By Thomas Silverstein, President/Executive Director, Poverty & Race Research Action Council 

Although our post-election recap covered a lot of ground, it was inevitable that we would miss some important occurrences. Two ballot measure victories – one offensive and one defensive – are worth lifting up. In Tacoma, Washington, voters approved Initiative 1, Safe Homes for All, by a 60% to 40% margin. The initiative will accomplish multiple complementary goals: enshrining tenants’ right to organize, obligating landlords to bargain in good faith with majority tenant unions, and providing both a private right of action and an administrative complaint pathway for tenants, tenant advocates, and tenant unions to challenge habitability violations. Additionally, it increases penalties for violations of tenant protection ordinances by large corporate landlords, provides for the revocation of the rental licenses of landlords that are repeat offenders, funds enforcement through fees imposed on landlords, and explicitly prohibits retaliation. Tacoma for All led the fight to pass the initiative, working in coalition with a broad set of community, labor, and progressive allies. 

Meanwhile, in Salinas, California (hometown of iconic chronicler of U.S. poverty and working class life, John Steinbeck), voters rejected a landlord-funded effort to roll back existing rent stabilization, just cause, and tenant anti-harassment protections as well as rental registry requirements by a similar margin. It is notable that multiple city officials who supported the failed repeal effort were reelected by the voters. That reinforces the importance of ballot measures as a means of achieving legislative reform with regard to issues where members of city councils or state legislatures are too timid – or perhaps influenced by well-heeled campaign donors – to take bold action. There can also be drawbacks to direct democracy, including for housing policy: consider the town meetings in Massachusetts that have been resisting compliance with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Communities Act. Still, there is progress in our society – from living wage protections to marijuana legalization – that would not have occurred without the ability of voters to bypass their elected representatives. 

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Last Thursday, I spoke on a roundtable at the Annual Fall Research Conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM) in Boston on the role of research in building common ground among tenant organizers and pro-housing (or YIMBY) advocates. We had an all-star line-up with moderator Solomon Greene of the Center for Housing Research and Innovative Strategies at the University of Denver and my co-panelists Tara Raghuveer, Director of the Tenant Union Federation and PRRAC Board member, Ingrid Gould Ellen of the Furman Center at New York University and PRRAC’s Social Science Advisory Board (SSAB), and Michael Lens of the Lewis Center at the University of California-Los Angeles and also of PRRAC’s SSAB. It was a rich conversation that built on many of the themes from the Perspective’s inaugural article. 

One comment from Tara really stuck with me, in part because it touched on something that was already on my mind. Tara has a way with words, so I will not even pretend that I am capable of capturing how pithily she articulated this point. The gist of it, however, was that, if we have evidence that a policy that has material benefits for tenants also presents some real trade-offs, including potentially for other tenants, we are not necessarily called to abandon that policy. We are instead called to figure out how we can use other policy tools to address the downside of those tradeoffs. The difference between Tara and me is that I think she expressed that thought in about three words. 

For PRRAC, it is an animating principle of our work that one of the ways in which we can be useful to grassroots movements is by helping to figure out in painstaking technical detail how to execute the “compensatory policymaking” that allows us all – including poor and working-class communities of color, in particular – to have our cake and eat it too. Future Perspective posts will undoubtedly touch on how to design policies to counteract the tradeoffs presented by vitally important but also nuanced movement priorities. 

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Following up on the description of the lay of the land for housing-related committees on Capitol Hill in last Thursday’s Perspective post, we would be remiss if we did not mention that Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) is mounting a challenge for the gavel of the House Financial Services Committee. Ranking Member and past Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) is not stepping aside and will seek to retain her role as the top Democrat on the committee. In response to pre-election rumors that Rep. Casten would seek this role, the vast majority of Democratic members of the committee reinforced their support for Ranking Member Waters. For this reason (among others), it is overwhelmingly likely that this potential “fight” will fizzle and that Ranking Member Waters will retain the gavel without much fuss. From a housing policy perspective, this will be a salutary result, as Rep. Casten is much less focused on the housing remit of the committee than is the Ranking Member. For the longer term, however, this situation speaks to the need for succession planning with respect to committee leadership roles within the House Democratic Caucus.