Oregon Democratic lawmakers are crafting one of the most ambitious legislative packages concerning affordable housing and tenants’ rights in the country – with intentions to propose a statewide cap on rent increases, the elimination of single-family zoning in favor of denser development and a prohibition on no-cause evictions.
And in the House, they have the votes to do it.
In the 2018 midterm election, Oregon voters gave Democrats supermajorities in both the House and the Senate, which allows Democrats to pass progressive legislation without a single Republican vote. Although, not all Senate Democrats are on board with the housing package.
This legislative session, which begins on Jan. 22, proponents of the package will have support and organized political lobbying from a group that has long been considered powerless and disenfranchised in Oregon politics: low-income renters.
The Community Alliance of Tenants, or CAT as it is also known, is a Portland-based tenants rights organization. It recently created CAT Action, a sister organization that will be devoted to political organizing and lobbying for renters’ rights. That makes it the only tenants’ rights organization in Oregon with the ability to raise and spend money for political purposes, and one of a growing number of such organizations along the West Coast determined to organize low-income renters to collectively wield and exercise political power.
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The Community Alliance of Tenants has been in existence for 30 years. In that time, the nonprofit advocacy organization has focused on educating tenants about landlord-tenant law, organizing tenants to advocate for better conditions in their buildings, and maintaining a hotline that tenants can call with questions and concerns about their landlord, an eviction, violations of landlord-tenant law, and other tenant-based issues.
The onset of Portland’s housing crisis, driven by escalating rents and a growing shortage of affordable housing, thrust CAT into the political sphere. In 2015, CAT’s then-executive director, the late Justin Buri, made an impassioned speech calling on the Portland City Council to declare a state of housing emergency.
The organization also has a contract with the city of Tualatin and Metro, the Portland metropolitan regional government, to educate renters along the Southwest Corridor, where a new MAX light rail is expected to be built in coming years. CAT has also expanded its reach to Medford, the Salem area and Central Oregon.
CAT has played a key role in rallying support for renter protections passed by the Portland City Council, including the requirement to provide 90-days notice of an eviction, rather than a month’s notice, and an ordinance requiring landlords pay the moving costs of tenants who receive a no-cause eviction or a rent increase of 10 percent or higher.
Now the organization is focusing even more on political activity.
CAT Action is a 501(c)4 nonprofit. This is the federal tax designation for organizations that allows for raising and spending money on political activities.
That includes hiring a lobbyist and lobbying, organizing and training volunteers for political canvassing, collecting ballots, phone banking and other get-out-the-vote efforts. The organization will also be able to endorse candidates for political office and collect signatures for ballot measures.
CAT Action formed at the beginning of 2018 and made endorsements in three races in the 2018 election: Kate Brown for Governor, Jo Ann Hardesty for Portland City Council, and Eddy Morales, a public relations consultant who defeated incumbent Kirk French for a spot on the Gresham City Council.
Katrina Holland, the executive director at CAT and CAT Action, said the three endorsements and related political canvassing were a soft launch to what she hopes is a forceful impact on Oregon electoral politics.
Approximately half of Oregon’s population rents housing. And according to census data collected in 2017, half of those renters are rent burdened, meaning that more than 30 percent of their income is used for paying the rent.
“Renters literally have the power to turn elections in their favor,” Holland said.
Rachael Myers, the executive director of the Washington Housing Alliance Action Fund, an organization similar to CAT Action, said that involvement in politics is something that “our movement should be doing much more of, in general.”
In 2012, the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, Washington’s largest organization dedicated to advocating for low-income affordable housing, started the Action Fund, which is also a 501(c)4 organization devoted to political activity and affordable housing advocacy.
In addition to its 501(c)4 organization, the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance also has a political action committee, or PAC, which allows the organization to raise and directly funnel money to political candidates.
Holland said CAT decided against starting a PAC due to “different rules and regulations to electoral engagement.”
Myers said she and her colleagues think of the trifecta of organizations “as an extension of advocacy and giving us all the tools available.” She said the existence of the Action Fund “has given us much stronger relationships with members of the Washington Legislature” and there is more willingness on legislators’ parts to push for passage of legislation related to tenants’ rights.
“There’s no way that we can match the contributions” from the landlord and realtor associations that Myers’ organization routinely finds itself opposing, she said. Those interests, like in Oregon, hold a powerful influence in the state capital.
“We can turn people out to knock on doors, do phone banks,” she said.
There may be no better example of the difference an organization like CAT Action can make in political races than the election of Morales to the Gresham City Council.
Morales won his race, unseating an incumbent with 58 votes. Morales said that “quite a significant number of our volunteers were renters,” and that Morales made a point to canvas in mobile home parks and apartment buildings.
Morales said that receiving CAT Action’s endorsement helped strengthen his connection to renters.
Candidate endorsements and the decision of an organization like CAT Action to marshal volunteers for door knocking and phone banking can sometimes make the difference in a race, Myers said.
“If they hadn’t done that, you can almost guarantee that he wouldn’t have had those votes,” she speculated.
Tenants’ rights and protections have recently played a pivotal role in Portland politics.
Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly ran a grassroots campaign in her 2016 election to the City Council, defeating incumbent Steve Novick. She ran almost entirely on a platform centered around tenants’ rights and affordable housing. Eudaly and her office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Portland Tenants United, a grassroots organization of activists devoted to tenants’ rights issues was also created that year. Margot Black, one of the organization’s founders, said that Portland Tenants United is not yet incorporated as a nonprofit but will likely seek 501(c)4 status this year.
Mark Gamba, the mayor of Milwaukie, said the fever pitch of tenant activism a few years ago, in which Milwaukie renters were practically “breaking down the door of City Hall,” defined the city’s agenda.
“It changed the focus for our city. It absolutely shifted the trajectory of the Milwaukie City Council,” he said. It went from focusing on building parks and fixing roads to passing a housing state of emergency similar to that of Portland, lengthening the notice for evictions from 30 days to 90 days, and other measures.
More recently, in the May 2018 primary election, former state Rep. Shemia Fagan handily defeated state Sen. Rod Monroe (D-Gresham). Monroe, who is also a landlord, played a key role in defeating House Bill 2004, a bill that would have prohibited no-cause evictions and lifted a statewide ban prohibiting cities from enacting policies capping or control how much rent can increase.
Fagan, throughout her campaign, voiced clear, full-throated support for tenant issues, including ending no-cause evictions, support for rent stabilization and legal support for renters facing eviction.
Fagan thinks her emphasis on tenants’ rights “played a huge role” in winning the primary.
“I was obviously responding to the needs of activists and just everyday people who didn’t have time to be activists,” she said.
The combination of the housing crisis and growing income inequality has affected enough low-income people that it’s turning into political action, said CAT Action’s director, Holland.
“I think people are tired of being ignored,” she said, as well as “dealing with very difficult economic, social and health circumstances as a result of housing instability.”
The defeat of House Bill 2004 during the 2016 legislative session was a rare exception to the growing influence of tenant activists.
Hundreds of renters and housing policy advocates testified in support of the bill. It was one of the most high-profile pieces of legislation of the 2016 legislative session and represented the most ambitious legislation favorable to renters introduced that year.
After narrowly passing the Oregon House, the bill died in the Senate.
Holland said the creation of CAT Action is a direct result of this defeat. She hopes increased lobbying from renters will sway legislators’ minds and also counterbalance the influence of the landlord, developer and real estate lobbies. For decades, those groups have held powerful sway in Salem and have historically contributed tens of thousands of dollars to political campaigns and lobbying efforts.
It “has created an atmosphere that legislators feel that they’re hearing from landlords more often than they’re hearing from tenants,” Holland said. “Their narrative can easily get drowned out.”
But that’s going to be different this legislative session.
“We’re going to be doing our absolute best to make sure that tenants connect with legislators as much as possible before, during and after the session,” she said.
John DiLorenzo, a Portland-based lawyer and lobbyist for More Housing Now, however, does “not necessarily” think an imbalance of power has existed between landlord groups and tenants in the past.
He said some actions taken by tenant activists – including putting police tape on the doors of senators’ offices and a protest outside of Sen. Rod Monroe’s church during the 2018 session – boil down to “theater and tactics that really don’t get us anywhere.”
Such action, he said, “doesn’t change hearts and minds, it just upsets them.”
Of CAT Action, DiLorenzo said, “if the creation of that organization can bring civility to the discussion, that’s a big plus.”
In Washington state, testimony from tenants has turned out to be one of the most powerful tools, said Meyers. “They’re some of the best advocates that I’ve ever met,” she said. “They are experts in this issue in ways that people who have never experienced homelessness or housing instability can never been experts.”
Fagan, who experienced homelessness as a child, thinks the voices of tenants will be instrumental in the coming legislative session and said it is “critical” for CAT Action to “pull up the real experiences of people.”
“There aren’t sitting legislators who have had that experience,” she said.
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The creation of CAT Action and the increase of tenant advocacy in Oregon mirrors growing activism around tenants’ rights throughout the country. Tenants’ rights organizations have been established in Denver, Colo., and Minneapolis, Minn.
In California, 2018 saw ballot measures in the San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan areas that would have enacted citywide rent control measures.
Myers said in Washington, the momentum for enacting tenant rights could be reaching its pinnacle.
“We’ve seen far more folks who are elected really going to the Legislature with the goal of working for affordable housing and ending homelessness in ways that we haven’t ever seen before,” she said.
During Washington’s 2018 legislative session, Myers said the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance and the Action Fund saw some of its biggest victories yet, advocating for the passage of legislation prohibiting housing discrimination based on a tenant’s source of income, as well as another bill that gives judges the ability to seal eviction records if the judge finds that the tenant was not evicted for cause, and increased funding for affordable housing and homeless services.
In Oregon, Fagan said she will reintroduce legislation that will end no-cause evictions and not only lift the statewide ban on rent stabilization, but place a statewide cap on annual rent increases. On Jan. 4, Willamette Week reported the statewide cap would be 7 percent, plus inflation.
Fagan, for her part, said “it is time for us to go bold” and pass legislation that “makes an actual difference in the day-to-day lives” of struggling Oregonians.
It’s a bold move, one that already has the landlord and developer associations in strong opposition.
“I think there is a House majority right now that is embracing a lot of proposals that tenant activists have come up with,” said attorney-lobbyist DiLorenzo. “Those who advocate for rent control are short sighted,” he said, “and they ignore the realities of economic science.”
DiLorenzo thinks the Oregon Senate, which is more conservative than the House, will once again stop such a bill from passing. “I do think there are a significant number of Democratic senators who are very adverse to the concept of rent control,” he said.
But Fagan said the landlord and Realtor lobby no longer has the power it traditionally has enjoyed. “They lost big in my race, they lost in the Governor’s race, they lost in Measure 103 and Measure 104,” Fagan said. “They don’t come into the Capitol with much of a negotiating position.”
Among other pieces of legislation expected to be introduced this month, Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland) is sponsoring a bill that would essentially eliminate single family zoning by requiring the development of duplexes, triplexes and cottage cluster-style apartment buildings on lots zoned for single family development. DiLorenzo said More Housing Now has not formed a position on that piece of legislation.
Democratic leaders and political observers say Oregon voters gave Democratic legislators a mandate when it elected supermajorities to the Oregon House and Senate in the 2018 election.
“I would call that a mandate,” Gamba, the mayor of Milwaukie, said, adding that he hopes the Legislature will pass “good, strong bills to solve some of these problems.”
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