|
Sign the petition to tell the Seattle City Council: We need strong renter protections, including rent control without loopholes!
Dear friends:
Yesterday (Wednesday, May 5), I proudly joined 40 renters, homeowners, small business owners, union members, socialists, and faith and community activists, at a press conference in Seattle's Central District, to announce legislation to enact rent control and other major renters’ rights.
Dramatic steps are needed to fight the growing crisis of economic displacement and gentrification, which is being fueled entirely by profiteering corporate landlords.
That’s why we announced major new legislation that demands housing as a human right. Our movement is fighting for residential rent control, and commercial rent control for small businesses, without corporate loopholes. We’re fighting to cancel COVID debt - big banks and corporate landlords should pay for the crisis, not renters and working people.
Are you with us? Sign the petition to tell the Seattle City Council: We need strong renter protections, including rent control without loopholes!
Our movement will challenge the political establishment to overturn the current state ban and enact rent control to make Seattle affordable for all. Under our movement’s bill, apartment rents in Seattle could go up no more than the annual rate of inflation.
Even before COVID and the capitalist recession of 2020, 46 percent of Seattle renters - 166,000 people - were officially “rent burdened,” paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent, and more than one out of every five renters was “severely rent burdened,” paying more than half of their income in monthly rent.
As Seattle residents barely begin to recover from the pandemic and recession, they are already experiencing landlords once again raising rates well above the rate of inflation. Industry analyst ApartmentList.Com found that between January and April 2021, rents across the board in Seattle for apartments of all sizes increased by 9 percent, an annualized rate of more than 40 percent. This puts rents on track to more than rebound in a very few months from the temporary 2020 drop, and to continue soaring at pre-pandemic crisis levels.
At the press conference, union member and mathematics doctoral student Amzi Jeffs noted, “I have needed to move every single year since I first came to Seattle because I couldn’t find housing that was affordable or safe.” Jeffs, a member of UAW 4121, the union of academic student employees at the University of Washington, said, “This has cost me thousands of dollars and a massive amount of personal effort. And my situation is not unique. Many of the members of our union face similar, and worse, hardships.”
“As a barista in this city, I struggled for months to find an affordable apartment to rent,” added Starbucks worker Star Willey. “Now the apartment that I moved into has become less affordable each time I renew my lease because they raise the rent every year. . . . Many of my friends have moved out of Seattle because it is unaffordable, and I am afraid I will have to as well. Now the corporate landlords of my apartment are very slow fix repairs, if they do at all. They are trying to push out my neighbors who have lived there for over a decade.”
Our movement also announced legislation to enact commercial rent control in Seattle, to help struggling small businesses that are confronting the same displacement and gentrification pressures that working-class renters face.
The press conference was conducted outside Squirrel Chops, a queer, women-owned haircutting-and coffee-shop that like many small businesses is struggling against rising rents and gentrification. “Small businesses have faced an unprecedented destruction during the pandemic year while big corporations and the billionaire class have profiteered,” said Squirrel Chops co-owner Shirley Henderson. “That’s why we need commercial rent control, as well as residential rent control.”
In addition to those two rent control measures, we announced we’ll be introducing additional measures to immediately limit rent increases:
-
One ordinance would require landlords to provide 180 days’ notice before imposing a rent increase on tenants. Currently, landlords have to provide only 60 days’ notice for rent increases above 10 percent, and have no advance notice requirement for increases below 10 percent.
-
Another measure would require landlords to pay tenants for relocation when they force tenants out through rent increases.
-
A third measure - to Cancel COVID Debt - calls for rental, mortgage, and utility debt cancellation for renters and homeowners struggling under the dual burden of COVID and the capitalist recession.
It will be extremely difficult to win any of these renters’ rights bills. The political establishment and the corporate landlord lobby will fight us every step of the way. And yet the moment is urgent, with tens of thousands of Seattle households struggling for economic survival.
That’s why I’m urging you to Sign the petition to tell the Seattle City Council: We need strong renter protections, including rent control without loopholes!
And then, once you’ve signed our petition, forward it to friends, family and coworkers.
We know that we will face huge opposition in our demand for rent control. Corporate landlords and politicians will say it will never happen.
But I want to remind you that just 12 months ago, as our movement was advancing our Amazon Tax, Mayor Durkan declared, “Yeah, that never is going to happen, and I think it’s irresponsible for anyone to say that that’s even possible.”
Well, we organized, we fought back, and we proved the mayor wrong. We won the Amazon Tax. That’s the kind of grassroots momentum we need to build again.
Community activist Castill Hightower, who has been organizing with our office to win justice for her brother Herbert, who was killed by Seattle police in 2004, spoke in solidarity with the renters’ rights movement and underscored the need to build independent grassroots power. “We will have to build democratically-organized, rank-and-file-driven movements to win. We cannot rely on the Democratic politicians, not on the so-called movement leaders who say they speak for the rest of us but believe that their insider negotiations with establishment politicians are going to achieve results, and put their own relations with powerful politicians first. We know that never works for us,” she said.
Want to learn more about our rent control and renters rights legislation? Here are some important links:
But most immediately, click here to sign the petition to tell the Seattle City Council: We need strong renter protections, including rent control without loopholes!
In solidarity,
Kshama Sawant
|
