriously. So, the judge was impatient with her and expressed open disbelief at her testimony. There was one point when Abby Gail, she denied that her mother had filed a complaint about her allegedly neglectful care of William. And the judge’s response to this woman in his court was, “Well, that was some ghost who came up here and filed it.” And then later, when Lassiter was again trying to conduct a cross examination, she referred to her son. She said he shouldn’t be placed into foster care because, quote, “He knows my mother, and he knows all of us.” The judge cut her off and asked, “Who is he?” Which I’m sorry. This is a custody hearing for a child, William. No one in the courtroom needed that question answered. But we just see judges and again, judges and opposing counsel, not really feeling the need to show professional courtesy to people who aren’t represented. And it has real, tangible consequences for their lives.

VALLAS: And you’re describing a case, obviously, where what was at stake was not housing. It was the loss of parental rights. And the push to extend the right to counsel beyond the criminal context and into the civil context is one that I mentioned has a long history. There also have been a lot of very recent proposals that have injected new life into some of that movement. You describe a proposal advanced by Senator Elizabeth Warren, a proposal advanced by a Representative Joe Kennedy III, which go as far as extending a right to counsel in all civil cases where basic needs are at stake, something many in the legal aid movement, and some call it the Civil Gideon Movement pushing for this has been pushing for, for quite some time. As we talk about this, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to John Pollock, who’s the coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, doing a tremendous amount of this work and tracking a lot of it at a website that will have a link to on our nerdy syllabus page for folks who are looking for more on a push for the right to counsel.

But I want to bring us back to housing in the amount of time that we have left, which is to both, Jay, ask you to help us understand a little bit of some of that momentum behind the right to counsel in the eviction context. A lot of that’s been trickling up and pushing up from the local level. Is that something that we can expect to see more of? And are we seeing more of that in this moment rather than just the push for those short-term eviction moratoria? And then, Dan, I’d love to bring you back in to talk about some other policy solutions as well. But Jay, staying with you first, just on that question about some of what we are seeing in terms of local pushes for right to counsel in this moment.

WILLIS: Yeah. So, there’s no state that currently mandates a right to counsel in evictions matters. But as you mentioned, there are a couple cities that have done so: I believe New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco. So, you are seeing a little bit of the push at the local level. But just as part of the national conversation, I think people are understanding just how important this is, and again, just like pretty much every other policy issue of note, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, creating a right or at least expanding access to counsel in evictions was part of the 2020 campaigns of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro. So, there is an understanding that this is something that public policy needs to address. For the piece, I spoke with Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a member of the Appropriations Committee. She says that Congress should be doubling or tripling the funding for the Legal Services Corporation. But it’s also the case that in its budget proposals, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating funding for the Legal Services Corporation and putting that money elsewhere, sort of in the same space. So, there certainly is momentum for expanding access to counsel in this context, but as long as President Trump is in office, I wouldn’t hold my breath for it.

VALLAS: And Dan, bringing you back in. You have not only looked a tremendous amount over the years at the dollars and cents of the housing wage, of the unaffordability of housing as we were talking before, but also about other solutions, other policy solutions that are necessary to ensure that everyone in this country does have access to safe and affordable and accessible housing. There’s a short-term conversation to be had. There’s a long-term conversation to be had. There’s some connective tissue between the two. What, in this moment, are you pushing from the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the advocates that you work with across the country for Congress and for state and local leaders to do in this moment? And then I would love to talk with you both about sort of how we use this moment to bring about that longer-term change and how we can make sure to situate access to justice and that right to counsel in the housing conversation. So, Dan, what is that short-term agenda first, before we go longer-term?

THREET: Sure. That’s a great set of questions. And let me just start by saying that I agree with what Jay was saying, that there is a grotesque status quo. And part of any set of short-term policy responses to this crisis should include stronger legal protections for renters, especially in the absence of an eviction moratorium. A right to counsel is something that’s long been needed in eviction cases. Jay also mentioned that the current state of the eviction moratoria across the country is sometimes hard to parse, patchy. Some state and local moratoria are already being lifted. And the federal eviction moratorium, which only covered 30 percent or thereabouts of all renters in properties that had federally-backed mortgages, that’s set to expire on July 24th, which is coming up. So, another part of the short-term responses, in addition to stronger legal protections, would be to broaden out that eviction moratorium. A nationwide eviction moratorium that was easier to understand who was covered. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition does have an eviction moratorium map on its website that shows which properties are currently covered by that moratorium or at least the multi-family end of that. But it is hard to know, certainly, if you are a renter, whether your property is one that is covered. So, a broad, nationwide eviction moratorium is something that would be immensely useful.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition is also pushing for emergency rental assistance. This is something that could immediately help households and prevent further housing instability. We published a couple of reports in the spring that estimated that we needed at least $100 billion in emergency rental assistance for households that would otherwise lose their housing. The Emergency Rental Assistance and Rental Market Stabilization Act, which was, I think, introduced by Representatives Maxine Waters and Denny Heck and Senator Sherrod Brown, would provide about $100 billion in emergency rental assistance. That act has also been incorporated into the HEROES Act. There are several other housing provisions that would be useful in this moment. All right.

VALLAS: And with a lot of that as some of the short-term kind of we need these things to staunch the bleeding, right? We need these things to prevent millions of people from being evicted. And it feels like that needs to be sort of said over and over. Those are the stakes that we are talking about right now. This is not just any old policy conversation about things that would be nice to do. These are the stakes right now. And just staying with you for a minute, Dan, before we go to some of those longer-term policy solutions that you’ve also been pushing for and have been pushing for, for quite some time before COVID. I’d like to dig in just a little bit more on the point of what the stakes are of homelessness in the middle of a pandemic. And I’m beating this drum because, as you’ve said in the Out of Reach report — as sort of a phrase that permeates a lot of the social media and press releases and things you guys are all doing to kind of help people understand why it’s so important to understand housing in the context of the pandemic — the phrase you have used is that housing is healthcare. Talk just a little bit about the immediate health risks in this moment of such a significant uptick of people not being sheltered at a time where it’s clearly so important to have stable housing to remain healthy.

THREET: That’s a great question. And it’s a simple point, really. There’s always been a moral imperative to offer more housing assistance and to ensure that people have basic needs met through housing assistance. But now it’s also clear that this is a public health imperative. We’ve seen a lot of orders across the country to shelter in place, to remain home where possible, and where people don’t have housing, they can’t shelter in place. It goes beyond just those who are experiencing homelessness in shelters, in congregate settings, or in places that are not fit for human habitation, though. There are a number of households who, when they lose their housing, will wind up doubling up with family or friends. And that kind of environment is also not safe when we need to be able to maintain some kind of social distancing. So, there is, I think, an immediate and obvious implication here that if we don’t take care to prevent people from losing their homes, having to double up or to move into congregate shelter settings, then we’re likely to see more community spread of the coronavirus.

VALLAS: And then in the last kind of minute or so that we’ll spend on solutions before I go back over and sort of wrap things up with you, Jay, talking about how we situate this push for right to counsel in some of this moment. What are the longer-term solutions that we need to see in a housing context as well? And are you optimistic, Dan, that this moment is being utilized to bring about that kind of longer-term change, to address those policy failures and market failures and the intersection between them that you were describing before, that brought about these conditions, that the pandemic is now kind of pouring fuel onto the fire of?

THREET: I’m optimistic in the medium- to long-term. We have more champions on the Hill. We have more public attention on these issues now. But we still do need an enormous amount of pressure on legislators to pass the pieces that are even needed just for the short-term response. The long-term policy solutions are necessary. And I think we’ve seen that the failure to address these long-term needs has exacerbated and inflamed the issue now. We need a permanent expansion of housing assistance to those who need it through the Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers Program or other forms of assistance. We need a sustained investment in the National Housing Trust Fund, which is our best means of producing and rehabilitating homes for the lowest-income renters. We need to reform and expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which is the most commonly-used tool to produce low-income housing in this country. And we have an enormous backlog of capital needs for our public housing stock, which need to be addressed quite dramatically. We need to think about expanding the public housing stock. And since Out of Reach also focuses not just on the shortage of available and affordable housing, but also on the wage end of that, we also need to think about policy responses that can help raise those wages, whether that’s raising the minimum wage or strengthening labor’s hand and other means.

VALLAS: And then, Jay, you’re going to get the final word in the last few minutes we have for this conversation. You use language in your reporting for The Appeal that resonates so deeply for me as a former legal aid lawyer who sees all of what we’re talking about very much through the lens of power, the same way that we’re having a national conversation, as we should be, about the just tremendous lack of worker rights that exist in this country, the tremendous imbalance of power that has allowed that to exist, and the myriad ways that that translates into the unequal economy that long predated COVID. The conversation we also are now starting to have in this moment, spurred by the George Floyd uprisings and the related national conversation there, is one that has started to bring and infuse the lens of systemic and structural racism throughout so many of our policy conversations, and especially our national conversation around our broken criminal justice system. But your reporting I appreciate a tremendous amount because it connects the dots of that broken criminal justice system and the systemic racism that infuses those horrible, horrific, tragic, unjust, immoral outcomes and connects that broken system with our broken civil legal system. Which doesn’t get nearly as much attention, certainly not nearly as many column inches, usually and which doesn’t get talked about in how it drives the tremendous racial disparities that we see and that are now finally on full display as part of this national conversation in this rare but incredible moment.

So, as we close out this conversation, would love to give you a chance to talk a little bit about the lack of a right to counsel in these cases as a systems problem, as relating to that larger conversation about power, and as one that is a policy choice we’ve made that has really significant and really racist consequences.

WILLIS: Yeah, I’m reminded a little bit of how persuasively advocates are making, and indeed have been making the case for decades, that the billions of dollars that we spend on paramilitary policing in this country could be better spent reinvested in providing social services, being reinvested in those communities. And the same thing is true sort of on the other side of the legal system in the civil context and the housing context. Now, obviously, having a lawyer there is not a cure-all, and having people never face eviction would be better than getting them a lawyer once they do face eviction. But in the studies that we’ve seen of pilot programs, mainly in big cities, this pays for itself. The cost of programs to create a right to counsel is consistently lower than the shelter costs that analysts find would’ve been incurred if not for the right to counsel, if those evictions would’ve occurred. So, especially at this moment when we’re seeing tax revenue down and cities and states trying to slash their budgets to accommodate that, there’s a strong financial case to be made, even setting aside the strong moral case. And I think that should be a part of the way that sort of advocates make their arguments here.

And then lastly, yeah, with respect to some of the racial justice issues that you brought up, there’s a long history of obviously both de facto and de jure housing discrimination in this country that is worth another podcast at least. And what it’s resulted in is a housing system that disproportionately harms Black and Latinx communities. So, they face, as we’ve talked about, they’re more likely to be rent burdened. They are more likely to face eviction. I believe it’s the sociologist Matthew Desmond who said eviction is for women as mass incarceration has been to men. And they’re more likely to experience homelessness and unsheltered homelessness. There is an important racial justice component to this that dovetails with this entire national reckoning that we’re having about race and the future of the way that this country can deal with it.

VALLAS: And I’ve been speaking with Dan Threet, author of the Out of Reach report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It comes out every single year. This year’s new report just released earlier this week, incredibly timely in the middle of this looming evictions cliff, that we are currently facing. And you were just hearing the voice of Jay Willis, a senior contributor at The Appeal whose recent piece is A National Evictions Cliff is Coming. America’s Failing Legal System Will Make it Worse. You can find that as well as the Out of Reach report on our nerdy syllabus page on Medium, of course. And thanks to you both for taking the time to join the show. I really appreciate it and really appreciate both of your work on these issues.

WILLIS: Thank you, Rebecca.

THREET: Thanks for having us.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Transcripts are courtesy of Cheryl Green. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.

TRANSCRIPT FOR PART 2:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. As Part 2 of Off-Kilter’s look at the looming evictions cliff, I sat down virtually with Tara Raghuveer, director of the Homes Guarantee Campaign at People’s Action and founding director of KC Tenants, as well as one of the leading housing organizers in the U.S. for a deep dive on the local and national push to enact policy solutions that would get us closer to, and eventually to, recognizing housing as a right in the U.S. Let’s take a listen.

Tara, thanks so much for taking the time to come back on the show. It’s really great to have you back to talk about this.

TARA RAGHUVEER: Thanks for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So, we had a conversation last week with a couple of folks about the evictions cliff, as some folks are starting to call it, and we talked a lot about looking at the analysis by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and their Out of Reach report looking at how unaffordable housing is, especially with wages being stagnant and declining, and particularly for people earning the minimum wage, the federal minimum wage. We talked a lot about what it looks like pre-COVID, before this pandemic and how long-standing this incredible housing precarity that is so widespread has been. But now we’ve got sort of this fuel on the fire that is this coronavirus pandemic, the lack of federal leadership, particularly by this administration, in protecting workers and families from significant and long-lasting devastation as a result of this pandemic. And now here we’ve got this evictions cliff that’s coming as sort of the latest and one of the most tangible and horrible consequences. Talk a little bit about what got us to this point. We talked a lot about it in the last podcast, but I feel like no one really sums it up better than you, given your perspective bridging the local level and the national level as well.

RAGHUVEER: So, it’s a long back story, and I won’t get into all of it. But we need to ground ourselves in the reality that for not just decades, but really centuries, American housing and land policy has been built around racial capitalism. And at every step along the way, we’ve seen certain communities benefit from government intervention and other communities consistently excluded from access to land, access to capital, access to wealth-building opportunities. And all of that lays the groundwork for a massive crisis and failure in the private rental market and the looming, growing eviction crisis across the country. And as you said, it’s important that we recognize that that was a crisis pre-COVID, of course. And I think there’s no better place to understand the magnitude of that crisis than the Out of Reach reports that the National Low Income Housing Coalition puts out every year. I’ve been staring at those numbers for basically the last decade of my life. And while they help us contextualize the state of affairs, it’s really a sad story that’s getting more and more sad with every passing year.

And I think in the last couple of years, the statistic that they’ve put out there that’s really stuck in my mind is this statistic that allows us to understand that a minimum-wage worker working full-time cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any county in the United States. And I think this has been true for several years at this point. This means urban counties, suburban counties, and rural counties. This country is just not affordable. And I think the important thing is that we complete that sentence. That is a story of market failure: the free market, the private market, where we have relegated the provision of housing, especially for the lowest-income and most-vulnerable people in our country, it has simply failed, period. And that failure existed long before the pandemic hit.

And then in the context of the pandemic, we have always known since March, since the very earliest days of this pandemic, we knew that this eviction cliff, eviction avalanche, tidal wave, whatever you want to call it, we knew it was coming. Organizers were talking about it. Tenants knew that it was coming because the stark reality was, before the pandemic, 12 million households were having trouble paying the rent or were extremely cost-burdened, paying over 50 percent of their income to rent. Then, in the context of the pandemic, those and tens of millions of more households lost their work completely. And then their ability to pay the rent went from minimal to zero, sub-zero, right? And so, for the past several months, we’ve seen people making decisions, forced to make decisions between putting food on the table or paying rent, paying for prescriptions or paying rent, using their stimulus check on their rent when they simply shouldn’t have had to.

So, I think it’s important that we recognize we knew that this eviction and homelessness crisis was coming, and it was avoidable. Which is why from the beginning of the pandemic, groups like all of the groups that I organize with have been calling for rent cancelation. Not a Band-Aid, not kicking the can down the road, but just cancel rents. We could’ve done it. We could still do it. And that would save so many households so much anguish during this period of time.

VALLAS: And I really want to dig into that, because there has been, I think, a lot of ink spilled around the concept of eviction moratoria was something that has been uneven at the local level, has definitely not been kind of the uniform nationwide eviction moratorium that groups like the National Low Income Housing Coalition — which we mentioned before, the author of those Out of Reach reports about housing unaffordability — and that market failure you were describing they also have been pushing for a uniform and nationwide policy in that way. And I think that’s gotten a lot of discussion. But talk about the immediate steps that are necessary to protect people. And I ask that question in part because I feel like there’s also been a comparative, a lot, of attention paid in the media, and rightly so, and a long time overdue, to this moment laying bare how little workers have in the way of rights in the employment context. This pandemic has exposed that for a lot of people, for whom apparently that is news. But there hasn’t been nearly as much attention about the ways that this pandemic and this looming, and also for many people under way, eviction crisis is revealing both that tenants also in a lot of ways have very little in the way of rights in a lot of places in this country.

RAGHUVEER: That’s right. And we were among the groups out the gate calling for a national eviction moratorium, supporting local organizing around eviction moratoria. And I think we always had the clarity that eviction moratoriums were not going to save us. And they were but temporary measures to protect people and keep them from being forced into the streets during a global pandemic. But it did nothing about the debt that accrued during that time, right? Which is why we were always pairing the call for an eviction moratorium with the call for rent and mortgage cancelation at every level of government where that was possible.

And I’ll give you an example. Here in Kansas City where I live, we fought for and won a pretty expansive eviction moratorium in Jackson County, Missouri. And that moratorium was replicated in St. Louis County on the other side of the state. Those victories were all well and good, and they did certainly protect tenants from what would’ve been a really gruesome period of evictions during the height of the pandemic or the first height of the pandemic. But our eviction moratorium expired on May 31st. And since then, we’ve seen more than 1,000 tenants taken to eviction court in person, which is, of course, a huge public-health concern, and by conference call, which is less of a public-health concern, but a concern related to due process as tenants have no access to counsel are sort of presenting their own defenses on a WebEx line and are rapidly being evicted and forced from their homes. And like I said, we’ve seen about 1,000 of these cases since the 1st of June, when evictions were possible in Jackson County, Missouri.

So, these types of proposals around an eviction moratorium, we agree there needs to be a national moratorium. We are part of the push to try to get that to be part of whatever Congress considers in their next package. And we know that that won’t save us. And I think you’re right to bring up the parallels between workers and tenants in a moment like this. And the truth, of course, is that workers are often tenants, and tenants are often workers. And there’s a lot of overlap when we talk to our comrades in the labor movement about who they’re fighting for and the ways in which workers are vulnerable right now.

And one of the things that I think should concern us greatly about this moment is that the reality is that not all of the people who were laid off during this period of time will go back to work. And if they do go back to work, they may be going back to work that has way fewer protections than they had before. Because the nature of this crisis is that some employers will take advantage of economic distress and hire people into roles that are really unprotected, where they have very little power. This is a moment that some profiteers will take advantage of to unravel what worker power has been built, what tenant power has been built. And that should concern us all, because this crisis then, is not so much about just the eviction cliff that happens this summer, but about a much longer story of who has power in the American economy and how they wield that power over and above people who have relatively less.

VALLAS: I want to pull some more on that threat of power because that was actually a big part of why I was excited to talk to you again. Just actually talked to you a few weeks ago about racial capitalism as part of that great panel on that issue of The Forge, but was really excited to have you back to talk about this evictions cliff really for this reason. And to talk a little bit about how power-building fits into your work as an organizer. You are the founding director of an organization called Kansas City Tenants, KC Tenants. This is in addition to your role at People’s Action, where you are running a campaign for pushing for a homes guarantee, which I want to talk about more as well, given a lot of the momentum around that national push right now. But kind of back to the local level, talk a little bit about KC tenants and why you founded that organization, which names as its theory of change, that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and organizing is at the heart of what the organization does.

RAGHUVEER: Well, I was an eviction researcher for six years before I moved back to Kansas City, which is my hometown. I grew up on the Kansas side of the state line in a neighborhood that was pretty white and pretty wealthy, to be honest with you. And I benefited from the privileges of living in that type of community, going to a great public school. And then I left to go to college. And at college, I started becoming really interested in housing. But frankly, I was bored by the existing literature on the topic, which seemed overly-focused on public programs from a couple of decades ago. And I didn’t really have an analysis then that allowed me clarity on this, but eventually, I gained an analysis that, of course, the dynamic that matters most for the most vulnerable tenants in this country today has very little to do with public programs and much more to do with the private rental market. So, I came back to Kansas City to start studying evictions in about 2012, 2013, and immediately, I was politicized by having conversations with poor and working-class people and people of color from my own hometown, whose experience, of course, was much, much different than mine. And they were dealing with slumlords and abuse and extraction. And oftentimes, I was realizing that the people who lived where I grew up were some of the profiteers, right, some of the people who were making money off the backs of these other folks in our own community just 10 minutes away. And that really got into my gut and drove me to organizing. But initially, I was organizing around immigrant rights and continuing this kind of side hustle, looking at the eviction data in Jackson County, Missouri, which is most of Kansas City. So, that was a side project for a long time.

And eventually, I got access to this massive data set that’s 20 years of evictions in Jackson County, Missouri. And all the data are at the address level, making this one of the most granular data sets on evictions in the country. And I started analyzing this data, coming back to Kansas City from Chicago once a month, you know, putting on a dress and heels, and taking my PowerPoint deck around to anyone who would listen to me. And that was satisfying and exciting for several months there. But eventually, I gained what is now some obvious clarity that my running around with my PowerPoint deck was not bringing about any change. In fact, the numbers were just getting worse and worse with every passing month that I was doing that. And meanwhile, I was an organizer in Chicago. So, finally, these things collided, and I realized that the only way that my hometown was going to move in a better direction was if people who are directly impacted by this problem were flipping the table over and demanding their own solutions and executing their own liberation.

So, I moved back last February to found KC Tenants with a couple of our founding members who are now on our board, Tiana Caldwell and Diane Charity, some of the most incredible, powerful people I’ve ever met, who we met and organized in their moments of deepest crisis. And now they’ve grown to be these really powerful leading political figures locally, regionally, and I would argue nationally. And that’s the power of organizing, in my mind. It’s a project of hope, it’s a project of possibility, and ultimately, it’s a project of transforming personal pain into public power. And that’s kind of the most basic currency of the work that we do. And so, far in Kansas City, I think it’s proven to be quite successful and strategic.

VALLAS: Well, and I would love for you to talk a little bit about some of the work that KC Tenants has done since it’s been up and running. There’s been work around a People’s Housing Platform. You also were successful at putting together an incredibly ambitious Tenants Bill of Rights that, as I understand it, actually just went into effect in Kansas City in June of this year.

RAGHUVEER: That’s right. When we started organizing last spring, we had about 750 conversations in the first couple weeks that we were organizing. And we asked tenants across the city to tell us what they needed. And from that, we put together this People’s Housing Platform, which is a pretty remarkable document, and I think, speaks to the reality that when you go have conversations with people who are the most impacted by housing injustice or any type of injustice and inequity, the ideas that they have, the vision that they have for the world that they deserve are quite bold. They’re quite radical. And that’s because those are actually not radical ideas. It’s because those leaders have clarity on what they’re owed, right, what has been taken from them. So, we started by organizing around that kind of vision.

We intervened in the local elections that were happening last spring, and we sort of forced housing to the center of the conversation, therefore, electing a slate of at least a few tenant champions to our mayor’s office and to the City Council, and meanwhile, kind of establishing ourselves as a political force in town. We took on local landlords, corporate landlords that were extracting from our communities. Over the summer, we picked a fight against one of the biggest out-of-state corporate landlords called TEH Realty. And by now, we, along with comrades in St. Louis, have basically run them out of business in the state of Missouri, and they’ve gone bankrupt. Their properties are under receivership, and they’re not welcome to do business here anymore because of the bravery of the tenants in their properties that organized.

And then to your point, in the fall, we had this incredible campaign where we wrote a Tenants Bill of Rights based on the experience of the people in our base. And we basically translated that vision for the People’s Housing Platform into its first reality, which is this Bill of Rights. And we ran a pretty intense campaign for several months in the fall and then ultimately, won that campaign in December with a nearly unanimous vote by our City Council. And the Tenants Bill of Rights went into effect just the beginning of June. So, you’re right. As of today, tenants in Kansas City have markedly more protections than they did just a couple months ago as a product of organizing by people who are also directly impacted by this problem.

VALLAS: Are you seeing those kinds of new and expanded rights that — I want to be careful you’re not saying everything has been done that one might want to do in terms of shifting the balance of power between tenants and landlords, and in particular, slumlords, nor in terms of putting in place the rights and protections that tenants would want in Kansas City, but huge steps taken forward — are you seeing those kinds of protections making a difference in this moment? Are folks in Kansas City better off now in ways that are measurable than they would’ve been absent that Tenants Bill of Rights in the middle of this evictions cliff caused by COVID?

RAGHUVEER: If I can be honest, the answer’s probably not yet. And the reason for that is that it’s one thing to win a campaign and win a policy or pass legislation. It’s another thing for that to be adequately implemented and enforced. And frankly, I think that’s a lot of the struggle that we have with our city. We don’t have tons of tenant protections on the books in the state of Missouri or in Kansas City. But what little we have, really, we find it’s difficult to hold the city accountable for enforcing those protections. And I don’t think that’s unique to Kansas City. I think that’s actually the case everywhere. So, we have work to do, honestly, to make sure that those protections actually put tenants in a different place now than they were several months ago. And then I think, quite frankly, during the pandemic, we’ve been drinking from a firehose, and we’ve sort of lost the ability to really deeply focus on one concerted push around implementation and enforcement of the Tenants Bill of Rights. Because for the last several months, we’ve had to set up crisis response and mutual aid, and we’ve established a volunteer-run hotline. And we’ve been running a campaign at the local level and at the state level and throwing down with these national pushes. So, it’s been a lot.

And meanwhile, of course, it’s worth noting that an organization like ours, which is genuinely led by grassroots leaders who themselves are workers who have been laid off and are tenants who are behind on their rent, our base is really stretched to the max right now because they’re personally impacted. That’s at once our power, but it’s also a huge limitation during a moment like this where, you know, just yesterday, two of our core leaders from our strategy team had evictions that were heard by the Jackson County courts. And so, there’s a personal toll that this time has taken on their ability to organize. With that being said, I also think I am lucky and honored to run around town with the most resilient, most powerful people in the region. And somehow, through all of this trial and tribulation that the last couple of months have brought, I think our leaders have actually gained in power, gained in clarity about the systems that’ve caused these failures.

And I think tenants are better off in Kansas City for our organization existing, because there’s now a place that tenants can point to, tenants can go to, where they get to relate to other people who are experiencing or have experienced exactly what they have. And there’s power in that. There’s power in individuals understanding that their eviction or their homelessness is not a product of their creation, but rather, connected to a much, much larger story that has its roots in systemic racism and capitalism. And politicizing people along those lines is where we see that power of translating what is really painful and personal into something around which we can build tenant power for the long haul.

VALLAS: I want to talk also about the push for a homes guarantee federally, but just staying with the KC Tenants story for just one more moment: what lessons do you feel like folks should take away from your experience with this organization to date as folks across the country start to get really riled up and connected to change and to action on the local level and organizing and democratic participation on the local level in this tremendous moment where there is the need for federal leadership, and yet none that we see coming, and therefore such incredible urgency for actions at the local level?

RAGHUVEER: Yeah, I think there are a couple lessons. My first is sort of basic, and obviously, I’m super biased, but organizing is everything. That’s the lesson. Organizing with people who are directly impacted is the way that change happens. It’s not always pretty. It’s often not polite or respectable in the way that dominant politics demands that we be. But that’s where the change comes in. It’s by creating tension and intervening in these status quo establishment ways of doing business that we bring about the kind of change at the level that our people need. So, I think lesson number one is organizing is everything. And if people are riled up and looking for a place to dig in, I think my answer, which is obvious by the way I talk about this work, is go find a group locally that’s doing the best grassroots organizing, that’s genuinely led by the people impacted by whatever problem is the problem that’s closest to you or the problem that you’re most concerned with.

And then I think one of my biggest lessons during this period has been reflecting on winnability and the way in which people talk about what is or isn’t winnable, which is pure speculation all the time. I think there’s factors that are immoveable related to political will and which party has power and stuff like that that, of course, impact winnability. But what we’ve learned in the last several months is that there is no limit on what is winnable, especially during a moment of crisis and clarity like this one has been. And in those first couple days of the pandemic period and the shutdowns beginning, we were winning things that just weeks before felt impossible, right? We won eviction moratoria policies across the country. No evictions in Jackson County, Missouri for a period of time. And that, you know, two days before, the win would’ve felt impossible to us.

So, one thing that I’ve been reflecting on a lot is what we think is winnable or possible and what they tell us is winnable or possible and how kind of fungible those categories are and how much it actually really depends on how we organize and what we demand. And I think this is very related to the homes guarantee, which hopefully we’ll dig into. But the homes guarantee, for example, is a demand that is not winnable today. And that’s the point, right? We’re trying to demand something that is a North Star. This is the vision for how the world should be. And we can then orient winnable or intermediary campaigns along the way that take us towards that North Star. But if we don’t have that imagination, if we don’t have that vision for the world as it should be, then nothing we do adds up to anything that brings about the level of change or the scale of change that we need.

VALLAS: So, let’s talk about homes guarantees. You’re bringing it up and contextualizing it as the North Star. It’s very much about shifting the Overton window as you’re describing, so that we can start to have a conversation and a debate that is not just about, you know, do we have work reporting requirements in housing assistance, for example, right? Which is the turf that, say, this particular administration would like us to be on rather than, should it be, do we live in a society where we think everyone deserves access to safe and stable and adequate and accessible housing? And that’s very much, as I understand it, what this push and what this campaign is really about trying to redefine the parameters around. Talk about the campaign and kind of where it came from, where you see it going, and how you’re using this moment to try to shift those goalposts a little bit.

RAGHUVEER: So, it came from a very similar place to KC Tenants and everything that we’ve built in Kansas City. It came from people who were impacted by housing inequity. I started organizing with People’s Action about three years ago now, almost three years exactly. And when we began, the network of organizations — it’s basically a national network of community organizations that work on racial, economic, environmental, and gender justice issues — and many of the organizations at our base had been doing some of the most amazing tenant organizing and housing work for decades. And People’s Action, actually, when we were National People’s Action, had been at the forefront of winning major structural reforms like the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, some would argue some of the biggest structural reforms in recent decades, right? But we had kind of abandoned a national housing campaign, I think mostly in response to just the feeling generally that there wasn’t much possible at the federal level or much to do at the national level around housing organizing. I think for several decades now, housing has been an issue that’s a third rail of American politics at the federal level and really relegated to local campaigning, organizing, policy ideas.

And so, I struggled for about a year to figure out how we could build a national campaign out of pretty disparate, separate, different local campaigns that were occurring. And eventually, we had this retreat where we brought together public housing residents from New York City and tenants of private landlords in Wisconsin, and we had unhoused people from Washington and California. And we had about 50 grassroots leaders in the room, and the organizers proposed all these kind of little issue cuts. We were like, you know, let’s make developer money in local elections toxic because that has to do a lot with what we’re able to win at the local level and ideas like that. Which, you know, I totally stand by that that idea, but ultimately, it’s pretty small in the scheme of things. And the leaders in the room were like, no! None of this is big enough. This problem is so thorny, it’s so massive, and we need to be the campaign that starts to articulate a vision for the world that we want, a vision for a world in which people are guaranteed a safe, accessible, affordable home, and a vision for a world where housing is a human right. And they actually said to us, we’re sick of chanting, “Housing is a human right” in the streets without a clear vision for what that looks like.

And out of that grew the homes guarantee, the idea being very simple: we live in the richest country in the history of the world. We can and we must guarantee that everyone has a home. Period. And then from that, we kind of built a policy agenda. We recruited in some amazing co-conspirators who share our politics and were down to kind of credential a grassroots vision with their policy expertise or their economic expertise. And last summer, September 5th, we dropped our Homes Guarantee Briefing Book. And then since then, it’s kind of been a wild ride. Several weeks later, Bernie Sanders adopted much of our platform. A couple months after that, The Squad and some of their friends introduced a slate of bills that I now consider the new floor for progressive housing policy on the House side. We’ve recruited 150+ down-ballot candidates to take a homes guarantee candidates’ pledge, pledging, among other thing, that they will not take developer, landlord, or real estate money in their local and state races. And along the way, of course, this campaign has been led by the people who are the most impacted, which I think means that at every turn, our leaders have pushed us to be even bolder and even thinking even bigger than we were before.

VALLAS: Talk a little bit about the policy that you guys are pushing for, given that a lot of the folks who listen to this show are nerds. I say that with great love! But I think there’s probably a lot of people going, Okay, cool. Lots the momentum? But what are they actually asking for?

RAGHUVEER: Yeah. So, it’s a big emphasis on transitioning housing from relegated to the private market and considered a commodity to guaranteed as a public good or a human right. And the way that we go about doing that through our policy proposal is by making a massive investment in what we call social housing, which is to say housing that is built and managed and permanently held off of the private market, not for profit, and by the communities that exist within it, that live within it, right? And social housing is a popular concept across the globe. Some models are more successful than others. And there’s a particular way that we think it would need to look in the United States, which we spell out in our briefing book. So, we call for 12 million new units of social housing across the country. And we want this to be not only housing for people, but also a jobs program. And not just a jobs program, but a green jobs program. Because we would want these buildings, of course, to be built to the highest standards of sustainability and resilience for our communities. So, that’s one piece of it. Now, I will say that in the wake of, or in the midst of, I should say, the pandemic and the economic crisis that has followed, that 12 million figure, all of a sudden it looks quite a conservative. And we have been in talks about making that ask even bigger than what it was when we put it out last fall.

Another big element of the homes guarantee is a massive reinvestment in existing public housing. So, we have about 1.1 or 1.2 million units of public housing across country, which, of course, have been vastly disinvested from in the last several decades as we’ve prioritized the private market and sort of housing assistance and solutions that live within the realm of the private market. And as a result, public housing is completely in a state of disrepair and crisis, and even more so now, during the pandemic. So, we want to see a massive reinvestment to the tune of $150 billion into public housing to pay back the capital needs and the operation needs that have built up over time, but then also to make public housing climate resilient and to make it a decent and great place for people to live, as it once was, frankly, back in the day when public housing was first constructed.

And then a couple other elements of the homes guarantee vision. We’ve got a big piece on tenant protections. We feel strongly that, in the transition from housing as commodity to housing as public good, we can’t lose sight of the fact that many, many tenants, tens of millions of tenants still rent from private landlords. So, we want to protect tenants in that instance by using policies like universal rent control across the country and just cause evictions and first right of purchase so that tenants can have protections even in the economy and in the world as it is today. And then finally, a couple elements that I feel really strongly about. One is around ending the practice of real estate and land speculation, which comes at a huge detriment to communities like mine in Kansas City, which is now mostly owned by out-of-state, massive private equity firms, foreign capital that really do nothing to contribute to our community, but do everything to extract from and exploit my neighbors. And then there’s a piece of the homes guarantee vision that’s about reparations. It’s about acknowledging that we can’t just start from today thinking about universal policies, ignoring the fact that for centuries, we have excluded whole communities, and in particular Black and Native communities, from the land and from housing. So, we actually have to think about a homes guarantee as reparative at the same time as its forward looking. And then finally, a vision that’s knit throughout our vision for the homes guarantee is the ways in which it would intersect with a Green New Deal and be part of a Green New Deal and really core to what a Green New Deal could deliver for America.

VALLAS: And all of this, just to kind of go back to where you said the political posture is at this point, supported by just huge numbers of current members of Congress, also now embraced by at least one serious presidential candidate from the primary, and also something that we’re really seeing start to take hold among some of the leading kind of progressive voices in Washington more generally. I was really excited to also see that a right to counsel in eviction cases is part and parcel of this agenda as well, and often shows up in things that Ayanna Pressley or AOC or others speak out locally about in contextualizing this moment within the broader push for these types of policies.

I asked you the last time that we talked on this show as part of that broader conversation about racial capitalism, and I kind of want to ask again now in this moment, I think, in part because I know my own continued flow of any level of optimism requires it. But I know there’s a lot of listeners as well who I think probably wonder this every time they hear articulations of the kind of policy that they want to see but are just desperately wondering how to get, as you said, from the place where we’re hearing it shouted in the streets, right, “Housing as a human right” to a place where it’s actually a serious conversation in the halls of power. How do we get to the place that you’re describing from here? I’m really curious your thoughts on this moment, which is the COVID pandemic, and some people are describing it as a portal for change and opportunity, as the flipside of the coin of the devastation and the hardship. I’m really curious your thoughts on the path to getting to this level of fundamental change now that so many serious leaders are starting to talk about it as the type of ask that we need to be rallying around.

RAGHUVEER: Definitely. I mean, I think this is one of the questions that’s keeping me up at night, because I think, you know, I definitely subscribe to the idea that out of crisis comes opportunity. And I think that’s particularly true when you’re organizing around issues like this. And I love the idea I think first proposed by Arundhati Roy that the pandemic is a portal, right? I love that idea. I have so much hope related to that idea. And I will admit I have some mounting skepticism that our legislators at every level are taking seriously that potential: the potential for the clarity that we’ve gained in the last several months to really help us forge a completely new way forward. And I’ll give you an example of this. I mean, I think our push to cancel rent is not a push that we have found a lot of success with at the federal level, if I can be honest, right? We’ve organized probably about 35 or 40 co-sponsors to Representative Ilhan Omar’s bill for rent and mortgage cancelation. But for the most part, we just haven’t reached the level of saturation that we would need to in order for that to be a seriously viable proposal in the next couple of weeks as the House and the Senate are negotiating around the next package.

Now, it’s still a very live reality. So, I don’t want to exclude the possibility that that could become viable at any moment, especially as this crisis becomes broader and deeper. But the reality of political will in D.C. right now is not a reality that’s aligned with canceling rents and mortgages or otherwise with the values that are ingrained and enmeshed in our homes guarantee. So, I think there’s a lot of work to be done to move D.C. in that direction, to move the general public in that direction, and it has everything to do with dominant narratives in the United States about housing and individualism and rugged capitalism and stuff like that, right? So, it’s everything from interjecting in D.C. and recruiting more champions around this vision for a bold restructuring of our economy and our housing sector to having conversations around a dinner table, around the idea that the way things are today is not the way they must always be.

So, to get more specific with you, I mean, I think we have a lot of work to do to build the kind of power that we could actually wield in the D.C. space. So, what we’re very focused on is base-building at a grassroots level. We need basically 100 times the scale of power that we’ve been able to build in Kansas City through KC Tenants, and then that replicated across the country. And the good news is the tenant movement has been building for the last several decades, and I think especially in the last decade, has gained a ton of power. [audio cuts out] ….this incredible organizing that will only [audio cuts out] coming. And then I think it’s a long game of trying to move the narrative and continue proposing ideas that sound bold, but push open that Overton window, as you said before.

As I scroll through my Twitter feed about candidates like Jamaal Bowman in New York who unseated an incumbent who had been in Congress for a while. And Jamaal Bowman is a product of public housing. He was raised by his mom in a public housing project and ran on a homes guarantee and just won his primary. And no doubt, he’s going to D.C. as a new champion for a homes guarantee. So, I think that’s another strategy, too, is we need to be recruiting people from our own base to be the people who come to deliver us this liberation, right? I think we’re not holding our breath that we’re necessarily going to convince people who have benefited from the status quo that the status quo needs to go. But we need to actually grow our own people who are clear that the status quo is not working for them and hasn’t been for a long time to become the people in the halls of power executing our vision. And that’s not a short-term project. Obviously, that’s a very long-term project, but it’s one that we’re quite invested in.

VALLAS: I can’t think of better words to end on. I’ve been speaking with Tara Raghuveer. She’s the founding director of KC Tenants based in Kansas City. She’s also the director of the Homes Guarantee Campaign at People’s Action. And you can find more of both of those organizations more and a lot of the issues we’ve been talking about, including the Tenants Bill of Rights, the People’s Housing Platform, and other successes from KC Tenants on our nerdy syllabus page on Medium. Tara, thank you so much for taking the time. And I really enjoyed this conversation. I am in just tremendous awe of the work that your organizations are doing and that KC Tenants is getting done. And it’s just, I find it to be just such a beacon of hope and a tremendous model for folks in this moment.

RAGHUVEER: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Transcripts are courtesy of Cheryl Green. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.