Lever Time - Premium

00:01:43:12 - 00:02:14:04
David Sirota
Wow. Wow. Hey there. And welcome to this week's special bonus episode for paid subscribers. Today, we're going to be discussing the soaring cost of rent in cities across the country. If you're a renter in the United States or, you know somebody who rents, you've probably heard about the astronomical rise in rent prices in recent years. But this isn't just an issue in cities like New York and San Francisco, even places like Chicago, Austin, Denver or really any urban area have seen rents skyrocket in the last few years.

00:02:14:06 - 00:02:38:18
David Sirota
So today we're going to be sharing producer Frank's interview with Tara Ragab here, who breaks down everything you need to know about rising rents. Tara is the campaign director for the People's Action Home Guarantee Campaign, which is organizing to enshrine federal protections for tenants, including rent control and an affordable housing guarantee. Thanks again for being a supporting subscriber and for funding the work we do here at the Lever.

00:02:39:00 - 00:02:41:19
David Sirota
Now here's that bonus interview.

00:02:41:21 - 00:02:45:04
Frank Cappello
Tara, thank you so much for joining us here on Lever time today.

00:02:45:05 - 00:02:46:09
Tara Raghuveer
Thanks so much for having me.

00:02:46:09 - 00:03:14:14
Frank Cappello
So I am one of millions of Americans, especially of this generation, who is a renter and will probably be a renter for the foreseeable future of my life. I know it's a big issue that is affecting a lot of people, especially younger people. So I want to really get into it because it's very precious. So before we get to the actual Homes Guarantee campaign, I want to start with the actual issue of rising rent prices.

00:03:14:15 - 00:03:27:09
Frank Cappello
So rents are soaring in the U.S. and not just in cities like New York, San Francisco, but all over the place. So what has been driving this severe rent inflation and how long has it been going on for?

00:03:27:11 - 00:04:06:21
Tara Raghuveer
In one word, greed. This rent crisis that we experienced now is the product of decades of privatization. We live in an economy that is orchestrated by and primarily benefits the profiteers. And in the housing market, as on so many issues, in so many markets, that power dynamic where our homes, our predicate, our access to homes is predicated on a private profiteers calculus about how they can extract the most from us is so profound, right?

00:04:06:21 - 00:04:30:15
Tara Raghuveer
It determines everything about how we live. So the rent crisis today is the product of decades of this kind of scheming that the profiteers have done to make sure that their industry is minimally regulated so they can extract maximum profit. And you're absolutely right that the scale and depth of this crisis is unlike anything we've ever experienced before.

00:04:30:16 - 00:04:53:10
Tara Raghuveer
There's not a single county in this country where a minimum wage worker can afford a two bedroom apartment. Not an urban county, not a suburban county, not a rural county. And it's not getting any better any time soon. Right. Rent is the biggest bill that poor and working class people pay across the country every month. And that bill continues to increase in size.

00:04:53:10 - 00:05:16:19
Tara Raghuveer
And all of our monthly budget rent is also a core driver of our country's inflation crisis. And it's the most enduring driver of that inflation crisis. The price of gas might go up and down. The price of eggs might go up and down. The price of rent just goes up in our lived experience. Sure. So this is a this is a crisis that is predicated on greed.

00:05:16:21 - 00:05:36:07
Tara Raghuveer
It's predicated on extraction and the rental market has changed in the last decade such that fewer institutions are calling more of the shots and that allows them even more control over our lives and really monopolistic control over the market from which they benefit.

00:05:36:08 - 00:05:59:06
Frank Cappello
I want to get into that point specifically about how rental ownership is being more and more concentrated, because I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of people who haven't been renting for, you know, the last few decades probably still consider landlords to just be, you know, some person that you rent a house or a house or apartment from, you know, like a mom and pop, they maybe got a second property, they got another bedroom and like that's what a landlord is.

00:05:59:06 - 00:06:22:03
Frank Cappello
But in reality, the rise of corporate landlords has been very, very acute in the last few years. In fact, a new report by the government watchdog group Accountable, U.S. found that the six biggest property management companies in the U.S. brought in 4.3 billion in net income last year, and that is an increase of more than 1.3 billion from 2021.

00:06:22:03 - 00:06:33:16
Frank Cappello
So over a billion more in just one year. So why has the corporate infiltration of the housing and rental market become so bad in recent years?

00:06:33:18 - 00:06:57:03
Tara Raghuveer
It's become so bad because they're setting the table right. They're creating the conditions for them to do the business that they do at the scale and ferocity that they want to do that business. Private equity has bought up a huge chunk of the residential market both in this country and internationally. And they're basically the corporate version of a house flipper.

00:06:57:03 - 00:07:19:02
Tara Raghuveer
They're putting minimal money into their investments and extracting maximal profit. And part of what's enabled this is a lack of regulation at the government level. At every level of government, I should say there's a lack of regulation. And it's not even just that. And this kind of brings us to the promise of the Homes Guarantee campaign right now.

00:07:19:04 - 00:07:45:16
Tara Raghuveer
It's not just that the federal government has turned a blind eye or avoided regulating this industry. It's actually that the federal government and really every level of government has enabled this type of corporate buy up of our homes and our blocks across the country. What I mean by that is, at a local level, developers benefit from tax incentives that rob from the taxpayers.

00:07:45:18 - 00:08:13:08
Tara Raghuveer
Public schools lose property tax dollars so that developers can build market rate apartments that are ugly and will fall apart in five years. At the state level, we're giving away tax credits to the same developers to build that type of housing. And at the federal level, there are government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that have played a huge role in financing that corporate buyout of our homes and our blocks.

00:08:13:13 - 00:08:45:19
Tara Raghuveer
So that's what I mean by the federal government kind of enabling this particular business model that's predicated on economies of scale, right? These people make their money by buying up not just a single family home here or there, but rather a whole block of single family homes over here, a whole set of multifamily properties over there. And the the portfolio on net is how they make their money with very little thought to the people who actually live in those homes and pay their rent checks to the landlord every month.

00:08:45:21 - 00:09:10:04
Frank Cappello
And this is a specifically generational issue in that millennials and Gen Z are statistically much less likely to be homeowners than older generations. I know personally, as a millennial, I often hear members of my family say things like, You know, when I was your age, I already owned a house, had a family, blah, blah, blah. So I know we have a lot of younger listeners on this podcast.

00:09:10:05 - 00:09:12:21
Frank Cappello
What would you say to people who make that argument?

00:09:12:23 - 00:09:39:01
Tara Raghuveer
Pretty much everything about the American economy has changed since anyone who's making that point was raised right. Everything about the economy has changed. And in particular, I think there's a generation of millennials and people who are younger than millennials who have grown up in the wake of the last financial crisis from which most poor and working class people and most black and brown people never fully recovered.

00:09:39:03 - 00:10:02:10
Tara Raghuveer
And in on this issue, on housing, in particular, the perpetrators of that last crisis. In some ways, just shapes shifted and became the speculators, the perpetrators of the current crisis that we see today. Right. No one actually ended up being held accountable. The big institution that caused the last financial crisis that had everything to do with our homes got bailed out, right?

00:10:02:11 - 00:10:27:02
Tara Raghuveer
The big banks got bailed out. The perpetrators, the architects of that crisis got bailed out. The people got left behind. And those people, for the most part, ended up in the rental market and are still there. I think about tenants like a woman named Michelle Pyles, who lives here in Kansas City who lost her home to foreclosure around the last crisis and is now a tenant and she's a tenant renting from a corporate slumlord.

00:10:27:08 - 00:10:49:22
Tara Raghuveer
And she's constantly anxious about her lease renewal because she knows that she basically is, you know, waiting for one of two things to occur. One, her landlord says we're not renewing the lease. You have 30 days to leave. Or two, the landlord says we'll renew the lease, but your rent is going up $500. And those two things are basically the same right there.

00:10:49:22 - 00:11:13:13
Tara Raghuveer
Basically an eviction without a day in court. And landlords know that that is the kind of market that they're operating within these days. They have all this power. Michelle has none. And that's a that's a power dynamic that they have orchestrated in the last decade. Right. So that's a long way of saying when someone says, when I was your age, I bought a home, why can't you do the same?

00:11:13:15 - 00:11:20:14
Tara Raghuveer
They are fundamentally misunderstood, owning the dynamics of the economy that we live within today.

00:11:20:16 - 00:11:35:17
Frank Cappello
Perfect. Thank you so much for laying all that out so clearly. So now that we know what the problem is, I'd like to turn to how we can fix it. So you are the campaign director for the People's Action Homes Guarantee Campaign. Can you tell us a little bit about the work that you are doing?

00:11:35:21 - 00:12:00:10
Tara Raghuveer
The Homes Guarantee is a simple premise. We live in the richest country in the history of the world. We can't and we must guarantee that everyone has a home. And of course, this is a simple premise, as we've been saying, that's complicated by what I like to call a conspiracy of the profiteers. They've stifled our imagination. They've convinced us that actually no one but them can guarantee our homes, can provide our homes.

00:12:00:10 - 00:12:31:13
Tara Raghuveer
Right. They they have convinced us that our homes must be treated as commodities, as investments to be bought and traded and to be invested in made money off of what we argue in the Home Guarantee campaign is that our homes should be guaranteed as public goods, right? We should think of them as some of the most important public goods that are guaranteed to every single person who lives in this, the richest country in the history of the world.

00:12:31:15 - 00:13:07:19
Tara Raghuveer
So that's kind of the big North Star. And of course, we live in a world today that is nowhere close to that world that we're trying to build. So along the way, we've forced ourselves to think about what are the steps that we take today that get us towards that North Star. One of the things that we've been thinking about, especially in the last couple of years, since 2020 and the pandemic kind of blew all of our worlds open is what it looks like in the world as it is where the government is so deeply in bed with the corporate landlords who control our lives, what it looks like to condition every dollar of public

00:13:07:19 - 00:13:22:09
Tara Raghuveer
funding that helps to subsidize or finance the private industry on a set of tenant protections that make us more stable and secure in our homes and intervene in that power dynamic that's so distorted between landlords and their tenants.

00:13:22:09 - 00:13:39:18
Frank Cappello
Can we get into some of the specifics on some of those tenant protections? Can we start with rent control, since it's probably, you know, one of the ones you know, I'm sure a lot of people have heard of rent control. I live in New York City, which has a bunch of rent controlled buildings, and fortunately, I am not in one of them.

00:13:39:20 - 00:13:49:01
Frank Cappello
But what is rent control? How does it work? And how can new rent control policies get passed in in different cities across the country?

00:13:49:03 - 00:14:11:21
Tara Raghuveer
The rent is too damn high. We keep saying this the rent is too damn high. And it's actually interesting when we knock on doors and we say the rent is too damn high, people like jump out of their homes to talk to us, right? Everyone knows that this is true. This is maybe one of the most fundamental uniting feelings that Americans have right now.

00:14:11:21 - 00:14:32:18
Tara Raghuveer
The rent is too damn high and the rent is too damn high because of this conspiracy of the profiteers that we've been talking about. And in many ways, these corporate landlords who have such a chokehold on the market are engaging in a practice that we would characterize as rent gouging. Right. They'll say inflation's bad. The cost of goods and services is bad.

00:14:32:22 - 00:14:54:09
Tara Raghuveer
That's why we have to raise the price of rent bullshit. In every region of this country, the cost of rent is rising at rates that are outpacing inflation. And that is telling us a story about rent gouging. Right? The rent that you and I pay for the places where we live is not based on the quality or condition of the home that we rent.

00:14:54:15 - 00:15:15:04
Tara Raghuveer
It's based on whatever the market will allow. And these profiteers control the market. So they're charging rents that are not based on the good or service they're providing, but on whatever they can get away with. The rent is too damn high. Rent control says basically the basic premise of rent control is the opposite of rent gouging is rent regulation, right?

00:15:15:05 - 00:15:38:20
Tara Raghuveer
It's actually putting a limit on how much the rent can be increased and trying to tie the price of rent more closely to the actual good or service we're getting in exchange for what we're handing over every month. Right. So it sounds it is made to sound really radical in the world, right. That the dominant narrative about rent control is that it sucks.

00:15:38:22 - 00:16:09:09
Tara Raghuveer
It's radical. It doesn't make any economic sense. That is propaganda that has been placed very strategically. And it's a narrative that's been built very strategically by the very people who stand to lose the most if we win rent control. Right. It's like with everything and we have a you know, we have a big narrative hill to climb to get over some of that because their propaganda has been extraordinarily effective.

00:16:09:11 - 00:16:41:01
Tara Raghuveer
All we're saying is that a landlord should not be able to hike your rent by 30% when it's time for you to sign a new lease, because when they do that, most of the time for poor and working class tenants, they're effectively evicting them and they know it, right? Most poor people can't just find another $200 to pay every month to contribute to their rent check so they're not actually dealing with a choice when they go to sign their lease.

00:16:41:03 - 00:17:03:12
Tara Raghuveer
They're forced out. They have no choice. They need to move and something's got to give because the rent is too damn high and there's not places for people to go anymore. Right. If someone gets priced out of Brooklyn, they might move to a place like Kansas City. What happens to my neighbors who have been paying $450 in rent when a new landlord sweeps in and says your rent is now 1200 dollars?

00:17:03:17 - 00:17:30:05
Tara Raghuveer
Where do they go? Where do you go when you get priced out of Kansas City? Something has to give because right now the place people go is the streets, right? People. So many people live on the streets in the richest country in the history of the world. And that is because for so long we've been unwilling to entertain the simplest, least radical proposal, which is just regulating this market that is like the Wild West right now.

00:17:30:06 - 00:17:56:12
Frank Cappello
Yeah, it doesn't seem too radical to me to prevent landlords from price gouging their tenants to the point of, you know, losing their homes completely. I'm curious, is there any kind of like rental cliff that we will fall off of at any point? Like according to all of the data that your your team has put together, do we know if there's like if there's a ceiling on how much these rents can rise before, like you said, something has to give?

00:17:56:16 - 00:18:30:03
Tara Raghuveer
It's a good question. And I'm not an economist for real. I just sometimes act like, well, you pretend to be one. And I think most of the economists that we talk to and we would trust with some of this analysis would tell you that the best we can do is speculate. What I would say as a non economist, as a tenant organizer, as someone who's on the phone with people who have to pay the rent every month, is that we've arrived at the cliff like we are living ing in the nightmare right now.

00:18:30:03 - 00:18:55:17
Tara Raghuveer
Tens of millions of people across the country simply cannot afford the rent. And that has so many implications for the rest of their lives. It has implications for their ability to maintain their commitments at work. It has implications for kids ability to perform at school. We I think we are living we are falling off the cliff. We're living in the valley and all our bones are broken.

00:18:55:19 - 00:19:24:02
Tara Raghuveer
And we have to figure out what comes next, right? Something's got to give. I think we're already at that moment and to prolong the pain that people are experiencing now is to basically guarantee, you know, mass suffering for much, much longer than we can even imagine. And we're living in that moment. So I don't know that there is going to be, you know, people in the pandemic where, like there's going to be an eviction tsunami.

00:19:24:02 - 00:19:53:10
Tara Raghuveer
There is going to be this one moment that redefines everything. That's not exactly how I think about it. I think about it in terms of the pain that I'm experiencing second hand when I knock on any door in any community across this country and people are telling me a story about these horrific choices they have to make between putting food on the table or paying their rent between taking their medication or paying their rent, between leaving an abusive partner or paying their rent.

00:19:53:10 - 00:20:09:09
Tara Raghuveer
Right. These are inhuman, undignified, painful choices that we should not allow our neighbors to have to make. And we are effectively forcing them to make these choices by not acknowledging we're already in the crisis moment were on it.

00:20:09:12 - 00:20:32:19
Frank Cappello
I want to get into a little bit of that organizing that you and your team are doing, because I know that the Homes Guarantee campaign is has the federal pressure campaign that you're doing to institute some of these policies on the federal level, but you're also doing grassroots local tenant organizing. Can you tell me a little bit about that two pronged approach and why it is so vital to making these changes?

00:20:33:00 - 00:20:59:05
Tara Raghuveer
Absolutely. Yeah. It's both at once. It's everything all the time. And that's because the leaders in our in our campaign are really serious about winning. Right. None of this is about a narrative campaign or a message campaign. None of this is about like screaming run control because it's cool. It's like, no, we actually want to regulate rents and we think we have a plan to get there at the federal level.

00:20:59:07 - 00:21:42:13
Tara Raghuveer
We also know that we can't win without organizing masses of tenants into tenant unions and figuring out how to wield that kind of power more effectively than ever before. So I'll start with the federal campaign. Basically, we've surveyed the landscape. Congress isn't delivering for us any time soon. They're not delivering the stuff that we want. So we've sort of zoomed in on the executive branch and agencies that could deliver some of what we're looking for, some of this intervention in the power dynamic between landlords and tenants and one of the most important places in the federal government that we've identified is the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

00:21:42:15 - 00:22:30:00
Tara Raghuveer
This is the main regulator of these big government lenders or government sponsored lenders. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, right. FHA regulates these two entities and these two entities provide a lot of the liquidity in the rental market. So basically, landlords are benefiting from pretty damn good terms on pretty massive loans to do their business. And what we're saying is, as the regulator of these entities, FHA, FHA should institute some regulations that say if you are borrowing money from a government sponsored enterprise, if you get $1 of federal financing subsidy tax credit, you need to be on the hook to this set of tenant protections, including on regulations, right?

00:22:30:04 - 00:23:00:22
Tara Raghuveer
You get a dollar of federal financing. You can't increase the rent more than two or 3% year over year. Right. Let's just rein that business in. So that's some of what we're working on on the federal level. All of that is predicated like whether or not we can win. That is predicated on whether or not we can organize a base of tenants and wield their collective power as powerfully as is going to be necessary against all these forces that we're up against.

00:23:00:23 - 00:23:31:04
Tara Raghuveer
Right. We have to be very serious that the biggest lobby in this country, the biggest lobby, it's not the NRA, it's the realtors. Right. The institutions that commodify our homes spend more money than anyone. On buying legislators across party lines. It's not just Republicans. It's Republicans and Democrats and all their cousins, aunts and friends, right. Are bought by the industry that commodified our homes.

00:23:31:06 - 00:24:00:10
Tara Raghuveer
We have to be very serious about the forces that we're up against, how much capital they have to move around to defeat anything that we would potentially want to benefit us and actually cut into their extraction economy. For that reason. Primarily, we need to be so serious about organizing masses of people into tenant unions, in their buildings, on their blocks, across their neighborhoods, across their cities and across the country.

00:24:00:12 - 00:24:28:19
Tara Raghuveer
And that's part of our project as well. At the Homes Guarantee campaign. The art and science of organizing a tenant union is one that we are experimenting with. It's not new. We're not inventing this new thing. And there is some invention that's required in the economy that we're organizing within right now because so many of our landlords are nameless, faceless corporate entities, and because this economy of precarity keeps people moving, right?

00:24:28:19 - 00:24:56:00
Tara Raghuveer
So organizing people into a union when they get evicted once a year is an extraordinary challenge. So it's both of these fronts, all of these things all the time until we win. And we believe that we will win. There are more of us than there are them. More of us are more deeply in pain now than ever before and getting more clear on what we need to do in order to take our lives back into our own hands.

00:24:56:02 - 00:24:59:20
Frank Cappello
Well, I also believe that you will win if that's if that's worth anything to you.

00:24:59:22 - 00:25:03:09
Tara Raghuveer
You win, Frank. You're a tenant.

00:25:03:11 - 00:25:28:21
Frank Cappello
You've got my support. Whatever you need. I have one final question, because I found this interesting in preparing for this interview. So back in January, the Biden administration published what they are calling a blueprint for a renter's Bill of Rights, which was actually celebrated by those corporate landlords. So why did Biden's blueprint fall short, in your opinion?

00:25:28:23 - 00:26:01:23
Tara Raghuveer
We worked closely with the White House for over a year on this inquiry that they oversaw regarding the federal government's role in relationship to that landlord tenant power dynamic. And we felt some optimism about, first of all, just the acknowledgment that there should be some federal role. Right. And I think that's not to be taken for granted, because for decades, the federal government has sort of pointed us to states and cities and said this issue is a local issue.

00:26:02:01 - 00:26:27:19
Tara Raghuveer
And housing and any sort of tenant issue at the federal government has been like the ugly stepchild of domestic policy. No one wants to touch it. It's not politically interesting, popular, deeply felt, whatever. That's that kind of view at the federal level. So it's not to be taken for granted that the White House arrived at this place where they were like, no, actually we need a position on tenants and we need to be thinking about the relationship between landlords and their tenants.

00:26:27:21 - 00:26:56:01
Tara Raghuveer
We need to be working on a set of tenant protections from the federal vantage point. And the announcement that came out in January doesn't provide much in the way of material relief for tenants like Michelle, who I mentioned earlier. You know, Harvey La monica, a bunch of the tenants who had been engaging with the White House are their lives are not better off because of this announcement.

00:26:56:01 - 00:27:22:19
Tara Raghuveer
A lot of it was a sort of framework for what tenant pretended protections could look like and directives to Congress or agencies or state and local governments about what they could do. And that's disappointing, especially given the depth and scale of the crisis that we have today. There is some good organizing potential that has come from that announcement in particular, or this FHA FE work that we're doing right now.

00:27:22:21 - 00:27:59:19
Tara Raghuveer
You the announcement directs FHA FE to investigate their authority to regulate excessive rent hikes. And that's good. That's a foothold for organizing. And what we wish we saw from the White House was we wish we saw the the president saying the rent is too damn high and signing an executive order that directed all kinds of agency level action to regulate rents and investigate the the the market that has really run completely awry and has strayed so far from the idea that our homes should be treated as public goods.

00:27:59:21 - 00:28:41:22
Tara Raghuveer
And we didn't see that. And to your point, the the marker of the marker to us of some of the some of what was lacking in that announcement was that the National Apartment Association, the National Multifamily Housing Council, were running victory laps on Twitter the day that the announcement came out. Right. They have such a chokehold on the market, but not just the market are decision makers that they basically got away with making unenforceable pretty symbolic commitments and they got celebrated in a press release from the White House.

00:28:42:00 - 00:29:11:12
Tara Raghuveer
Meanwhile, absolutely nothing that came out from the White House regulates or reins in their industry in the slightest. And that is not viable. It's simply not viable to think that will continue down that path and keep these industry actors happy, executing the kind of harm that they're executing on millions and millions of people.

00:29:11:14 - 00:29:33:13
Frank Cappello
Like a lot of Democratic policies, it's gesturing towards doing something that could be good maybe one day if we look into it. But like you said, not a lot of actual material, concrete stuff in there. Tara Rajveer is the home's guarantee campaign director at People's Action, a national network of grassroots organizations committed to racial, economic, gender and climate justice.

00:29:33:15 - 00:29:43:08
Frank Cappello
She's also the founding director of KC Tenants, an organization led by poor and working class tenants in Kansas City. Tara, where can our audience find you and your work?

00:29:43:10 - 00:30:06:04
Tara Raghuveer
You can find the Homes Guarantee campaign at damn high rent dot com. Let me make sure I got that right. But I think it's damn high rent dot com and we have a new site coming soon where tenants who are interested can join us in our efforts to regulate the landlords that are getting federal financing for their business.

00:30:06:06 - 00:30:17:11
Tara Raghuveer
And you can find KC tenants at KC tenants on most social platforms except for tick tock, because we haven't figured out a way to do that straight away.

00:30:17:13 - 00:30:19:15
Frank Cappello
It's a lot of work being worked.

00:30:19:17 - 00:30:30:02
Tara Raghuveer
It's a lot of work. But yeah, you can find us there. You can find me on Twitter if you want more. Yelling and screaming about how damn high the rent is.

00:30:30:07 - 00:30:35:06
Frank Cappello
All right, Tara, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. And thank you for all the work you're doing on this issue.

00:30:35:08 - 00:30:36:13
Tara Raghuveer
Thanks, Frank.

00:30:36:15 - 00:30:57:08
David Sirota
Wow. That's it for today's show. Thanks a ton for being a paid subscriber to the letter. We really could not do this work without you. If you like this episode, please pitch in to our tip jar. You can find that link in the episodes description or at lever news.com slash tip jar. Every little bit helps us do the independent journalism that we do.

00:30:57:12 - 00:31:07:00
David Sirota
Oh, one more thing. Be sure to, like, subscribe and write a review for lever time on your favorite podcast app. Until next time. I'm David Sirota. Rock the Boat.