NLIHC’s End Rental Arrears to Stop Evictions (ERASE) project hosted on June 29 the first session of its three-part summer webinar series highlighting the 2022-2023 ERASE cohort and its members’ successes supporting local tenant organizing efforts to increase housing stability. During the call, participants heard from NLIHC staff, tenant-led organizations, and community partners about their efforts to educate, train, and organize tenants to advocate for solutions impacting their living conditions, as well as about the strategies being used by tenant organizers to divert the threat of eviction for renters over the long-term. View recordings of the call here and here.
NLIHC ERASE Project Coordinator Nada Hussein kicked off the call by providing a brief overview of the ERASE project. The project seeks to end housing instability and homelessness in the U.S. by advocating for the passage of more permanent tenant protections, including protections related to source-of-income discrimination, the civil right to counsel, “just cause” eviction protections, eviction record sealing and expungement measures, and rent stabilization/anti-rent gouging laws. Nada also provided an overview of the 2022-2023 ERASE cohort, a group of 34 state and local nonprofit partners that are conducting on-the-ground partnership development, capacity building, outreach and education, and policy reform/systems change work to promote housing stability, advance equity, and prevent evictions for renter households all over the nation. At the conclusion of her presentation, she shared an online resource located on the NLIHC website where individuals can learn more about the work of the ERASE project.
NLIHC Senior Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Renee Willis joined NLIHC Housing Advocacy Organizer Sidney Betancourt and NLIHC Board member Zella Knight to discuss the impact and future of the NLIHC Tenant Leader Cohort. The Tenant Leader Cohort is a group of tenant advocates and community leaders with lived experience of housing insecurity who work towards housing justice and racial equity in their neighborhoods and greater communities. During the call, Renee provided an overview of the work of the Tenant Leader Cohort, including its participation in a November 2022 meeting at the White House to discuss the ways in which the Biden administration can advance housing equity through the creation of permanent federal tenant protections. She also shared that the Tenant Leader Cohort will soon transition into its second iteration after the first cohort wrapped up its operations in May 2023.
Sarah White, a staff attorney at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, and Teresa Quintana, a housing equity organizer at Make the Road Connecticut, provided an overview of how tenant unions in Hartford, Connecticut, are organizing around habitability standards and concerns to ensure that tenants have access to safe and quality housing. During the presentation, Sarah explained that tenant organizing efforts in Hartford gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also suggested that tenant organizing efforts in her city enabled the state government to hire additional code enforcers to inspect rental units to ensure each unit was up to code.
Mihaela Gough, a managing attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza, and Betty Gabaldon, a tenant organizer at the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), joined the call to provide an overview of their work educating and informing tenants about their rights. Mihaela provided an overview of her work educating tenants about their rights to fight back against harassment and retaliation and recounted how Centro Legal de la Raza hosts pop-up housing clinics for tenants to learn more about their rights during their lease. Betty, meanwhile, shared her firsthand experience organizing a rent strike with her neighbors in her apartment complex. She observed that because of these efforts, they were able to prevent their rents from being increased for more than two years.
The ERASE project will hold two more calls as part of the webinar series. On July 27, attendees will hear about 2022-2023 ERASE cohort members’ efforts to pass tenant protections at the state level. Presenters will discuss the different types of tenant protections pursued, strategies used to pass protections, the various challenges faced in doing so, and how members from the cohort overcame them. In the final call, on August 24, attendees will learn about cohort members’ efforts to sustain emergency rental assistance programs in their localities. Attendees will learn how cohort members are assessing their communities’ need for rental assistance, what aspects of emergency rental assistance are continuing in the post-pandemic era, the various funding streams available to continue program operations, and legislative strategies for passing revenue to sustain emergency rental assistance programs. Both calls will be held from 3 to 4:15 pm ET.
Register for the upcoming calls here.