This is Democracy – Episode 159: Renting Crisis in American Cities

2021-08-04_This-is-Democracy_Episode-159
This is democracy, a podcast about the people of
the United States, a podcast about citizenship,
about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in
what happens next. Um, welcome to our new episode of this is democracy.
Jeremi: Today. We’re going to focus on a very immediate issue, an issue with a long historical tale, but an issue that affects many of our listeners. In fact, today, the challenges of finding an affordable renting situation in our society today, many people are struggling throughout our cities, Austin, New York city, San Francisco, many, many other places to be able to afford rent to be able to rent a apartment or a house in a way that’s affordable based on their income and based on their circumstances. And we are fortunate today to be joined by someone who’s doing some of the most important work on this topic. She’s devoted looks like much of her career to studying these issues and taking action.
To empower renters and empower them to make a change and find better legal protection for their needs. This is Shoshana Krieger. She’s the project director at Busta, which is a, an acronym for building and strengthen strengthening. Action based here in Austin and part of the Texas Rio Grande legal aid Shoshana has a strong background in this.
What Boston does is it works with Austin renters and their neighbors to ensure that all Austinites have access to safe and affordable housing by facilitating the development of tenant associations, which is important. So tenants have their voices heard and building renter power in Austin. And again, this is a phenomenon we’re seeing across, across cities.
And I know Boston is connected to that. They target slumlords who profit off of renting substandard properties, the conditions of which negatively impact the health of families before working here in Austin. Shoshana was a staff attorney at neighborhood legal services of Los Angeles county. So she worked on these issues there and she was also a tenant’s rights organizer at the Goodwill.
Lower east side. She has a JD and an ma in urban planning from UCLA. So she’s clearly, probably more qualified to talk about these issues than almost anyone else. Shoshana. Thank you for joining us today.
Shoshana: It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me
Jeremi: before we turn to our discussion with Shoshana. Of course, we have a Zachary scene setting poem.
What’s your poem titled? Today’s Zachary.
Zachary: They say a house is just a metaphor.
Jeremi: I can’t wait to hear it. Let’s hear it.
Zachary: Say a house is just a metaphor. That home is where the heart is as if the end of poverty is merely where the start is. When young we learn a home is what you pledge allegiance to that poets find a house among their boundless lovers, arches as if truth is merely that which we give credence to as if a house is just an artifact, we misconstrued.
But a house is not an artifact of flag or an embrace. A Homeland is not a Homeland. If you cannot find a place, a house may be four walls, a toilet and a bed, but you have no hope
of poetry. If your
young ones are not fed. And if we can’t think of a better way than what’s been said, then the metaphor can be put to sleep.
Instead, give the house to the mom on the street.
Jeremi: Powerful. Zachary, what is your poem about?
Zachary: Well, my home is really about getting beyond the very superficial, uh, language and euphemisms. We use to describe the housing crisis in the United States and really getting to the heart of the matter, which is that people just can’t find a place to live safely.
And, and stay healthy in our society.
Jeremi: Right. Right, right. And, and you, you’ve made this personal as well as systemic at the same time in your description. Um, Shoshana, H how should we begin to understand this issue? Uh, I, a lot of my students, uh, have told me that they struggle with, with rent, uh, but then others who live in my neighborhood where we’re homeowners often don’t know about this.
How do we explain this crisis to people who are not immediately affected by.
Shoshana: Well, I think that one of the things which we’ve seen over the past few decades is an increase, a dramatic increase in folks who are housing insecure, um, and folks who are paying, um, not just more than a third of their income towards rent, which is what, uh, the federal government would call being a housing cost burden, but are even paying more than 50% of their rent.
Uh, okay. 50% of their income towards rent. And so I think that even though there are many, many folks who are not directly impacted by the affordable housing crisis right now, um, in the next five or 10 years, likely those folks are going to encounter, uh, loved ones in their lives, um, who are being impacted by this crisis, um, or themselves are going to be directly impacted by this crisis.
Um, whether that be. Uh, kids who are graduating from high school and college and going out on their own and trying to find a place to live and being confronted with skyrocketing rents. So they have to, uh, go and live with mom and dad, um, or, um, other loved ones and family members, uh, who, uh, their housing cost burden, uh, might be, uh, in the form of property taxes and, um, mortgage payments.
And. Um, their house could be foreclosed upon, um, and that we are seeing the trend lines are, uh, in the direction of unaffordability, sadly, not in the direction of affordability and
Jeremi: how many families are affected. Do we have some approximately.
Shoshana: We do, I do not have those numbers, those numbers memorized.
Jeremi: And, and they’re growing that the number of people affected, you said the trend lines are growing,
Shoshana: right?
The trend lines are growing. Um, the national low income housing coalition, um, just put out, um, their, uh, annual. Uh, numbers on how much would it, uh, how much in each city, uh, would you have to make to be able to afford a one bedroom or two bedroom apartment? And here in Austin, I think it was really, it was 25 or $26 an hour would have to be the minimum wage to be able to afford an apartment here.
And of course our minimum wage, which is federal minimum.
Jeremi: Right. Right. So, so, uh, under that, um, analysis, I mean, it might even be hard for a school teacher or a firefighter, uh, let alone someone working in fast food to be able to afford a, just decent, small place to live in a city like Austin, right? Yeah.
Shoshana: Yeah, exactly. And you have, you know, uh, $15. An hour minimum wage campaigns and living wage campaigns, which are so important. Um, but just hearing, seeing that disconnect, right. That even w even struggling to get $15 an hour standards nationally, um, is something which is still. Quite a fight. And then when we actually look at the numbers, uh, for the cost of housing, there’s a disconnect.
So if we can’t even get ourselves to $15 an hour as a minimum wage, when our housing costs in Austin are over 25, w would be over $25 an hour, you’d have to make, um, there’s something really wrong with that situation and were very long way from solving the affordability problem.
Zachary: So how has COVID, uh, exacerbated this crisis?
Shoshana: I think COVID has laid Bayer, um, the crisis, um, that it, it has exacerbated it, but a lot of what COVID has done and the conversations and the headlines, which we’re seeing around this crisis are actually pointing to a crisis which has existed for a long time. Um, but. We have as a society, uh, just conveniently ignored.
Um, COVID has impacted the lowest wage workers the most. Um, so I think that this, this, this, uh, there’s a connection right between, um, poverty and the housing crisis and, uh, high housing costs. And that for COVID with COVID, uh, lots of folks. We work with day in and day out, had their hours reduced, had, um, had their job.
They lost their jobs, um, for periods of time and they were living paycheck to paycheck. So they may have, at this point, rebounded, they may be have employment now, but they had a month or two or three. For where they were without work or had, um, had fewer hours and because they don’t have savings and because it’s impossible to save, given the wages, they currently earn that amount of rental arrears continues to protect.
Jeremi: And building on that, Joe, Shawn, I want to also ask about the, uh, the freeze we had in Texas, uh, in the spring, uh, because I know your organization Busta was heroic and trying to bring water to be believing. Some of my students were recipients of, uh, your heroic work and help. Uh, but how did that affect the situation?
People in, uh, units they could barely afford then having to go a week without water, without power. What consequences did that have?
Shoshana: Well, I mean, there was the immediate aftermath of, uh, just widespread of water outages at multifamily properties throughout the city, which persisted long after, um, water was restored officially on.
That Austin water was putting out because the issue at that point wasn’t that the utility wasn’t providing the water, the issue was that there were broken pipes and other infrastructure issues at the properties, which was causing there not to be water. And then there were some properties where it was three weeks, a month that they didn’t have water.
And landlord did, uh, very little to try to get their residents water. And instead, uh, the nonprofit sector, uh, with assistance from government, um, were the primary, uh, providers of water during that time. And those landlords where the outages were three weeks, four weeks. Um, there were a lot of, there was a lot of damage at those properties.
Um, and the fact that it happened. Particular properties was also no accident. Um, that what we’ve seen is that even now five months after the storm, we’re working at properties, uh, where there was, uh, there was significant damage. Um, and most of these properties also have standing outages and these were properties which were in disrepair Hmong before.
The storm hit. And so that when then we had the winter storm, these properties weren’t able to be resilient against the storm because infrastructure, um, and maintenance, um, head, uh, infrastructure had not been maintained. And this all in the end, I think does, uh, connect to this affordability crisis and the affordability problem, because one of the reasons that landlords are able to get away.
With having properties in such terrible condition, um, is that they’re able to find renters who are willing to live in those conditions because there are no other options. Um, and that a lot of these properties are also in areas which are gentrifying, which means landlords are making a very specific calculation, um, and are speculating and are saying, why am I going to put it in.
Um, money to, uh, to make repairs at this property right now, when I know five years from now, I’m going to flip it and there’s going to be a total gut rehab. So I’m not really inventing, investing in something, which is long-term, it’s better to just not make the repair. Take the rent. Cause I have a plenty of people who will rent and then wait it out to the Mo to the moment, um, when I can, I can cash in and make bank.
Um, I think your, your initial question was how did, um, you know, how has that exacerbated the housing crisis, you know, on top of the pandemic. And I think just in terms of lived experience of renters, um, you have folks who are already. Living paycheck to paycheck. If that many already had a rear is because of the pandemic.
And so landlords, um, used existing loopholes. There were Austin still has many local protections on evictions, um, because of COVID, but there are some loopholes in those protections, um, in the event of a natural disaster. So we saw landlords using those loopholes. Just to get the tenants who are behind on rent out.
Uh, so the sides up those protections, and then just tenants had, um, you know, much, uh, have less of a safety net, uh, because they had less savings. Their family members have less savings, um, and their friends and their community to be able to make a move to be to. Um, to get out and in Texas, there are very few protections for tenants who find themselves, um, in a damage unit.
Um, and landlords really can almost unilaterally terminate leases with very little notice to tenants and tenants are just out of walk. Um, That compounds, um, that combines kind of the injustice, which attendants experienced during the storm.
Jeremi: And, and, and I will say I saw this firsthand, uh, one of my graduate students.
This is someone in a PhD program. Uh, who’s a high performing, highly educated person. She was in one of the, uh, units you just described, uh, a, uh, overpriced under, uh, maintained apartment complex on the east side of Austin. Uh, she lived there. She lives there with her husband because they couldn’t find something else that was affordable and close to campus.
And, um, I think she was three weeks without water. And what was most disconcerting to me is there was no communication from the landlord, um, and very little effort to repair things. Uh, finally I convinced. Uh, my student to call her city council person, uh, and the city council person’s office then contacted the landlord and magically the day after they came and repaired the water and had the water running.
Um, and it, it shouldn’t have to work that way. Um, and, and I think it reflects what you say and, and. You know what we would call upper middle-class. This is not even a poor person struggling, and we can only imagine what others are going through Shoshana in some ways, this is an old story, right? As historians, we know landlords in the United States and in other societies have always tried to exploit.
They have an incentive in a certain way, in many cases to exploit a tenant. Um, it’s an old English story as well. What has made it worse in recent years? What are the sources or why have we backtracked from what we thought was progress? We had made, uh, through the federal housing authority and other entities in the seventies and eighties what’s happened recently.
Shoshana: Well, I, I think you’re right, that this is an old story. And I mean, this is a story of capitalism and this is the story of us as a society, seeing human, not as a human it, seeing housing, not as a human. Right. Um, but as a commodity, um, I think in recent years, though, what we’ve seen is a. Influx of gold global capital into the rental housing market.
And we’ve also seen, um, a increase in, uh, corporate ownership of rental housing. Um, and we saw that in the single family, um, sector right after the financial crisis of the two thousands, um, where we saw some, a few very big players. Buying up, uh, recently foreclosed properties, um, and becoming a one of the largest landlord.
So taking a lot of properties out of the kind of mom and pop, uh, rental market and having these large corporate landlords of single family housing. And we also see that in the multi-family market. And so what that means is you’re just. The landlords that are even more disconnected from their properties, because oftentimes the landlords are guests, these marquee entities, which are very hard to even find who is in control of let alone hold the individuals, controlling those companies accountable.
Um, and then also means that, um, you know, when you have. Landlords who are in California or Vancouver or Nashville. Um, I’ve just rattled off some of the places, uh, that where the landlords of properties where organizing live they’re so far away. So I told her it’s a lot harder to hold them accountable. Um, that you were talking about the call from.
You know, your student, um, to the council member and then the council on Vercon involved. Well, it’s a lot harder to get for our council member to even advocate for a tenant. If the landlord is very far away because the landlord just doesn’t have as much to lose. Right. Um, and so it makes it, it makes them even less accountable.
Um, and it makes housing into. Um, more of a commodity and lots of a home. Right. But it’s not in the kind of the kind of quaint picture we have of a landlord tenant relationship is a, you know, oh, uh, one guy who has, you know, a couple of extra properties on his hand. And then he comes by and collects the rent every month.
Then he sees the. The kids grow and, you know, it’s, he, he has this kind of benevolent relationship and oh, that family struggling, right. Because he has a relationship with them. He’ll give them a bit more time. Um, and he’s a human, um, but that’s increasingly not the relationship of, uh, landlords to tenants in America.
Right.
Jeremi: It sounds more like a call center where you’re you’re, you’re the tenant, just like the person, you know, using the, the computer that’s not working and you’re calling the call center and you’re waiting and you can’t get anyone on the phone. Right. Um, Zachary, you had a question on there. My
Zachary: question is really why has the.
Th th the media, if we want to treat it as sort of one large entity seemed to ignore this problem for so long, I mean, it seems to have had such a huge influence, not just on individual members of our society, but our political discourse. I mean, just the fact that our president was the child of slumlords.
As, as Jeremy read in, in your, in your bio.
Shoshana: I think that, I mean, it’s, it’s a really good question. I, I might think a lot of that has to do with, with classism and racism. Um, that is so in Austin. 70% of black Austinites are runners and it’s 65% of Latinex Austinites are renters. And then 55% of all Austinites are renters. So we’re a majority runner city, but a disproportionate number of folks who are communities of color are renters.
And also. Poor people are renters. So 75% of Austinites who are in less than $75,000 a year are renters. And so with just like, you know, political power, right. And Y kind of our, uh, our poverty programs are what they are. Right. Um, they, there, there are many larger kinds. Stomach, uh, reasons for that. I think it’s similar to this affordability crisis of that.
Those in the media, um, are there’s a disconnect in terms of, uh, race and class of those reporting on stories. Um, then. Uh, kind of the stories which need to be covered
Jeremi: and what you would think about the argument that’s often made here in Austin and in other cities that, uh, the problem is a problem of supply and that the solution is in the market, which I think is something different from what you’re saying of just building more stuff.
This is often the argument made for gentrification. It’s the argument developers make all the time. What’s your response to that argument?
Shoshana: I think that that argument is a simplistic argument. I think both sides of that argument are simplistic arguments because obviously we need more supply, but supply alone, isn’t going to be the magical, um, solution.
Um, You know, w we through, through the history of rental housing in this country, uh, landlords haven’t just acted benevolently. Uh, cause they cut, you know, we had tenements, you know, a hundred years ago. Right. Um, and so, I mean, regulation is. Um, I key to curbing bad behavior across the board and humans. Um, you know, humans are humans and then especially in a capitalist society, um, and a society in which we value individualism over almost anything, anything else?
Um, I think that there are ways to get supply while at the same time, ensuring that a certain percentage of that housing is affordable, but oftentimes overlooked in, um, conversations around affordability. And how are we producing more affordable housing is also what are the standards for tenants, um, in that housing, which is produced, uh, because in.
Baseline, uh, tax credit housing, which is, uh, most of the, uh, low-income affordable housing, which is, uh, built. Um, today. There are very few protections, additional protections for tenants, um, other than what exists under normal state laws. So in a state like Texas, um, if you are in a low income housing tax credit unit, you don’t have a right to organize with your name.
Um, and so that’s something we see all the time where folks we’re working with end up getting kicked out of the properties, um, or we get kicked out of the property out, um, because they don’t like that tenants are pointing out the fact that repairs are needed and that the manager is a bully and that the towing policies, um, are unfair and likely on lawful.
Um, Hmm. W we, as a society could say, Hey, if we are subsidizing this housing, we want to make sure there’s a standard set of protections. And if municipality is saying, okay, we’re going to opposites own this property in exchange for you, giving a certain percentage of units, you know, allocating a certain percentage of units as affordable.
Part of that conversation should also be okay. What are the protections? The tenants living in that property are gonna have? Um, because really, if we’re talking about like a longer systems change and how are we shifting power and building power, which is fundamentally what, uh, Boston does. And our lens is about with everything we do is about how are we building a power long-term that means we need to be shifting some of this structures, not just saying, okay, we have a few more years.
If the folks in those units can’t organize. If the folks in those units can’t demand, don’t have leveraged to be able to demand repairs, aren’t allowed to renew their lease. Um, there aren’t actual caps on the rent increases, then those affordable units are pretty meaningless,
Jeremi: right? And, and, and I think Shoshana that, that echoes beautifully one of the main themes of our podcast each week, which is.
Democracy is a concept means that there is an essential role for government local and state and national to play in regulating, uh, the interactions between different actors in the market that an unregulated market often becomes undemocratic. And one of the lessons from Franklin Roosevelt’s new deal, our inspiration for the podcast is that there’s a very positive and essential role for government to play in a democracy.
I think that. Uh, directly into the sort of last set of questions we had, which is w what are you through Busta trying to do? And what do you see as the solutions, if there are any, or at least the, the elements of progress we can make going forward.
Shoshana: Um, so as the solution bosses sees organizing is the solution, um, that organizing and engaging folks and engaging folks who are the most directly impacted, um, into crafting and advancing the solutions.
And that if we aren’t engaging. New folks. If we aren’t building, if we aren’t building power, both pennant power in them, political power, um, then we aren’t going to be able, um, to demand the necessary, well, we may be able to demand, but we’re not going to be able to successfully demanding. I have those demands met.
Uh, regulatory changes, which are needed. Um, and at the end of the day, having community control over the development process and what I’m saying, community control, community control is thrown around all the time and oftentimes is used, um, by, uh, By homeowners and single family neighborhoods to say, we are the community.
Right. And who is community? And that’s it like a huge question, but when I’m saying community control, I’m talking about the people who are living in the multifamily housing are renters, right? Like a broader community of folks being able to have autonomy over the places they’re living. And that kind of goes back to the poem at the beginning of this podcast, right.
What’s a home and what’s a house. And I would say that to have a home. A house, which is a home, you need to have autonomy over it. And so we’re working to organize at individual properties, um, communities of tenants who then can collectively prioritize the issues they want to work on and collectively strategize on how to win campaigns, which prioritize.
Those issues. And that’s really in the weeds on the ground. And a lot of times the campaigns we’re doing are about one particular manager who everyone hates and W2’s people with dignity, or it’s about a one property where at the big thing, which is getting everyone is wind chimes. They’re not allowed to put up wind chimes.
Um, and that sounds like a lot about. What the feeling of not, uh, having autonomy in your home right now, what people want is to be able to be like, I want to be able to plants and I want to be able to kind of have my own mark on my home. And those, those issues are a long way from broader. How are we making sure that, um, government is regulating the market, but for Boston engaging folks at that level of meeting people really where they’re at.
First step to bringing them into a larger movement where we’re having those conversations. And that’s where some of our city-wide work is. Um, but you have to do all of it. You can’t just go into those communities and be like, okay, like, let’s talk about community control over the land people. Yo I have like the light in front of my house is broken and there’s been two robberies there in the last three weeks.
Like, don’t talk to me about like these larger, you know, a morphous issue. Talk to me about immediate solutions.
Jeremi: It sounds so much like bread and butter, civil rights organizing where you’re at. You’re connecting with the community. You’re building a beloved community and you’re motivating people to come together to make the demands for their basic humanity that are being denied.
Uh, it’s a very powerful historical way to raise awareness because it’s not about debating one policy detail or another. It’s about the humanity of those who are, who are suffering in these units right now. Uh, it’s a very powerful way to, to approach things. Are you, are you finding success?
Shoshana: We are finding success.
Um, I think it’s, you have to. You have to embrace the small victories and the small victories as what fuels larger victories, um, at north Lamar mobile home park, uh, which is a 68, um, lot mobile home park in kind of north central Austin. Um, last in the middle of the pandemic. Uh, we supported that association and purchase.
Um, their community as a co-op from their owner. Um, and that was after a five-year campaign. Um, and that they now have control over their community. There are headaches with that control, um, but they, you know, they do, uh, we’re supporting right now and another association where. Um, they’re all the families, uh, we’re about to be displaced because of the winter storm damage.
Five months later, the landlords were saying they had to leave. And, uh, the lamp after the tenants organize, um, the T the landlord. Withdrew those notices of termination. And now we’re working on getting a temporary relocation process, which is working right. And that in, in that process, we’re developing relationships with people and folks are, um, from other campaigns we’ve worked at, at other places, right.
Are supporting and in solidarity. Uh, th this existing campaign, we’ll see where it goes, but the folks who are organizing at this property are going to link into our work into the future, um, and are going to be able to inform future campaigns and hopefully build upon this relocation agreement that we get.
So the next one will be even better than this one. Um, and it’s kind of that small, incremental, um, incremental growth, which is. Like, which is a victory. It’s also exhausting. It’s not, we don’t have magic bullets and we don’t have,
Jeremi: this is always the challenge for, uh, activism. It’s maintaining the, uh, the.
For the long haul. Um, but it sounds like you’re, you guys are doing incredible work, uh, Zachary as, as a young person who lives in Austin and visits other cities and sees this issue in front of you. Uh, when it is, when it’s a matter of talking to people who are struggling to pay their rent and we see homelessness in front of us, uh, does the work that Boston’s doing and what’s your has described to you, does that, does that, is that something that could motivate young people like you to get involved and think about these issues?
I think
Zachary: so you mentioned. The resemblance to civil rights activism. But to me, it’s also, uh, it, it also deeply resembles uh, labor activism. Uh, and I think that part of the story of the past few decades has been that we sort of, uh, let, uh, those, those institutions, uh, that, that bring communities together, uh, and allow them to negotiate for better conditions.
We’ve let those, uh, institutions be torn apart. Um, by profit interests, et cetera. And I think, and I think part of the way forward out of this moment of inequality is to
Jeremi: rebuild this institution right, right. Within government and outside of government too. Right.
Shoshana: I would also say there’s the institution.
Like there’s also just the communal institutions, right? Like just our churches and just institutions for social cohesion, which have broken down. And that’s one of the reasons I. We love working with tenants and tenants associations as a lot of that work is about creating, um, creating groups and creating community space and of neighbors knowing neighbors.
And so I think part of the healing is also just through human connection and being able to see. Everyone around you as someone, um, who is, uh, who is part of your community, um, who, where you’re feeling kind of that love and human connection. And that’s something, um, which really, uh, we’re in desperate need.
Right,
Jeremi: right. The, the scholarship on social activism is so powerful on this and echoing what you, you just said, which is that, uh, social movements that, that endure tend to be ones where people feel a close interpersonal connection, sort of like soldiers in the military. Right. They feel connected to the person next to them.
And that keeps them motivated when they’re tired and they’re disillusioned. And it sounds like you’re building exactly. That model of activism at the community level. Uh, Shoshana, last question. If people want to get involved and want to learn more, uh, where should they go?
Shoshana: Um, so they can go to our website, which is www.boston, Austin VA S T a U S T I n.org.
Um, you can also follow us on social media. We’re probably most active right now on Facebook and that’s at pasta Austin. Um, and we have, um, a number of resources also on our local eviction protections and Austin and the eviction solidarity network, which we’re an anchor of. Um, so if folks are living in Austin, uh, listeners are living in Austin and are concerned about.
Um, potential evictions, definitely check that out. And it has a lot of educational materials, um, on what your rights are. And, and
Jeremi: what about those? Not in Austin. Are there, are there national entities they can look to? Or what, where should they go? Um, so
Shoshana: we’re part bosses, part of the right to the city Alliance, um, in their homes for all campaign.
Um, I’m not actually sure their website off hand, but you can Google right to the city of LA. Um, and there are a number of, uh, dozens of groups throughout the country, um, who, uh, organize, uh, the way we do and sometimes slightly differently than the way we do. Um, but there are comrades and allies in the struggle, and that has a map of all of the different, um, local organizations.
And I think w I mean, one thing. We kind of touched on. Um, but, uh, the struggle with kind of tenants rights and housing justice activism is that a lot of things, the issues and the problems are global and national problems, but most of our stuff solutions from a policy standpoint or local solutions, it’s about zoning.
It’s about our tenant regulation. And so that makes an even tougher nut to crack. And that’s why alliances, like right to the cities, uh, homes for all. Uh, coalition becomes so important because it’s really, translocal connecting different local groups who are all experiencing the same thing and creating spaces, um, for us to be able, uh, to both share ideas and also to nurture each other, um, and to learn from
Jeremi: it.
Sure. Sure. Well, Shoshana, thank you so much for, for all that you do, and for sharing these insights with us. And I want to encourage our listeners to follow up and learn more about these issues. This is something that affects us all, whether we are renters or not. And it’s also just such an important manifestation of civil rights, organizing and labor organism organizing today, as Zachary said, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you for having me Zachary. Thank you too, for your poem and your insights. And most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us for this week of this is
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