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Tenant Disenfranchisement The link between affordable housing issues and fair housing concerns is illustrated dramatically in Sussex County, where three families may share a three-bedroom house, paying as much as $100 per week for a room. This leaves the landlord with a windfall profit, but the local government with an overextended infrastructure and houses whose systems are being stressed and eventually fail. Tenants have historically been considered literally as non-citizens in our society. In his book, Tenants and the American Dream, Allan David Heskin, notes that non property owners did not originally have the vote. Both Jefferson and Paine were in a very small minority that favored tenant suffrage and foresaw the emergence of class divisions and a new aristocracy, if citizenship were to be based on property. "The result of the failure to grant tenants equal suffrage rights in the revolutionary period may have had long lasting effects on the legal structure of the United States. Virtually no tenants had either input into the writing of the U.S. Constitution or any say in its ratification." When agitation came to grant suffrage rights to tenants, it had to meet the resistance of powerful figures, including Adams, Webster, Madison, Monroe, and Marshall. Heskin goes on to remark, "the arguments concerning the worthiness of tenants and landholders and their respective contributions to society, are very similar to those made during landlord-tenant policy debates today." (pp 5-6) Today the status of tenants has been upgraded to that of second-class citizens: non-property-owners. Fair Housing Roundtables A scarcity of decent units breeds insecurity, fear, and a willingness to be exploited. The result is a combination of resentment and submissiveness. The issue of tenant disenfranchisement is corroborated by the findings of the roundtables which DHC held in Sussex during the last year. These roundtables were designed to make us and other advocates and professionals more aware of fair housing issues by holding sessions in which we gathered information, instead of reflexively giving it. The primary themes which came out of these gatherings touch directly upon the point made by Heskin. Most prominent among them was the observation that affordable housing is very limited, if not on-existent. Long waiting lists for all types of housing and emergency shelter, chronic overcrowding, substandard housing conditions, and increases in the incidence and length of the episodes of homelessness were cited. Another theme was the treatment of housing as a commodity, rather than a dwelling, which results in lack of repairs by absentee owners, and the eventual dilapidation and condemnation of properties. Related to this was the theme of tenants being unwilling to assert their rights under state landlord-tenant and fair housing laws or under federal fair housing acts. On the toll-free Tenants Rights Hotline (1-888-335-7928) which DHC operates we speak with over 700 callers annually. This experience confirms the observations made by participants in the Sussex County roundtables. Tenants who do not know their rights are the primary callers. However, we often receive calls from tenants who are unwilling to stand up for their rights. Some have already been threatened in one way or another. In a few instances, the treatment about which they are complaining goes beyond violation of housing codes and fair housing law and includes demeaning and even harassing behavior. Gina Miserendino of the DHC staff has written a very thorough article on this in the joint (DCRAC, DHC, HOND) publication, Fair Housing Issues in Delaware: Reports from the Field. The Sussex Housing Group At the beginning of this year, the Sussex Housing Group held a planning session, at which it identified certain objectives which it would like to work to achieve over the next year and more. The main goal identified is that of helping to establish an SRO-type facility in the Town of Georgetown, which would: be flexibly enough funded to compete with rents in overcrowded situations in the town, and be able to accommodate workers without stringent admission requirements. It would most likely serve as a community center, as well as providing lodging. The other objectives identified fall under the heading of "unfinished business" and include code enforcement without displacement of low-income people, changes in code to better deal with abandoned and blighted properties, housing solutions which promote neighborhood stability and contribute to increased homeownership, and looking beyond the housing crisis in Georgetown, which has consumed almost all of our effort, to issues in the rest of the County. DHC was extremely fortunate to receive funding from NCALL Research to be able to continue our close association with, and facilitation of, the Sussex Housing Group through the end of this calendar year. Social Housing The history of the tenant movement in this country, as described by Heskin and others, has been one of struggle to increase their security of tenure, despite their not being property-holders. For the last few decades, their has been a similar, growing movement, to create "social" forms of housing, which span the gap, and blur the line between, the traditional rental and homeownership forms. These forms can offer security against speculation, greater security of tenure, permanent affordability, and preservation of subsidy invested by public and community groups in affordable housing. One such model is the community land trust (CLT), in which a nonprofit corporation acquires and holds land as the trustee, leasing it to the families buying or renting the units that sit on the land. Resale of the land is never part of the transaction that might pass the property from one household to another. Initial investments in land are preserved, making ongoing subsidization of affordability far into the future, unnecessary. Land trusts typically serve families at or below 50% of the median income for the area in which they are located. In a recent issue of Shelterforce (January/February 2002), Winton Pitcoff cites the example of the Central Vermont CLT, which "oversees 70 single-family homes, 80 mobile homes in four parks, and 140 multi-family rental units scattered over an area that takes an hour-and-a-half to traverse by car." We are faced with increasingly difficult land-use issues in our state, with the problem of preserving affordable units whose subsidy period has expired, with state and federal budgets that operate at deficits, and with the low-wage local economy in a globalized, structurally adjusted world. As Michael Stone says, in Shelter Poverty: New Ideas on Housing Affordability: "Suppose that a portion of the housing stock were to be removed permanently from the possibility of resale in the private market. Then once the original cost of producing or acquiring the housing had been paid off, the ongoing costs would simply be for operations and for any additions, alterations, and capital improvements. Even if nothing else were to change, the substantial expansion of such a ‘social sector’ of housing would over time mean a very sizable reduction in the housing costs of a growing proportion of the population. It would also mean a slowing in the growth and eventual reduction of mortgage debt, as the mortgages on existing housing were paid off once and for all." As we enter a new era for local communities and for the world community, we must, in seeking solutions to basic needs, open ourselves to new forms of caring for the land and the most vulnerable among us.
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