Thomas Breen photo
Activists Sade and Donny at an affordable housing rally.
(Opinion) — On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act, among the last great legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement. It took the death of Dr. King a week prior — and the massive unrest that followed in cities from Los Angeles to D.C. — to force a reluctant Congress to act.
The Fair Housing Act came 50 years after a highly contagious respiratory virus left its own imprint on American housing.
In New York City, where the 1918 influenza pandemic was especially lethal in the city’s overcrowded tenements, a wave of rent strikes and other collective action led to the seminal adoption of the city’s rent control system, as well as laws guaranteeing basic housing conditions like access to heat.
New York proved to be a model for the country: In the years that followed, safe conditions were an obsession of housing reformers (albeit often with horrific consequences for the minority neighborhoods bulldozed in the name of public health).
These two diseases — one of the body, the other of the body politic — have erupted again. And once again, racism and a pandemic are closely linked to our housing injustice crisis.
The economic fallout of the public health lockdowns threatens a tsunami of evictions and foreclosures when the current moratoria lift. And the virus exacerbates the risks of the resulting displacement; after all, one cannot shelter-in-place without shelter.
Since Black and brown renters are more frequently evicted, the coming eviction crisis will devastate the same communities already reeling from the harshest impacts of the pandemic.
The police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others — and the resulting mass protests — are also closely tied to housing injustice.
And the racism of the criminal law has metastasized to housing law: the only kind of evictions exempt from Gov. Ned Lamont’s eviction moratorium are those for “serious nuisance,” a term which in practice often means minor drug infractions.
The link between the racism of American housing and American policing is particularly poignant in New Haven. Racial justice protesters in late May marched over a highway connector, which now stands where thousands of people once lived in the integrated Oak Street neighborhood, razed in one of urban renewal’s great tragedies.
When asked about the protests of 1968, James Baldwin said that white America ought to put “pressure on his landlord, pressure on the local government, pressure wherever he can exert pressure.”
It is in that spirit that a group of students and faculty within the Yale Law School Legal Services Organization recently prepared a report on preventing displacement within New Haven.
We don’t pretend to have all the answers. We can only offer some suggestions, drawn from our experience with the cold injustices of the status quo.
In addition to other policies, notably rent relief, promoted by tenants’ advocates and the proposals in our report that address other drivers of displacement (foreclosure and insufficient creation of market rate and affordable housing units), two measures are particularly urgent.
First, New Haven should not wait for the state to act to guarantee a right to counsel in eviction proceedings. The City can and should do so before the courts reopen to an avalanche of eviction filings.
Roughly 90 percent of landlords have lawyers in eviction proceedings. But in Connecticut in 2019, over 93 percent of tenants facing eviction did not.
The few tenants who do have lawyers are far more likely to win their cases or settle on favorable terms — the truth is that the assembly-line nature of our current eviction system depends on there not being very many tenants with lawyers.
This representation crisis is a racial and gender justice issue: as Matthew Desmond has argued, “in poor [B]lack neighborhoods, what incarceration is to men, eviction is to women.”
New Haven, like New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and others, can help tenants — disproportionately Black women — fight back by giving them the legal help they need to protect their homes and hold bad-actor landlords accountable.
One might object that an eviction right-to-counsel program would be too expensive. It wouldn’t be free, but it would be cost-effective.
For the past two years, the Yale Law School Housing Clinic and the New Haven Legal Assistance Association have piloted a limited-scope, same-day representation program for unrepresented tenants in New Haven Housing Court.
With just a handful of lawyers and law students, we have already seen anecdotally the difference that even this modest representation can make for low-income tenants.
The costs to the City of enacting a similar, broader program could be reduced through in-kind logistical support from the Judicial Branch, the occasional award of attorney’s fees when tenant’s lawyers identify erroneously filed or meritless cases, and other measures identified in our report.
The budgetary objection obscures the real issue: we can either pay a little to help tenants fight for their rights, or we can force the most vulnerable New Haveners to bear the catastrophic costs of mass displacement on their own. Our City pays either way. This isn’t about what we can afford to do — it’s about what we can’t afford not to.
Second, the City (and the state) should ban tenant blacklisting.
New Haven has broad authority to regulate landlords and to promote fair housing — authority that other cities, like Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minn. have used to address blacklisting.
Those cities have done so because when evictions are wrongfully filed or tenants win their cases, tenant-screening services mark those tenants with a “Scarlet E” that can make it almost impossible for them to find housing in the future.
Landlords routinely deny or upcharge apartment applicants who have been in housing court, regardless of the underlying facts or outcome. This is especially true in New Haven, where our extremely low vacancy rate and the increasing consolidation in the landlord market have slammed the door on many tenants — disproportionately Black women — who have previously been in housing court.
Covid-19 and the government’s response to the pandemic have made blacklisting even more salient. Tenants are about to face a tsunami of eviction actions for nonpayment of rent because they lost their jobs when Connecticut and the City put the economy in deep-freeze.
The fact that someone was caught up in a once-in-a-generation economic crisis says nothing about whether they are a “risky” tenant, and it would be deeply unfair for the government to order working people’s workplaces closed and then fail to protect them from the long-term consequences of those orders.
That’s why the City should follow New York’s lead and make it unlawful for a landlord to deny or upcharge an applicant because of their previous involvement in a civil housing case.
One could make the argument that this is all just now-more-than-ever-ism. There’s something to that. These changes were needed six months ago, they’re needed now, and they’ll be needed until they’re enacted.
These changes alone will not be enough. It would be irresponsible to claim that the only thing we need to do to address police violence and the coronavirus is to address housing.
But it would also be irresponsible to pretend they aren’t connected. These crises have opened a window, just like 1918 and 1968. The greater failure, in our view, would be to let this moment pass without addressing our long-running housing injustice epidemic’s role in forcing our society to this breaking point.
This is the first in a series of columns addressing displacement, all based on a report by the Housing and Community and Economic Development Clinics at Yale Law School. Future entries will address the City’s role in preventing foreclosure and addressing the City’s shortage of affordable and market-rate units.
Nathan Leys is a recent graduate of Yale Law School and since 2018 has been the Student Director of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization’s Housing Clinic — Evictions Track. This op-ed does not necessarily represent the positions of Yale University or Yale Law School.