By Derek Barnes–
Many housing providers (for-profit and non-profit) are extremely upset and frustrated. Cities like San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley want to introduce more restrictive housing laws with slow “ramp downs” of a three-year eviction moratorium that has damaged the housing market across the Bay Area.
Lawmakers and municipal leaders created a crisis by upholding three-year health emergency mandates and eviction moratoriums. They introduced moral hazards and emboldened people to destroy property and to stop paying rent without adequately funded government programs in place. It has created an unpaid rent bubble and consumer debt estimated to be as high as $3B across the Bay Area’s nine counties. Municipalities have insufficient plans to help households pay what is owed and provide lifelines to rental property owners in financial distress or foreclosure.
During the pandemic, legislators essentially sanctioned the theft of service with blanket protections where many renters, without proven COVID-19 financial hardship and loss of income, decided to stop paying rent. Essentially, the government allowed people to use housing services without paying since March 2020. It would be state-sanctioned theft if this was permitted in any other industry.
Housing is a human right. No rent on stolen land. Stop all evictions. No right to profit from renters. These are the messages and new rules-based ideology that radical socialist progressives (SoProgs) push and institute housing policies authored by self-dealing lobbying attorneys. Organizations like the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) aim to depress real estate values, and control socialized housing under nonprofit or public housing models. This is fundamental to their mission, no matter the cost and loss for smaller property owners.
Extreme renter entitlement and protections are so pervasive in Oakland and Berkeley and fueled by a plethora of nonprofit tenant litigation organizations. For many years, organizations like ACCE, with tentacles into local city governments, targeted large corporate rental owners/operators as the businesses taking advantage of renters. Today, there’s also a full-throated effort to demonize small rental owners. In these cities, smaller rental housing providers own/operate most older and affordable housing units. They are typically the most vulnerable and under-resourced rental businesses that struggled for three years during the Eviction Moratorium if they didn’t receive rental income.
In major cities like Oakland and San Francisco, increased homelessness, open-air drug use, and crime have become the norm. These conditions have also contributed to housing challenges and resident flight. Recently in San Francisco, I walked four blocks on Eddy Street (Market St. to Jones St.) and was appalled by what I saw happening in broad daylight—right in front of the Tenderloin SFPD. This is the ongoing reality that many residents, workers, and tourists face daily in our cities. It further erodes our cities’ value and esteem, as well as stifling business and housing investment.
New attitudes of political correctness and extreme liberalism by SoProgs can cloud good judgment and impede common sense. These views enable a type of cultural conditioning that we’ve not experienced before. The acceptance and enablement of lawlessness drive out businesses, residents, and tourism—desperately needed commerce and tax revenue to fund municipal investments.
These new attitudes are often rooted in misguided equity and justice initiatives that can backfire and create unintended consequences. For example, good intentions for renters can disenfranchise vulnerable and under-resourced Black, Brown, immigrant, and elderly rental property owners through housing enforcement policies, rent increase caps, emergency mandates, and forced owner subsidies. Unvetted programs and polices often require no proof of renter financial hardship or qualification to reside in affordable rent-controlled units. These activities ultimately destabilize housing and real estate markets, reduce the availability of rental units, and force communities of color that own real estate and rental property out of the market.
Historically, communities of color have worked hard to own property and homes, playing by rules stacked against them despite decades of injustice and racist housing policies. Rental owners of color largely provide most of the below-market rate housing to other people of color. Now, more radical SoProgs are on a mission to devalue their properties by installing new rules through unvetted policies, using scare tactics, and stealing opportunities to build equity and generational wealth in communities of color. It’s an insidious new form of blockbusting we’ve seen before, and the enablers must be stopped before the damage to the most vulnerable communities and housing market are irreparable.
Derek Barnes is the CEO of the East Bay Rental Housing Association (www.EBRHA.com). He currently serves on the boards of Horizons Foundation and Homebridge CA. Follow him on Twitter @DerekBarnesSF or on Instagram at DerekBarnes.SF
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Published on April 20, 2023
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