Campaign to Cancel Rent Raises Questions for the Affordable Housing Movement

If you live in a state capital or large city, it’s likely that sometime last week you saw a caravan of honking cars pass by covered with signs calling for public officials to cancel rent. Or maybe you saw one of many banner drops from balconies or highways, or a rent strike poster pasted on a lamp post. As a new month has arrived and rent is due, the cancel-rent movement is getting louder.

Tens of millions of people have lost their jobs due to the pandemic in the last month. Even those who are covered by an eviction moratorium are now worried about accumulating back rent and ending up on the streets once the moratorium lifts.

A hotline to help people connect with assistance during the pandemic in Santa Clara County, California, gets hundreds of calls every day. And the top concern is rent, says Jeffrey Buchanan, public policy director of Working Partnerships USA, which helped to found Silicon Valley Rising, a community and labor group that staffs the hotline. “Most tenant households don’t have $400 in savings, and the average rent here is $2,700 per month. It’s heartbreaking to hear the stories of families who have no idea how they are going to make May rent.”

While nonprofit housing providers and many individual landlords are assisting their tenants who can’t pay, many others are insisting that the rent is due, and even violating eviction moratoriums; examples of that reported by ProPublica and Shelterforce are likely only the tip of the iceberg, given the lack of standardized data collection and enforcement regarding evictions. Other landlords have continued to raise rent during the shutdown, or proposed things like having people who can’t pay move into smaller apartments in the middle of shelter-in-place requirements.

“Some private landlords are saying once the moratorium is over they’ll pursue legal action,” says Arianna Feldman, communications organizer for Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia (United Renters For Justice) in Minneapolis. “There’s been some retaliation. One member has had their landlord calling every day in April to say ‘When you are going to pay?’”

In response, a wide range of tenant and worker organizations are organizing around the idea of canceling rent and mortgage payments during the crisis.

“The pandemic crisis is an economic crisis that then becomes an eviction crisis,” says Davin Cardenas, national field organizer for the Right to the City Alliance. “We didn’t create this crisis; we shouldn’t suffer the effects.”

What Does Cancel Rent Actually Mean?

Organizers are still coalescing around specifics. The baseline for all proposals is that rent payments would be waived completely some period of time, not to be owed later, and without any late fees or punitive action allowed against tenants. The time frames proposed have included three months, the rest of the year, and until the national emergency is lifted.

Most supporters are also calling for a simultaneous cancellation of mortgage payments to support not only struggling homeowners, but also smaller landlords.

The question of if and how to reimburse property owners, and which ones, is more contentious. 

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