Toward a philosophy of renter rights
By Sheila
Bernard
The battle over Lincoln Place
has raged for 15 years. A group of tenants with few resources and no staff have
battled a heavily-financed owner and his team of experienced, high-priced
attorneys. We have been fairly successful, evidenced by the fact that we have 50
of our 52 buildings still standing with excellent prospects of saving most of
historic Lincoln Place for its residents and for posterity.
What makes a community rear up on its hind
legs like that? Is it simply our desire, as the landlord alleges, to save our
rent-controlled apartments and take unfair advantage of a property owner? No. It
is much more than that. Yes, we want to stay in our homes. But we are also part
of a larger historical
trend.
Renters’ rights is the
last frontier in the evolution of American society toward equal rights for all.
At the beginning, all land was controlled by a small minority of white male
property owners. Now all land is controlled by a somewhat larger minority of
property owners, which includes women and people of diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Of course, there are income, ethnic, gender, and age factors which place some
property owners closer to renters in terms of how much power they have. In
addition, there are many property owners who agree that renters’ rights
are important to jobs/housing balance, stability of neighborhoods, and other
indicators of the quality of urban life. But in spite of the fact that the
majority of people are either renters or in sympathy with renters’ rights,
the law favors property owners in some very troubling ways, greatly out of
proportion to their numbers in the total population. This power disparity does
serious damage to the civil rights of
renters.
A renter does not have the
right in California to contract for a permanent home. State law gives an owner
the right to “go out of the rental business” by demolishing rental
housing, and in so doing to destroy entire neighborhoods without regard to the
circumstances of the people who will be displaced by such an action. Although it
is widely known that displacing a person of advanced age from a long-time
residence can cause risk to the senior’s health, including risk to life,
California law holds the right to land speculation higher than the right to life
of the senior tenant. Our law is definitely selective in its protection of life,
if not liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.
The law is also selective in
its protection of the right to property. A tenant has a leasehold on the
residence he or she rents. A leasehold is a form of property ownership. The
tenant is said to be “in possession” of the premises with the right
to quiet enjoyment. Landlords who evict tenants are said to “regain
possession.”
Many local jurisdictions
have chosen to protect the leasehold and bring it somewhat closer in value to
other forms of property ownership. However, these attempts have usually been
struck down in higher courts. The City of Los Angeles, with 60% renters and a
serious housing crisis, has trouble stopping property owners from destroying
affordable housing, even when inhabited by senior citizens, because of mixed
messages in the laws of the state of California, as interpreted by the courts.
For example, cities have the right to
approve or deny subdivisions. (A subdivision is permission to divide a parcel
of land into smaller pieces, so that the pieces can be sold off to different
individuals.) A state law called the Subdivision Map Act says that a city must
deny a subdivision that conflicts with any element of the city’s general
plan, including the housing element. (A city’s housing element describes
how a city intends to have an adequate supply of housing for its population at
all income levels.)
When the City of
Los Angeles denied the owner of Lincoln Place, a subdivision, to demolish the
apartments and build condos, citing the City’s housing element, the owner
successfully sued the City under the Ellis Act, another state law which says a
city cannot stop an owner of property from “going out of the rental
business” by demolishing rental units. Although the Ellis Act states that
it does not intend to interfere with local jurisdictions’ powers relative
to land use, the Ellis Act does exactly that, stopping a democratic entity (the
city) from protecting hundreds of its senior citizens at Lincoln Place against
the harmful economic decisions of a single individual property owner. The
seniors’ right to life is not on a par with the property owner’s
right to become more wealthy through land speculation, using no-fault
evictions.
The no-fault eviction might
even be seen as a violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Senior
tenants inhabit property peacefully, providing stable and secure income to the
property owner. When the owner sells the property, he or she is selling a
community, including both buildings and people, for some of whom moving can be
an insurmountable hardship. The people are responsible for a great deal of the
value of the community. That value, and those tenants, are sold to the next
property owner for the purpose of increasing wealth. Such a sale often results
in displacement of people away from their neighbors and their extended family.
These people have been bought and sold and their value exploited, and since
displacement poses a risk to life, these people have been
expended.
Of course, theoretically,
these tenants could have moved from their apartments at any time, and were not
subjected to physical violence or overt dehumanization. So their servitude to
the property owner can certainly not be compared to the involuntary servitude
imposed for 400 years upon our country’s black population, the people for
whom the 14th Amendment was written. However, in the evolution from a
slave-holding society to a society of equal protection under the law for
everyone, we can see the applicability of the 14th amendment, which says that
involuntary servitude is illegal. When a tenant contracts for a home and lives
there into old age, the tenant is in servitude to the landlord, but the
servitude is voluntary. However, at the point where the landlord moves to evict
the tenant, depriving the tenant of his or her home and possibly the
tenant’s very life, the servitude has become involuntary. Can any other
contract in this society be unilaterally terminated in an analogous way, against
the life-and-death interests of one party to the
contract?
While these ideas are
discussed in relation to senior citizens, it is important that renters’
rights be seen as applying to all renters. At what age and at what degree of
frailty does it pose a threat to a person’s life to be forced from
one’s home? Can seniors be isolated from their neighbors, including
singles who assist senior neighbors with groceries, etc., and families with
children who benefit from interacting with senior neighbors? Although seniors
are among the most deeply affected by the disparity of rights between renters
and property owners, it would be counterproductive to attempt to protect seniors
separately from everyone else.
If this
reasoning about renters’ rights were to inform the law, land speculation
would become limited in its ability to produce wealth. People who are in the
business of owning and managing rental housing would be entitled to the fruits
of their labors, but when they sell their rental property, it would be disclosed
to potential buyers that tenants have the right to remain in their homes. With
such disclosure, coupled with laws preventing harassment of tenants, older
buildings which required rehabilitation would probably not change hands in
speculative ways. Rather, such buildings as they aged would in many cases come
under the control of non-profit organizations which secure permanently
affordable housing for protected groups in the population, including the old,
the young, and others without the capacity to own property. This would be
roughly analogous to regulation and/or ownership of water, utilities, energy,
and education in the interest of the public.
Another consequence of this proposed
elevation of the power of the leasehold would be an increase in the number and
variety of forms of ownership of property in common. We already have condos and
cooperatives, both forms of social ownership and management of multi-family
property. There are other forms as well on the continuum between public and
private ownership, which provide residents varying degrees of control over the
property in which they live, dependent only on residents’ capacity and
willingness to manage the property responsibly and competently together, with
varying degrees of participation and control by outsiders such as neighbors,
mortgage holders, and public officials. These forms of ownership, besides
building the capacity of tenants to manage their own residences in common, would
increase the public participation of vast numbers of renters who presently
believe that our society no longer belongs to them, and that their votes are
worthless.
In a healthy family and a
healthy society, it is understood that we are all in this leaky vessel together.
At present, property owners can be heard to say, “Affordable housing is
not my problem. I can do what I please with my property, and society as a whole
will have to bear the burden of the loss of affordable housing.” A healthy
society would respond to such a property owner like this: “You are one of
us. We need your help, as we need everyone’s help, in solving this housing
crisis. Your right to greater wealth must not interfere with the right of a
tenant to a long life in a permanent home.”
Posted: Thu - May 1, 2003 at 06:03 PM