A Tenant and a Corporate Landlord: One Needs Help, One Doesn’t.
By Erica Smiley, Executive Director, Jobs With Justice | Twitter: @SmileyJWJ
Meet Erum. She’s a mother of two — a young infant, and a gregarious ice-cream loving son with special needs. Before the crisis, she worked in a cafeteria at a national office building in D.C. Like nearly half the country, Erum was already living paycheck to paycheck — then she was laid off because of COVID-19, making her financial situation even more precarious. Now, her landlord is trying to force her to use her stimulus check to pay for rent, instead of paying for the critical medication her son needs. Or for groceries to keep food on the table.
Everyday, this story becomes more the rule than the exception. On April 1st, nearly a third of US apartment renters could not pay. The next due date is May Day, and even more people will be unable to pay rent.
Now meet Sam Zell, the head of Equity Residential, which owns over 150,000 rental properties — including apartments, manufactured homes and RV parks. Last year, Zell was ranked number 119 on the Forbes 400 list with an estimated $5.2 billion in personal wealth. While one of his companies, Equity Residential, has announced freezes on evictions for April, May and June in response to the crisis, they simultaneously increased rents.
So, while people like Erum navigate whether to spend their meager stimulus check on food or prescription drugs, Zell aims to increase the already bulging wealth of himself and his partners. While the rest of us ration cleaning supplies, minimize grocery trips, teach our children while wondering if we’ll be able to feed them that night, Zell sees an opportunity to make a huge profit.
One of the top desires of many laid off workers is rent forgiveness, a break to allow them to stretch the little they have a bit further without endangering their families in search of work when they should be social distancing. And despite most not having a history of tenant organizing, they’re willing to take drastic action to win that relief.
That is why on May 1, 2020, Jobs With Justice and many others are supporting workers who actively refuse to pay their rent to Wall Street and corporate landlords like Sam Zell who seek to profit from our collective pain. They do not need government help or government permission to cancel rents.
Zell and others have the power to freeze and forgive rent payments for the duration of this crisis. And like with the grinch who stole Christmas, there is an opportunity for Zell to have a change of heart. In addition to not evicting anyone who cannot pay, he could forgive all rents due for April, May and June. And unlike many smaller landlords who are doing this out of compassion for their tenant neighbors — people like Mario Salerno who canceled rent for tenants in all 18 of his apartment buildings in New York during the coronavirus at great expense — Zell can more than afford it. It wouldn’t really cost him anything at all.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic downturn have exposed the fragility of the global economic system, which neither can safeguard public health nor stop widespread economic consequences — including job loss, increased food insecurity, and destabilized housing. But at the same time, we do have some control over our collective response. We can choose to wear a mask, to stay home, to support each other during this pandemic. And Zell and other corporate landlords can choose forgive rents.
Join the #RentStrike movement, stand up to billionaire landlords like Zell: https://bit.ly/3clSo4E
