Tag Archives | Rent

In this series, we (BAR Book Forum) ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis.

A new book acknowledges that “the rent is too damn high”—then tells us what we can do about it.

Rent control has been around for as long as the landlord. Since antiquity it has served as a tool for limiting land speculation, especially during economic shocks. In Rome, beginning in 40 B.C.E., in the wake of civil war, a debt crisis, and political turmoil, the government instituted a temporary rent cap and a cancellation of rent for one year.

New York State’s Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974 permits the regulation of residential rents  (“rent stabilization”) on the declaration of a housing emergency in New York City when the vacancy rate falls below 5%, or by similar declarations in municipalities in the suburban New York City counties of Nassau, Westchester and Rockland.

Setting limits on how much landlords can increase rents, as Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s legislation would do the moment the unjust state rent control ban is lifted, is a commonsense response to this sick profiteering.

Spend less, work longer or get another job, move in with your parents or get a flatmate. But whatever you do, don’t push for a pay rise to compensate for inflation.

A grassroots tenant-organizing victory comes after Orlando and several cities across CA adopted rent control on Tuesday.

The Cost of Living (Tenant Protection) Act allows ministers to temporarily freeze rent increases for private and social tenants and for student accommodation.

As landlords continue their relentless pursuit of profits, and politicians allow pandemic-era eviction moratoriums to expire, the human toll of a fundamentally brutal housing system is arguably more visible than ever—particularly in America’s largest cities.

Only 3.6 million eviction cases were filed in the entire year of 2018. The looming eviction crisis reflects the catastrophic failure of the U.S. government.

A June poll reveals American citizens’ anxieties on paying for housing in the coming year.

The new eviction moratorium was put in place amid protests at the federal capital led by progressive legislator Cori Bush, along with various social movements in the U.S.

Over 40% of Black and Latinx households pay more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with 25% of white households.

As millions of Americans stand on the brink of economic annihilation, the money keeps flowing to Wall Street thanks to carefully contrived mechanisms to maintain a dying financial system afloat.

“I had like $500 left in my account,” my friend Jordan excitedly tells me. “I was seriously fucked for rent.” Like millions of others, Jordan had entered his final few weeks of eligibility for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the government’s $2,000 per month unemployment program.