16. Eviction Moratorium: Activist pressure on the President wins

Members of Congress worked with activists to reverse Biden's decision on the eviction moratorium.  While it isn't everything we wanted, it clearly had a positive effect in keeping people in their homes during this crisis.  In this episode we talk housing as well as the importance of elected officials working with activists and standing their ground against the Supreme Court.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Mass, season 4 episode 16.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 8/13/2021 by FL.]

Anna Callahan  0:00  
Hey there, you are listening to incorruptible, Massachusetts. Our mission is to help you understand state politics. We discuss why it is so broken what we could have here in Massachusetts, if we fixed it, and how you can get involved. So I am joined, as always by my, my super amazing and wonderful co hosts, Jonathan Cohn, and Jordan Berg Powers. Jonathan, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Jonathan Cohn  0:23  
Yeah, my name is Jonathan Cohn, joining from Boston, I've been active with electoral and legislative campaigns here since 2013. We just passed my eight year anniversary of moving here.

Anna Callahan  0:35  
Woohoo! Jordan?

Jordan Berg Powers  0:37  
My name is Jordan Berg Powers. I use he/him and I am active in electoral politics.

Anna Callahan  0:44  
I'm Anna Callahan, she/her, coming from Medford and super interested in state politics, excited to make it better! So today, we are going to talk a little bit about the eviction moratorium and what is happening with that. I am going to have-- Jordan, why don't you give us a little lowdown on what happened at the national level with the eviction moratorium?

Jordan Berg Powers  1:07  
Yeah. So my understanding of this comes from a CNN report. And so basically, the Supreme-- the eviction moratorium was put in place by the CDC, which is an odd place first to house-- it wasn't passed legislatively. But that's because Republicans were in charge. So the CDC put in place an eviction moratorium based on our public health need to keep people in their home during a pandemic and not have people moving around and also that housing instability on top of a pandemic is something that is really bad for human health. Right? So that makes some sense and some reasons to put into it. Some Alabama Realtors in May went to a district court with a judge appointed by Trump and-- really to say supported by Trump, I think it's more to say Mitch McConnell, who obviously pushed through all of those-- And the DC Circuit Court basically agreed and said that there's no way that you can have a nationwide eviction moratorium.And then it got taken to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court seemed inclined to agree with the DC Circuit Court. And so Joe Biden basically said, we're going to set a deadline of July 31, and we're gonna end the eviction moratorium on July 31. So he wanted to preempt the Supreme Court doing it immediately, and say, we're gonna do it, we're gonna have some time and place to sort of put other things in the way. And so the Supreme Court then allowed the stay to stay in place until the 31st. But in its ruling, four justices made clear-- meaning that there's probably a fifth justice as well-- that they would be interested in ending the eviction moratorium, right? So the five conservative justices, probably six, are interested in ending the eviction moratorium, and Joe Biden sort of preempted it. So what happened, and then in the national news, is with all of those protests, right? So all of those legislative protests. And I think it's important to note that there's been a lot of criticism, like why didn't people do something sooner? It's unclear that this was something you could fix legislatively, because the Supreme Court has said it wasn't sure that it wanted to do it. Plus, you'd have to get the Senate to agree to it. God knows what Joe Manchin and Sinema and some of these other people do, right? And so what happened was pushing pushing Joe Biden to rescind that CDC recommendation was the fastest and best way to do it. But it took legislative action in the sense of them, making it an issue-- a priority, making, you know, making a moral claim. That protest led to Joe Biden reversing the thing he told the Supreme Court he would do. But instead of making a national eviction moratorium, he narrowed it slightly, but still covering most people, and pushing off that date a little bit further.

Jonathan Cohn  3:51  
And the one thing I want to highlight about this that Jordan alluded to, is that you you saw it was kind of like a rare public example of like Members of Congress actually doing organizing, which is something that you saw as well as them organizing and cut with with backing of organs like backing up like I was I advocate backing up into advocacy groups, local activists, etc. With like Cori Bush and a number of both, let's say other members of the quote unquote Squad as well as other progressive members of Congress making a very public show by hanging out kind of outside of outside the Capitol for the first time climbing to the register as long as they needed to. Until that gets extended and have Cori Booker Representative Cori Bush in St. Louis, noting even connected with her own experiences of housing insecurity. And what I hope this is a great example of is their realization that if let's say some back channeling that will never really happen like there are reports about once a speaker Nancy Pelosi having frequent calls to try to get the Biden administration to do something, the ability for any type of like inside strategy like that to work needs to have that outside operation at the same time. So by keeping it in the media and in the public attention for a sustained period of time, helped create the pressure that enable those who are kind of on the inside, whether it's kind of like Pelosi using her wall, or people in the administration who wanted to do so that helped enable them and make them feel empowered to do what they had wanted to do in a way that with low media attention, it's probably not gonna happen.

Anna Callahan  5:31  
Oh, yeah, I want to jump in with a two things. One is, as I've sort of studied and trained people across the country to successfully elect slates of candidates and pass policy, one thing that's really clear is that the elected officials *have* to be organizers. You can't just hope as an elected official that people on the outside know what's going on in the building, that they are going to organize by themselves, that they *are* the glue between the people and that elected body. So the real necessity for members of Congress, for members of the State House, for members of city council, you know, of every electoral body to be involved in bringing their people to whatever needs to happen, whether that's protest or letters to other members of Congress or whatever they think is the right pressure point, that is an incredibly important role of an elected official.

Anna Callahan  6:35  
The other thing that I was thinking when Jordan, you were describing, what happened between the Supreme Court and the Biden administration is, I think it's important that we remember that we as members of the public and even elected officials, it is not our job to agree with the Supreme Court. And I had a great sort of lesson in this when I served on a commission in Berkeley. It was the Open Government commission and Campaign Fair Practices Commission and dealing with-- we had just passed a public financing of elections law. And so dealing with some of the specific details about limiting the amount of money that could come in, and I don't need to get into the exact details. But someone said, "Oh, we shouldn't try and pass this, which we think is a good idea, because we already know, it got struck down in Arizona, and we suspect that the Supreme Court's probably gonna agree with the Arizona court. And so probably it would be struck down, and we don't want to get in trouble." In fact, I think it was the legal aid to that-- there was always a legal aid that was at every one of those meetings, and the legal person paid by the city, was there to you know, tell us oh, don't rock the boat. Don't disagree with the precedent in Arizona, and what with what we think that the Supreme Court, either their precedent or what they might say in the future, and one guy on the commission, who was just fantastic, he said, "Hey, it is not our job to agree with the Supreme Court. If we think that corporations are not people, and money is not speech than we should pass laws saying so. Because, you know, that is how we're going to get those laws overturned!" And so it's important for elected officials not to, you know, preemptively as it looked like Biden was going to do sort of handcuff themselves to doing whatever the Supreme Court has said, if it's something that we believe is just wrong.

Jonathan Cohn  8:45  
Yeah. And I just want to say also, I think not just to add on to that effect, I want my legislators to do things that are unconstitutional, that force the Supreme Courts react, just the way the conservatives do this all the time. They push boundaries. And then when a boundary set, they just be like, Oh, is that the new boundary, we'll just meander over here just a little bit to the thing. And in the meantime, it's gonna have a real effect on people's lives. Because people will be able to stay in their home while it goes into the courts, and the system moves slow. And you know, and the truth is, because people don't read the Supreme Court and they don't know the intricacies. Frankly, most political people don't know exactly what happened. They're not really clear what happened. They just know the eviction moratorium stayed in place, what people, regular people, people who don't have the ability to follow this closely read any of the things. What they hear is there's an eviction moratorium. And that's actually what's important. Because there's a vast difference between living with laws written in the way it's supposed to applied and the way it's enacted in the real world.

Jonathan Cohn  9:48  
And I just want to just double down about the importance of points of the eviction moratorium itself. Because one thing true just throughout the pandemic, and as we're seeing it, start kind of having a new resurgence now is if we want people to stay at home, the best way to do that is for them to actually have a home to stay in.

Anna Callahan  10:11  
It seems obvious!

Jonathan Cohn  10:13  
Right? It's very basic about that, that if we don't want people going out and about, if we want to control spread, people need somewhere to stay.

Anna Callahan  10:24  
And logically this makes sense. Like there are studies that show that--

Jonathan Cohn  10:30  
Exactly.

Anna Callahan  10:30  
--homelessness increases the spread of COVID.

Jonathan Cohn  10:33  
Exactly. And it's an overcrowding as well, in places where it was if you lost your house and ended up having to stay with somebody else and that compounds things as well. Think of the economic impact of it, when people owe a lot of back rent, in many cases, because that's a looming problem that if you suddenly make it so that people owe all of the money that they haven't paid because they haven't been able to afford rent during this period, that's creating an economic disaster as well, during a period where it's important to make sure that we get people back on their feet broadly.

Anna Callahan  11:18  
Absolutely. And I want us to turn for a second to Massachusetts state politics and the eviction moratorium that we had here. And Jonathan, do you want to give us a little brief kind of overview?

Jonathan Cohn  11:30  
Yeah, I can just say that one thing. So what last year, Massachusetts did have for a period of time, I think one of the strongest eviction moratoriums in the country. That combined a strong eviction moratorium with also some protections around mortgages and foreclosures to make sure that like to help protect, let's say, you're a small landlord, who might and end up losing the property in the process. But they let that expire last October, and they extended at once past the original, but it hasn't been in place since. But what we have had is a situation where if somebody applies for rental assistance,  they can't be evicted during it, since they're both from the federal level and the state level. And I'm at the city level is different programs to help people pay for rent, if they don't have the money during this. That's good. But there are limitations. One of them is the money often isn't getting to people as quickly as it should be, because of different bureaucratic processes, as well as some people might not even know that they have these resources available.

Jonathan Cohn  12:46  
So it's something that's better than nothing but it depends on a lot of pieces all aligning together. So that it depends on somebody knowing that they have that right, knowing how to apply for rental assistance, the assistance actually gettingto them, the landlord acting in good faith. And it's something that's much more of like a kludge than a flat out moratorium, although it's better than nothing.

Anna Callahan  13:16  
And let's remember that an eviction moratorium is not great. Like this is not a wonderful policy. I knew people when I was campaigning, and the eviction moratorium was solidly in place, who said that they were being evicted by their landlord. And I said, you know, there's an eviction moratorium? And she said, Yes, I know. But I'm not going to put my family through that. So, you know what? An eviction moratorium is not--

Jonathan Cohn  13:41  
Yeah.

Anna Callahan  13:41  
This isn't like the ideal, wonderful policy. This is a stopgap to desperately try to help the people that our system of government crushes, especially under the economic downturn that we've had during this year.

Jonathan Cohn  13:58  
Which is, and your point is a great one, when we think about law, having the laws are good, but the enforcement, implementation of reality, is never 100%. This is a separate issue. Like it's good to have strong laws combating wage theft. The existence of laws making wage theft illegal does not mean there is no wage theft.

Anna Callahan  14:20  
Right.

Jordan Berg Powers  14:23  
This

Jonathan Cohn  14:23  
There's so much we could be doing around housing, and aren't doing around housing, to just be forward thinking right. The pandemic has exposed-- supercharged this problem, but this has been a problem, right? This has been a problem for a while. We had, before the eviction moratorium, we were going through a foreclosure crisis. And guess what? That foreclosure crisis is still happening. And our state has done things to make it easier to foreclose and done nothing to hold the banks or people responsible who have done it.

Anna Callahan  14:58  
But

Anna Callahan  14:59  
But I just want to talk talk about money and politics for a second, because the healthcare industry sends a crap ton of money at the State House. And the real estate lobby is probably the number one form of corruption at local levels, but it's also powerful at scale.

Jordan Berg Powers  15:16  
Yeah, and I could talk about that specifically, but one of the bills, one of the many bills that we could do to address this and I think a lot about is there's a rep whose name I'm actually now forgetting had an idea of like a rental insurance the same way you have an unemployment insurance, that would kick in if something happened, that your rent would get paid, right? These are ways that government can intervene. And again, because these are predictable problems that we know people regularly have, and government should be the floor that allows people to stay in their homes to ensure. Currently the way the government works is the government functions as a system to make poor people's lives less stable, by kicking them out of their homes, right? There's government resources going to destabilize people's lives, and nothing going-- or pennies, right? Like pennies are spent going to keep people stable, who most need government, right? Like we make government unattainable for the poor people who need it. You have to go apply, in a language you may not speak, for assistance to pay your thing, rather than just having a system in place that ensures that you stay in your place and somebody gets paid if they need to get paid, right? Those are things that we could do because we know that these are problems. But instead, the system just doesn't work that way.

Anna Callahan  16:31  
Really harkens back to the episode we did, where we were talking about how our government just inevitably supports and gives preferential treatment to the people who have the most money and makes the lives of regular people and poor people as difficult as possible.

Jordan Berg Powers  16:55  
And I just want to say, as somebody who's on a zoning board in Massachusetts. I'm on the Worcester zoning board. The way that power works is that they throw money around without even having money thrown around. So Worcester recently had somebody go to jail, or at least gets convicted in federal court for taking direct bribes from a developer on something, but I can tell you that that's the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the times what happens is this just simply things like, I can't do this if I don't get money. This project won't happen unless you do it the way I said you have to do it. And if somebody throws a round a large enough number that intimidates me, I have to take a step out be like, Am I going to be the person as the zoning board to hold this up? Right? There's somebody money, and it took, you know, I didn't tell you as, as somebody who was who was, like, appointed to those boards, it took time for me to be like, yeah, I am that person. Like, who cares if this right? It was like, you know, if I didn't get to take that much time, I'm sort of wired. But you know, I tell you the first time it happened, I remember sitting there going like, Oh, that's a lot. And the second time it happened, I just thought "You have enough money! Who cares if you lose it? Like that's not my concern. Don't put it into things like this then, right? Like, my concern is what this project will do, how it'll affect the community. That's my job, right?" So anyway, that's my way of saying like, even money has the ability to corrode, even in ways that's not always obvious. And that's often what happens to our legislators. It's not just that they get money in their bank accounts, which they do. It's also the way that they say "You have to do what we say or else" becomes the way that they talk to us.

Anna Callahan  18:35  
Mmm hmm. So true. Okay. However, let's go through a couple more things that we should be doing in housing that we're not.

Jonathan Cohn  18:43  
Yes. So we're going to also talk about a bill called the homes Act, which is around eviction ceiling, because I just had a hearing hearing last week, and I always give credit for good backronym for bills when people do that. So it's the housing, mobility through eviction ceiling, ah,

Anna Callahan  19:04  
ah, homes, and which is just which kind of addresses the problem that eviction records can create for tenants. So back in 2013, all bunch of eviction records were made available online. And that was done as a way of helping people to manage cases remotely. But what it also did was give landlords a whole bunch of information for which to use to deny people, it kind of just screen people out of rare kind of renting, renting an apartment. And the problem with this is that one, even if you did nothing wrong if you were evicted, because of no fault of your own or over with not only not your own fault, but because of the landlord's fault, that record still exists, and that the existence of that record will be frowned upon by somebody that kind of whoever owns the property that you're trying to rent in the future. But even if somebody was at fault, we've developed the correct understanding over the years. Things like criminal records of being able to set a certain time. And then after that time, that record gets sealed. For the understanding that people should be able to have, like have have a fresh start, rather than having somebody stay with them forever. So you have that need as well, as well as the problematic element of children shouldn't have eviction record saying that they weren't the ones who like, what, regardless of what happened, they're not the one they're not the me.

Jordan Berg Powers  20:29  
The other thing that I talk about is the incredible information power difference between tenants and landlords. When do you as a tenant get to see whether your landlord had, you know, owned a property with mold in it and had reports of mice or, you know, anything, like, when you get to see whether your landlord ever evicted anybody, we don't get

Jonathan Cohn  20:51  
as 10 Yeah,

Jordan Berg Powers  20:52  
I've been a tenant forever. Like, I don't know, if I'll ever be able to buy a home. Like, in this area, we do not get to see anything about our landlords. And I once had a previous landlord who we we've both our neighbor, and some prior people who lived in a different house that this person owned, both said that, that he set up cameras, private secret cameras, and videotaped not getting so but there's there was like no way that you can find out complaints, actual sort of legal processes that your landlord has been through and yet landlords can they can forgot everything about you, they get your entire credit history, as well as any evictions or any you know, any of that criminal records, like all of that stuff, they can know anything about you, and you can know nothing. And it's a huge power dynamic.

Jonathan Cohn  21:49  
And you're gonna see this, that that's, that's also true, if you're trying to if you're trying to find a bank, right, so you make it so if you let's say you want to buy a home, you don't get it, you know, your ability to access a mortgage is so low. And you don't have any information about those people who might be servicing your, like, you can maybe go into their documents that they released a Wall Street, right, and maybe try to find it and read it, but there's not you know, there's there's a power imbalance at all levels of this process. That that again, like, you know, the bank, like I joke that my like, when we bought our when we bought our house, I feel like the bank knew more about me than my wife did. But like, I don't know, right, but I didn't I didn't get a say in that bag. I don't get to say like, you know, your foreclosure rate is really high, can somebody else service my mortgage? Right? Like, it's not, it's not the same level of things, right, like, so it all access across those things. And I think it's important to note that because one of the things that people in power do successfully is they always come back with these small landlord problems as the as if they are the problem, right? You know, like, so they'll say, like, oh, what about the small landlord as if the majority of us live with small landlords as opposed to people who own multiple properties, which not which most of us can on one property, let alone multiple properties, right? Like that already isolates you into a up into a stratosphere economically, for which the majority of us will never reach. And so like, you know, and

Jordan Berg Powers  23:17  
I think this small Oh, sorry, you finish your thing. And then I've got some notes. Okay. Yeah. This, I once read a book by an organizer who did a lot of a lot of work in the freedom movement, the civil rights movement, and he talked about, divide the united and unite the divided. And this is something that the other side does in this particular case. So the big corporate landlords, they want small landlords and what people who own like one building with three units in it, or maybe they own two buildings, they want them to think that the corporate landlords are on their side. And the truth is, that though the small landlords, first of all, usually they're the ones that are, you know, keeping rents pretty low, they're great landlords, they fix everything, as a general rule, right? Just statistically, and, and they are usually more on the side of in many ways, and many different policy areas, the renters, but they say, but these corporate leaders succeed in like marketing, this fallacy, that the the corporate landlords and the small landlords are, you know, one, you know, unified thing and we have to be better as people as organizers on the left at dividing the United, right, dividing those groups up into the people who actually would benefit from the policies that we want to pass and then uniting the divided, right getting, you know, renters and small landlords and hold the homeless and a lot of other folks to kind of unite in policy stances. Yep, go ahead.

Anna Callahan  25:00  
Yeah, it's a great breakfast. And you think about it for like for small landlords, like, the larger production of the larger property holders would love for your building to go live for you to not be able to afford your building anymore and have to go into foreclosure and buy it out.

Jonathan Cohn  25:13  
Yes, yeah. And that's, and that's actually the, that's the dynamic that's happening around the country that as they're trying to force, larger and larger corporations are trying to buy homes to force to take away home ownership as an opportunity and turn that into another place of rental income for wall street. I think, you know, when we talk about housing policies that we could be pushing, we really don't have a comprehensive housing policy as a state. And we certainly don't do enough as a, as a, as a coalition of progressives to push on these issues. You know, for example, so we, you know, we haven't talked about it, but I think it's important to talk about like, even rent control, all it says is that you can't raise rent more than three times inflation, three times inflation, and they're making it sound like we're in communist Russia. Really, that's,

Unknown Speaker  25:58  
that doesn't really say

Anna Callahan  25:58  
that all that each city could decide, right? Well, if

Jonathan Cohn  26:02  
you if you enact it, if you enacted rent control, right, that's what most people are talking about. And even that we can't even we can't even allow cities to, to offer that, let alone You know, some of the other things we shouldn't could be doing is requiring residency, you know, residency requirements, a lot of this money that comes in, especially in the Boston, you know, one of the things that's happening where I live in Worcester and Springfield and other places, is that Boston real estate, ORS are moving into these places, because they've been priced out by international conglomerates, in, in other in other places. So you, you know, a lot of these, a lot of housing gets housed. And so it's been housed housing, and we need to throw, we need to throw it in. So there's, there's like loads of policy stuff around this, I just want to end with the last thing that I think a lot about, because

Jordan Berg Powers  26:52  
it doesn't end on a cliffhanger. Jordan is frozen. Jordan is frozen. And you know, I we're gonna hear his final words in a second. He is to layer this golden nugget on us. Wisdom.

Jonathan Cohn  27:13  
So I belong to all these small, small business small landlord associations. One, they're better organized than we are I get updates on what housing things are happening from them rarely from our side. So that's how I know to show up to testify against them. The other is, is that you know, they they do do a good job of trying to make it sound like we're all in this together. But you know, one of the things about housing currently is that it is unattainable for increasing. It used to be that black and brown people were for were systematically not allowed to have access to it. But increasingly, not only are we but everyone is not allowed to have access to it because we're being priced out. And the only way that we could afford our three Decker was the only way we could afford to own a place. My wife and I was to own a three Decker to have rental income to subsidize owning the mortgage because we can't afford it right in this in the most affordable place in Massachusetts to own a place. And so just a little thing that blew my mind the other week. So July 1999, around the time that I graduated from high school, the average the median sale, say the median price to sell a home was 130,000 128 627. If you do inflation on that, that's $240,000. In today's dollars, right? Today, the median income for for the country is over. housing price is over $300,000. And in Massachusetts, right, so Jill, according to Zillow, July, sorry, April 2020, the average sale price was $300,000. A little over $300,000. It is now a high 500 and almost $550,000. So in eight years, we have grown to almost double, almost double, right, like in a half a million more than a half a million that the median income and mass and median housing price in Massachusetts, that is unattainable. Right

Jonathan Cohn  29:20  
that doubled over the past day.

Jonathan Cohn  29:25  
And so when we think about housing policy we need to think about are how are we ensuring not just that people can rent and be have the safety nets they need we also need to have pathways for people because homeownership is still the number one way wealth is built in America. And we can have lots of conversations about what that means and whether or not we want that and all those complicated things. But I but if we are going to have if we are going if we want to have you know housing instability housing as economic stability owning a home is an economic stabilizer for our communities and especially for black, brown and poor communities. We need to make it attainable. It is not. It is not.

Jordan Berg Powers  30:03  
Absolutely man, I am so excited to dig deeper into the housing because there there are a ton of things, especially policy if we want that we have not even mentioned. And I think we could easily also dig into why this is happening. Right? So why is in an economic downturn, our housing prices skyrocketing? Seems a little counterintuitive, right? So I'm excited to talk about that. We're gonna save it for another podcast. And thank you both so much. As always, we look forward to talking to everybody real soon, we'll do housing, we'll do climate. You know, we're going to talk about COVID Delta variant and all of these things. Talk to everybody next week.