Josh Michtom’s chalkboard van during a rencent Cancel Rent CT caravan.
Local and statewide tenant organizers are turning to a simple, if profound, solution for staving off a pending eviction, foreclosure, and homelessness crisis.
Their rallying cry? “Cancel the rent.”
Organizers with the Cancel Rent CT movement appeared Thursday on\ WNHH Radio’s “Pandemic Organizing” to talk about the urgent need they see for not just deferring, but outright forgiving renters’ debts for the duration of the Covid-19 crisis.
They want Gov. Ned Lamont to cancel all rent and mortgage payments for April, May, June, and going forward until 45 days after the governor lifts the current state of emergency.
And they want Lamont to extend the state’s current eviction moratorium beyond its current end date of July 1.
Over 820 people have signed their petition calling for statewide rent cancellation as of Thursday afternoon.
“At a time when residents are losing jobs and wages” en masse, said CTCORE-Organize Now! Deputy Director Ashley Blount (pictured), the government must take bold action to make sure that families won’t find themselves weighed down by debt and then kicked to the streets in the midst of a public-health crisis.
Renters should not have to bear the burden of applying to the state and federal governments for housing relief, said Hartford City Council member Josh Michtom (pictured).
That burden should instead fall on the shoulders of landlords, who own real property, have relationships with banks and mortgage lenders, and are in a much better position to apply for economic help.
Requiring renters — who are disproportionately lower-income, minority, and undocumented — rather than landlords to navigate government bureaucracy in order to obtain relief “is a recipe for leaving people out,” he said, “not just undocumented people who may not qualify, but anyone who is operating with a super-high level of stress.”
“We’re being very bold at this time,” Blount said about Cancel Rent CT’s demands.
Why? Because the need of Connecticut’s most marginalized populations is so great. And “because we know folks are listening.”
A spokesperson for Lamont’s office did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article. Click here and here to read about various rent deferral, eviction moratorium, and renter assistance actions that Lamont has taken so far. And click here to read about renter protections included in the federal CARES Act.
“Folks Want To Eat, And They Can’t Pay Rent”
Blount, Michtom, Mutual Aid Hartford organizer Sarana Nia Beik (pictured), Connecticut Students for a Dream Program Coordinator Eric Cruz Lopez, Junta for Progressive Action Interim Executive Director Bruni Pizarro, New Haven Legal Assistance Association attorney Keren Salim, and local Cancel Rent CT organizers Johnny Shively all said they hear the exact same concerns from nearly every family they work with — whether they be in New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, or Norwalk.
The families they serve are primarily African American and Hispanic. They’re primarily low-income. And they all need help paying for rent and paying for food.
“Folks want to eat, and they can’t pay rent,” said Blount. That’s what she’s heard from families who have filled out the intake form for CTCORE’s New Haven-based mutual aid operations.
Blount and Beik and Lopez (pictured) and Pizarro all said that the families their organizations serve have lost jobs and major sources of income during the pandemic. They said many have not yet received (or are even eligible for) state unemployment insurance since being laid off.
“The stories are all the same,” Blount said. “They’re just coming from different places in the state.”
Shively said that they are calling for rent cancellation not because renters don’t want to pay, not because they have some vendetta against landlords, and not because tenants are “lazy” or “deadbeats.”
“The reason we want to cancel rent is really simple,” he said. “It’s because people already can’t pay the rent.”
He quoted statistics he pulled from the state Department of Labor, the U.S. Census Bureau, and DataHaven.
He said over 500,000 individuals in Connecticut have successfully filed for unemployment since the start of the pandemic in Connecticut in mid-March.
And before Covid-19, he said, over 50 percent of renters were “rent-burdened,” meaning that they spent over a third of their monthly income on rent.
Before the pandemic, he continued, 60 percent of black families and 55 percent of Hispanic families were rent-burdened. And between March 13 and May 19, 79 percent of Hispanic families, 64 percent of black families, and 40 percent of white families in Connecticut reported a loss of income.
“There is a racist disparity to who is most affected by this crisis,” he said.
Michtom said that cancelling rent is not just a good move from an ethical perspective, but also from a political, social, and economic one as well.
“There’s a pretty good structural argument” for cancelling rent, he said. “Which is that, if you have a lot of evictions, than you end up with a lot of foreclosures. And if you have a lot of foreclosures, you end up with a lot of out-of-town speculators buying up properties.” Those out-of-town landlords aren’t always the most responsible and responsive in keeping up their properties, he said. “It is bad policy from a structural perspective to let communities go.”
Blount said that the Cancel Rent CT organizers have had to innovate—much like other progressive-minded community organizers—as they try to rally mass public support for their cause and put pressure on political leaders and also maintain necessary physical distance in order to stem the spread of the pandemic.
She said that over 60 cars participated in a Cancel Rent CT caravan in Hartford, Danbury, and New Haven last weekend. She said they drove to state and local government buildings, as well as the homes of political leaders, and beeped their horns and yelled with bullhorns to get their message across.
They’ve also taken to Zoom virtual organizing meetings and teach-ins, as well as “Twitter storms” in which organizers set a particular hour on a particular day to bombard the account of a politician, like Lamont, with tweets bearing the same hashtag: #CancelRentCT.
“Because we can’t walk into their offices,” she said. “We have to use our creativity and be imaginative.”
Pizarro (pictured) said that Junta started a “Pay Rent Fund” GoFundMe page in early April because they knew that the predominantly working-class Hispanic New Haveners her organization works with every day would need help making rent during the crisis.
As of Thursday, that page indicates that Junta has raised over $13,300 towards a $25,000 fundraising goal.
Blount said that many people’s minds are understandably on the anti-police brutality movement right now, and rightfully so, as thousands throughout the state have taken to the streets to demand an end to police brutality.
Blount said that that movement’s bid to “defund the police” is intimately intertwined with the calls for cancelling the rent.
“If we defund police, those funds can be utilized to make sure folks have a safe place to live,” she said. “All these things intersect.”
Indeed, in Citywide Youth Coalition’s list of eight demands for Friday’s planned anti-police brutality protest, one such call is to take $20 million out of the local police pension budget and use that money instead to create affordable public housing.
Previous articles about political organizing during the pandemic. Series logo by Amanda Valaitis.
• Activists Press “Harm Reduction” Response To Covid-19
• Renters Ramp Up Call For “Bailout Of Tenants”
• Academics Seek Security, “Joy”
• Earth Day Rally Connects Coronavirus To Climate Change
• YNHH Workers Win Covid-19 Pay Bump
• Pride Center Pivots Towards Virtual Support
• Can Covid Spawn Public Health “New Deal”?
• One Year Later, Protesters Pack Zoom
• Pandemic Prison Protests Pioneered
• “Food Garage” Feeds Families During Covid
• Pro-Immigrant Crew Tackles Covid Crisis
• Mutual Aid Teams Tackle Covid-19 Challenge
CancelTaxes
Elicker should announce a cancellation of all taxes for 2020.