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    The Rent Revolution Is Coming

    Here’s a list of places you might imagine seeing an argument over housing policy. A city council meeting. A late-night zoning hearing. Maybe a ribbon-cutting to christen a new affordable housing complex.Instead, there was Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., on a stage dressed as the pope with a half-dozen hecklers in yellow T-shirts berating his new housing plan from the audience in front of him. Mr. Lucas had arrived at the outdoor Starlight Theater on a warm August evening for a cameo appearance in a local production of “Sister Act.” Just before he walked onto the stage, the demonstrators, who belonged to a group called KC Tenants, unfurled a banner that read “Mayor Lucas: Developing Displacement.”A pack of uniformed security guards promptly smothered the scene. During the slow procession to the exit gates that followed, members of KC Tenants chanted, “The rent is too damn high!” while the audience tried to focus on the mayor/pope and the dancing nuns.Such is the state of housing in America, where rising costs are flaring into pockets of resistance and rage. Take two-plus years of pandemic-fueled eviction anxiety and spiking home prices, add a growing inflation problem that is being increasingly driven by rising rents, and throw in a long-run affordable housing shortage that cities seem powerless to solve. Add it up and the 44 million U.S. households who rent a home or apartment have many reasons to be unhappy.That unhappiness extends across the economic spectrum. At one end are renters who aspire to buy a home but have had their dreams dashed by high home prices and, now, rising mortgage rates. At the other are low-income tenants who make up the bulk of the 11 million households who spend more than half of their income on rent. In between is a hollowed-out middle class that is steadily losing ground, although not enough to qualify for much sympathy or help.The confluence of all these forces has fueled a swell of tenants’ rights activism that has brought organizing muscle and policies like rent control to cities far beyond the high-cost coasts. Kansas City, Mo., is a leading example. With a population of 500,000, where the avenues are lined with brick buildings and side streets have modest homes with raised porches, the city offers little to suggest a renters’ revolution. Zillow’s home value index puts the typical Kansas City home at $230,000, or more than $100,000 below the national level.But with a steadily expanding economy driven by the logistics and medical industries, Kansas City has seen its rents increase 8.5 percent from a year ago, outpacing the rest of the nation, according to rental search site Apartment List. Over the past decade, Kansas City, like many places, has added a collection of high-end towers and apartments even as its stock of low-income housing has withered. The strain from rising rents, which landlords say they need to cover their costs, is creeping from people working in low-income service professions to middle-income teachers and city workers, part of a festering affordable housing crunch that spreads more widely across the nation each month.KC Tenants is one result. Pairing aggressive protests with traditional lobbying, the group exploded onto the political scene during the pandemic and has since become instrumental in passing tenant-friendly laws like an ordinance that gives renters a lawyer during eviction proceedings. It has also left a trail of embittered opponents who find the group’s tactics, such as protesting outside judges’ homes, ill-suited to what many residents describe as a cordial Midwestern town.Organizers with KC Tenants protesting a new set of housing ordinances during a council meeting at City Hall.Barrett Emke for The New York Times“It’s a transition in politics for us,” said Mayor Lucas, a Democrat, who says he meets with the leaders of KC Tenants regularly, despite being a frequent subject of the group’s protests. “There is a new, almost tougher political edge, in the sense that there are people who are organizing and intrigued by politics and are very angry and are not coming out of the same institutions that built a lot of us.”America’s housing problem was simmering long before the pandemic, and tenant organizing is a well-established trade. What’s changed is the depth of the housing shortage and the suddenness with which Covid-19 and inflation have tipped smaller cities into an affordability crisis. This has opened the aperture for policies once deemed politically impossible, in a wider range of markets.Unlike homeowners, whose budget problems are blunted by a litany of tax breaks and fixed-rate mortgages, renters are mostly unprotected from rapidly rising prices. Once cities around the country passed widespread eviction moratoriums and emergency rent caps that were followed by tens of billions of dollars in pandemic rental assistance, it was only natural for housing activists to push for some of those temporary policies to be made permanent.Politically speaking, inflation has only helped. Nationally, rents are now 20 percent higher than they were in early 2020, creating an opportunity for renter-friendly laws to get baked into long-term policy.“People take for granted that rent is always going to go up,” said Tara Raghuveer, a co-founder of KC Tenants. “There’s so little political imagination about what could be different, and now I think that’s changing.”A hyper-focused worker who blends the rhetoric of a revolutionary with the efficiency of a chief executive, Ms. Raghuveer also directs the Homes Guarantee campaign, which works to create tenant unions around the country. She described KC Tenants as both a local movement and national experiment through which organizing ideas can be test-driven.“I think every national organizer should be accountable to a local base,” she said.During a three-day visit in which I hung around the office and shadowed meetings and protests, Ms. Raghuveer returned repeatedly to an idea that has become a refrain among tenant groups: the hope that growing resentment over housing costs is fostering a broad tenant identity that will inspire a wide range of renters to organize and vote with a shared interest. In the activist nomenclature, this is known as “tenants as a class.”That’s an audacious goal in a country where homeownership is all but defined as success. An irony of the nation’s housing problem is that it’s become so pervasive that it has created as many opportunities for cleavage as it has for coalition. Need has grown faster than resources, making housing policy a prism through which a stealth conflict between the middle class and the truly poor is filtered.Even so, what’s clear is that in Kansas City and elsewhere tenants are becoming a real constituency. That’s not something you could say as recently as a few years ago. But a few years ago the rent wasn’t quite so high.Getting the DataTara Raghuveer, KC Tenants’ founding director, working outside the East Patrol Division Station where the group camped out waiting for Board President Tiana Caldwell to be released on bond.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesKC Tenants began, more or less, as homework.Ms. Raghuveer, now 30, was in her final year at Harvard when she settled on a topic for her senior thesis: evictions, inspired by the work of Matthew Desmond, the Princeton sociologist and author of “Evicted,” the 2016 book that explored the housing struggles of low-income families in Milwaukee. She’d grown up in Mission Woods, a suburb on the Kansas side of the Kansas-Missouri border, and conducted her thesis research in the Kansas City metropolitan area.After college, Ms. Raghuveer was invited to talk about her thesis in policy forums, and that’s how she met the women who would help her start KC Tenants.One was Tiana Caldwell, whose husband contacted Ms. Raghuveer as the family bounced between hotels after being evicted from their apartment amid Ms. Caldwell’s treatment for ovarian cancer. Another was Diane Charity, a 72-year-old retiree who rents a two-bedroom townhouse and who met Ms. Raghuveer during a presentation at the local health department.“She gave all these stats and I said, ‘I need to talk to you,’” Ms. Charity said. “We’ve been telling these stories forever, and no one’s listening. But she had what it took — I’m sorry to say this, but to talk to white people and people in power, you got to have data.”KC Tenants was founded in 2019 by a group that included Ms. Charity and Ms. Caldwell. A local union allowed the group to work out of its offices, and a folding table there formed KC Tenants’ first headquarters. That’s where Ms. Raghuveer was working when the Covid-19 pandemic erupted.‘Shut it down’For all the uncertainty that the pandemic wreaked on markets and the economy, there seemed to be at least one prediction that housing experts and policymakers agreed on in its early days: a “tsunami of evictions” was imminent.Nearly three years later, that prediction has yet to materialize. The economic recovery from the immediate shock of Covid was faster than many expected, and in the meantime trillions of dollars in federal stimulus spending and eviction moratoriums helped plug the gaps. Still, the attention that Covid brought to housing insecurity is poised to be a lasting remnant of the pandemic economy, even after rental assistance wanes and the patchwork of moratoriums expire.It shows up in cities like Los Angeles, where the City Council this month voted to expand tenant protections for renters in the same meeting that it voted to end its Covid-related eviction moratorium. Last year, voters in St. Paul, Minn., passed a new rent control ordinance. The uneven rollout of federal rental aid, in which bureaucratic hurdles frequently prevented cities and states from getting money to tenants, inspired a number of cities to experiment with cash assistance programs that are now becoming a permanent feature of the policy landscape.For organizers, the pandemic provided an almost perfect opportunity to build their ranks. Here was a crisis that affected large swaths of renters pretty much all at once, in contrast to the normal state of affairs in which tenants who are falling behind or evicted are dealing with problems that seem unique to their lives and mostly handled in private. “Embedded in tenant organizing are deeper questions about the structure of our political economy,” said Jamila Michener, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell who has studied tenant organizations. “It’s getting people to think about not just how you can leverage power against your landlord or get the city council to help you, but also questions like: Why does the economy seem to be rigged against people like you so systematically?”In 2019, Jenay Manley was making $11.50 an hour at a QuikTrip gas station when a paperwork error cost her a voucher that covered a portion of her rent through the federal Section 8 housing program. To help make up for the loss, she allowed a former boyfriend who she said was abusive to move back in. One night, she texted a friend who had been displaced by a rent hike to ask what she could do. The friend, Maya Neal, suggested that she go to a KC Tenants meeting. There, she heard Ms. Caldwell tell her story of being evicted during cancer treatment.Maya NealBarrett Emke for The New York Times“It was just this clarifying moment of, We’re not OK. People are not OK,” she said. “We are struggling, and no one knows. And the more of us who tell our story, the more of us realize our story is worth being told.”A few months later, after leaving the night shift at QuikTrip, Ms. Manley, along with her sister and three children, stationed herself along Interstate 70, next to a minivan with “#CancelRent” scrawled across a window in purple marker. She was there to protest the burden of Covid on tenants in a socially distant manner.In July 2020, KC Tenants protested the end of a local eviction moratorium and tried to halt eviction proceedings by logging onto virtual court hearings and continuously reading a script — “Every eviction is an act of violence” — so that judges and lawyers couldn’t hear one another. By October, the group’s members were chaining themselves to the courthouse doors.They also started targeting lawyers and public officials, including through a rally in the front yard of Judge J. Dale Youngs, who oversees the circuit court in Jackson County. Mr. Youngs said in an interview that at one point the group spray-painted “FU” onto a flagstone path in his yard. He added that he did not know if “FU” was the completed thought or if the vandal was interrupted before the message could be finished.“I’m a pretty big supporter of the First Amendment, and I’m the first to admit democracy is messy,” Judge Youngs said. “But when you go protest in front of someone’s private home, I think the only reason you’re doing that is to let them know that you know where they live. And there’s something kind of inherently not cool about that.”Locals argue over how effective these protests were, but there’s little doubt that housing pressures brought on by Covid helped open the door to policies that otherwise would never have happened. The biggest, by far, is a new right-to-counsel ordinance in which the city will pay for a lawyer to represent any tenant facing eviction. The measure was drafted by KC Tenants, according to Andrea Bough, the City Council member who introduced it.In an interview in her office, Ms. Bough expressed the same anxiety I had heard all around town, including from the mayor and from low-income tenants: even though Kansas City remains inexpensive compared with larger cities, it is spiraling into the same affordability problems as those places and is no more equipped to solve them.“We aren’t to the point of a widespread housing crisis, but if we don’t do something we’re going to get there,” she said.The right-to-counsel law, which went into effect this year, has already changed the landscape. Julie Anderson, a Kansas City attorney who represents a number of local landlords, said that the cost of an eviction had risen by a factor of five and that the process now took from three months to a year, up from a month or so. Her clients are unhappy, but it’s also been good for business: Ms. Anderson said she had hired two lawyers and three paralegals to handle the extra work.“That part of my practice was very uneventful,” she said. “Now, post-Covid, almost everything is contested.”The Tenant ClassBarrett Emke for The New York TimesKC Tenants now has 4,300 members, seven full-time employees and piles of yellow T-shirts ready for distribution. The nonprofit organization operates out of a second-floor office inside a Methodist church, and is funded through a mix of individual donors and foundations. It has a $450,000 annual budget.This month, members launched a separate entity, KC Tenants Power, that is registered as a 501(c)(4) and has more leeway to engage directly in politics. Like everyone else these days, Ms. Raghuveer seems to spend most of her time on video calls, talking in front of a banner that reads, “Eviction Kills.”Tenant-organizing has been central to any number of social justice and civil rights movements stretching from the turn of the twentieth century, but, in recent decades, it has rarely been successful outside localized pockets. An enduring issue in organizing tenants as a class is that homeownership is still most families’ goal.Covid has illustrated this. Once remote workers could live anywhere they wanted, many renters left big, expensive markets for smaller cities where they could afford a home.Ms. Raghuveer believes in a growing tenant identity, but she has no delusions. She doesn’t imagine that one day she’ll lead a protest march in which public-housing tenants lock arms with residents of luxe buildings, where one-bedrooms start at $3,000 a month and include access to rooftop pools and private dog parks. What she does believe is that housing instability, however it is experienced, can be a catalyst for a broader coalition that operates across traditional political lines.She pointed to a recent effort to help a local trailer park where the county was evicting residents in order to build a jail on the property. This would normally have been an organizing no-brainer. However, during a meeting, several members of KC Tenants said they were reluctant to get involved because a number of the cars and trailers in the park had Trump stickers and flags on them. Other members responded by recalling that the group’s community agreements, which they read before every meeting, declare that KC Tenants does not make assumptions about anyone.So a group went to knock on doors.“This little skinny gal comes to my door, and I’m like, ‘Who in the hell is this?’” said Urban Schaefer, a resident of the park who helped organize it after meeting Ms. Raghuveer. “A lot of people were skeptical about it.”In the end, about a dozen members of KC Tenants worked with residents to demand a better deal. And the county sweetened its offer: six months of free rent and at least $10,000 in relocation costs.Inventing HopeAn organizing meeting for tenants Gabriel Tower Apartments, in Kansas City.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesThere weren’t any MAGA hats at the KC Tenants meetings I went to, but it was a generally diverse group with a range of motivations for being there. There were Black women, who are among the people most affected by eviction, both locally and nationally. There were white men, who began whatever they were about to say with acknowledgments of privilege. And there was a child of the housing bust, whose faith in the American dream was shattered when his family was foreclosed on and a chain of moves followed.During a meeting of a tenants’ union in the gentrifying Midtown neighborhood, I met an economics professor who had come because she had wanted to better understand the housing problem. Later, at meeting in a Section 8 building on the other side of Troost Avenue — long the city’s dividing line between its Black and white residents — several attendees sat in wheelchairs, and one said he’d recently slept under a bridge.Small frictions abound. At one recent meeting, a young man talked about the “carceral state,” only to have Ms. Charity reply: “Are you talking about jail?”This diversity is, unintentionally, the policy conundrum that Mayor Lucas and other officials are grappling with as more people look to the government for help with housing.Around the country, developers have spent the past decade building mostly higher-end units. Eli Ungar, the founder of Mac Properties, which is based in Englewood, N.J., and owns about 9,000 apartments, including 2,000 in Kansas City, bluntly laid out the economics. The cost of development is now so high that the most reliable way to make money is by building apartments for tenants who regard the cost of rent as “a matter of curiosity.”This leaves two groups behind.“The folks who think of themselves as middle class and are feeling increased worry and pressure as rents go up faster than incomes, and the people who are most vulnerable in our society and desperately need housing that no developer can provide without a massive subsidy,” Mr. Ungar said. “As a citizen, I would be entirely comfortable with my taxes being higher to provide well-maintained housing for those who can’t afford it. The question is how that is achieved, and market-rate developers are not unilaterally going to say, ‘I will reduce my income to achieve this goal.’”Caught in the teeth of a housing problem that is growing faster than local budgets, public officials inevitably try to solve both problems at once, pitting the middle class against families who live on minimum wage or fixed incomes. This was the crux of the “Sister Act” protest.Mayor Quinton Lucas, in Kansas City, last year.Chase Castor for The New York TimesAs part of a new housing plan, Mayor Lucas had proposed a $50 million bond issue to fund low-income housing, but at the same time he wanted to loosen the city’s regulations for apartment projects that receive tax breaks through a program designed to create affordable housing in market-rate projects. The shift would allow developers to substitute middle-income units for those reserved for families in the lowest income brackets.KC Tenants framed the change as selling out families closest to the edge. The mayor’s retort was that the previous iteration of the program had resulted in no new units for anyone, and his hope was that the revisions would push developers to build middle-income housing, which the city needs as well.In the interview, he cast himself as a leader trying to navigate a difficult problem in world of limited resources.“We don’t have a Scandinavian tax structure,” he said. “Maybe we can get to it, but I don’t know that it starts in Kansas City.”Two days after the “Sister Act” protest, when the City Council held its vote on the plan, the chambers were packed with yellow T-shirts. After a 9-to-4 vote in favor of the new policy, Ms. Neal, an early KC Tenants member, yelled, “How dare you!” Security hauled her out with her arms behind her back in a scene that members’ cellphones captured from every conceivable angle.Ms. Neal being escorted out of the council meeting at City Hall.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesWhen Ms. Neal was gone, Ms. Caldwell, the once-evicted tenant whose cancer is now in remission, continued the chant. “Not another penny for the slumlords!” she shouted. She was removed just as fast, only instead of getting booted to an outdoor bench, like the one where Ms. Neal sat after she’d left the building, Ms. Caldwell was arrested and taken to a local police station.An hour later, the lawn outside the station was crowded with yellow shirts. Members of KC Tenants lay on the grass typing on laptops and eating pizza. A slice was waiting for Ms. Caldwell when she emerged a short time later to cheers.“I’m feeling great,” she said to the crowd, as her 15-year-old son joined her. “I’m doing this so that my baby will never have to.”After a chant of “Tiana, we got your back!” a small group that included Ms. Caldwell and Ms. Raghuveer went to a wine bar to relax. The bar was closing, but Ms. Raghuveer said she’d called the owner, who’d promised to keep it open for them. She added that he was a renter. More

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    Funding Fight Threatens Plan to Pump Billions Into Affordable Housing

    A federal voucher program is at risk of being sharply scaled back as the White House seeks to slash its social policy package to appease two centrist senators.SAN FRANCISCO — Audrey Sylve, a retired bus driver, has spent 13 agonizing years on a waiting list for a federal voucher that would help cover rent for an apartment in one of America’s most expensive housing markets.This summer it seemed that help was finally on the way.In late July, congressional Democrats introduced a $322 billion plan to bolster low-income housing programs as part of the $3.5 trillion social spending plan embraced by President Biden. At its center is a $200 billion infusion of aid for the country’s poorest tenants, which would allow another 750,000 households to participate in a program that currently serves two million families.Affordable-housing advocates saw it as a once-in-a-generation windfall that would allow local governments to move thousands of low-income tenants like Ms. Sylve, 72, off waiting lists and to expand aid to families at the highest risk of homelessness.But optimism has given way to anxiety. Low-income housing, and the voucher program in particular, are among those most at risk of being sharply scaled back as the White House seeks to slash the package to accommodate the demands of two centrist Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, according to several people involved in the talks.Congressional negotiators are seeking to cut the overall size of the 10-year package, in coordination with the White House, to between $1.9 trillion and $2.3 trillion. Housing is just one of several high-price priorities on the chopping block in the negotiations.Yet proponents say no other proposal is likely to have as immediate an effect on the lives of the country’s most vulnerable as the increase in rental assistance because it addresses a foundational problem: securing an affordable place to live when rents everywhere are outpacing earnings.“I’m all for funding early childhood education, child care and the expansion of health care with education, but we cannot be successful with any of that unless people have safe and secure housing,” said Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat who leads the House Financial Services Committee, which drafted the original plan.Supporters of the expansion say every penny is required to begin addressing a crisis that threatens to undermine recent gains in the fight to reduce poverty. They fear it will be elbowed aside by other programs, such as universal child care, that enjoy broader political support because they benefit middle-class, and not just poor, people.“Better health care or increased educational access doesn’t do much for families sleeping in their car or under a bridge, or for the millions more on the verge,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which is pressuring the White House to fund the program as it was drafted. “There are no ‘savings’ to be had here.”The financial services industry, which puts together the complex public-private financing packages used to build most affordable developments, has already factored in a significantly scaled-back congressional compromise.“Much of the proposed $400 billion in housing-related grants and tax subsidies is likely to be cut from the reconciliation bill,” analysts from Goldman Sachs wrote in an email last week. That figure bundled the $332 billion package, which also includes increases for public housing authorities and an affordable housing construction fund, with a smaller package of tax breaks in the bill.White House officials say they have made no decisions. Ms Waters and her counterpart in the Senate, Sherrod Brown, a Democrat of Ohio, said they would not accept any deal that cut the housing plan more than any other proposal.“We’re not going to scale back. We’re not going to lose our way on this,” Mr. Brown, chairman of the Banking Committee, said in an interview. “And we’re not going to compromise the mission of transforming the fight on poverty.”The White House is looking for ways to win support for its package from Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin III.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesOver the past two decades, the federal government has stopped bankrolling construction of government-run public housing projects. Instead, it has shifted resources to voucher programs, which bridge the financial gap between what a poor tenant can afford to pay and what a landlord might reasonably expect to get on the open market.Demand far outstrips supply: One recent study found that the federal government has provided funding for only a quarter of the vouchers needed to help house eligible families — and many housing authorities have simply stopped taking names to avoid leaving tenants in the lurch.Even if the voucher increase somehow makes it past Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, it would represent only a down payment on an enormous unmet need for housing aid exacerbated by rocketing real estate values in most major cities.California’s estimated share of the new aid would bankroll only a fraction of the new vouchers needed to meet the demand, said Matthew Schwartz, president of the California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that works with community groups to finance low-income housing projects.But it would be a significant improvement, Mr. Schwartz said, particularly on top of a $22 billion affordable-housing plan that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law this summer.Joseph Villarreal, executive director of the housing authority of Contra Costa County, outside San Francisco, is less concerned about the future than fulfilling the promises he has made in the past. He saw the new cash in personal terms, as a way to fulfill a commitment more than a decade in arrears.“It would be horrible if any, much less the majority, if this voucher money gets cut from the proposal,” he said.Mr. Villarreal’s organization, which serves as a pass-through for federal funding, maintains 51 separate waiting lists for the vouchers — some for specific developments, others for targeted demographic groups, with 47,000 families in limbo. “It weighs on me,” he said of the lists.Ms. Sylve, who said she was scraping by on a small pension and Social Security, was one of 6,000 chosen from 40,000 qualified Contra Costa County applicants in a lottery to be added to the slow-moving queue for the program, which is still known by its historical name, Section 8.A few years ago she was told that a voucher was about to become available, but that fell through, and she has spent much of the past 13 years hopping from apartment to apartment. Last spring, Ms. Sylve moved in with her daughter across the bay in San Francisco, because the neighborhood around her apartment had become too dangerous.“They give you hope, and that’s the hardest part,” Ms. Sylve said. “But you keep hoping, year after year after year.”A survey of 44 large housing authorities across the country conducted by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning Washington think tank, painted a grim picture of the voucher program. A total of 737,000 people were on waiting lists, and 32 of the authorities are refusing to take new applications, with a few exceptions for particularly vulnerable populations.The situation on the West Coast was especially dire, with eight times as many people lingering on waiting lists as receiving aid in San Diego, where the list has topped 108,000. Long waiting lists are also a staple in Washington, Philadelphia, Houston, Honolulu, Little Rock, Ark., and New York, which closed its list years ago.Will Fischer, director for housing policy for the center, said bolstering the voucher program was the most important single move the federal government could make to address the homelessness crisis.“Look, the public housing money is urgently needed — but it would be for existing units, for families who already have a place to live,” he said. “And most of the other funding in the proposal actually serves people a little bit higher up the income scale.”Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat whose district is among the poorest in the country, said housing always seemed to be listed as the third, fourth or fifth priority of many liberal lawmakers.When House Democrats peppered Mr. Biden with questions about the social spending package at a meeting in the Capitol this month, Mr. Torres — a former chairman of the New York City Council housing committee — was stunned when he realized no one had asked the president about rental aid, and spoke up.Mr. Biden responded by promising he would “protect” housing, without elaborating, Mr. Torres said. 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    Progressive Lawmakers to Unveil Legislation on Energy and Public Housing

    The proposal, billed as the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, offers a clear policy marker for liberals as Democrats seek to influence President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan.WASHINGTON — Top liberal lawmakers are set to unveil legislation on Monday that would modernize the public housing system and start a transition to renewable energy, offering a clear policy marker for progressives as Democrats haggle over the details of President Biden’s infrastructure plan and how to push it through Congress.The introduction of the legislation, led by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, is the first of multiple proposals from progressive lawmakers as they seek to influence a $2.3 trillion infrastructure overhaul to address climate change and economic inequities.Their proposal comes as Mr. Biden and his allies are navigating congressional crosscurrents that include the larger policy demands of a Democratic caucus that has little room for disagreement and Republicans who say they want to compromise, but have largely panned a plan paid for by tax increases. While the president has outlined the broad contours of his proposal, it is up to lawmakers to reach agreement on the final provisions and details of the legislation.Some lawmakers are floating the prospect of downsizing Mr. Biden’s legislative plan to win the 10 Republican votes needed to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate, amid a flurry of lobbying from rank-and-file members. Progressive Democrats like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Mr. Sanders are instead doubling down on their call for a larger package than the president proposed and pushing to shape what could be one of the largest investments of federal dollars in a generation.The progressives’ legislation, billed as the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, is a prong of the broader climate platform that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and others have long championed to help the United States wean itself from fossil fuels. It would repeal limitations on the construction of public housing and create grant programs to ensure improvements that not only address unsafe and aging housing, but reduce carbon emissions.“We’re here to make sure the Democratic Party upholds its values and keeps its promises, and to also push and expand the scope and the ambition of the Democratic Party,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview. She and other liberal lawmakers are expected to reintroduce additional parts of the Green New Deal this week.Filling sand bags to protect public housing before a hurricane in Lumberton, N.C., in 2019. Republicans have seized on the climate and housing provisions in President Biden’s infrastructure plan as overreach.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesTo qualify for the grants, recipients would have to adhere to strong labor standards, such as protection of collective bargaining and use of American manufacturing and products. The legislation would also fund tenant protection vouchers for displaced residents and create apprenticeship programs for residents.When Mr. Biden outlined his proposal last month, he called for more than $40 billion to improve public housing infrastructure. At an event in New York on Sunday, a group of lawmakers from the state, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, pushed for at least double that figure.“Public housing has been neglected, left to get worse, and we’re not going to stand for it anymore,” Mr. Schumer said. The president’s plan, he added, was “a good start, but it ain’t enough.”Mr. Sanders, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and allies envision the proposal costing between $119 billion and $172 billion over 10 years to meet the needs of their constituents, according to an estimate provided to The New York Times. It aims to create thousands of maintenance and construction jobs.“Probably our best bet would be one bill — and it should be a large bill,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “I think it’s just easier and more efficient for us to work as hard as we can in a comprehensive broad infrastructure plan, which includes human infrastructure as well as physical infrastruture.”Republicans, who have sought to weaponize the Green New Deal in recent years as egregious federal overreach that would harm the economy, have already seized on the climate and housing provisions in Mr. Biden’s plan as far beyond the traditional definition of infrastructure. Mr. Biden is also preparing a second proposal that would focus even more on projects outside what Republicans call “real” infrastructure and could bring the total cost to $4 trillion.“Republicans are not going to partner with Democrats on the Green New Deal or on raising taxes to pay for it,” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said at a news conference last month. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, has repeatedly warned that the infrastructure plan is “a Trojan horse” for liberal priorities, while Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, declared last week that “it’s a lot of Green New Deal” that would lead voters to turn away from Democrats.“I think the expansive definition of infrastructure that we see in this sort of ‘Green New Deal wish list’ is called into question,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said on “Fox News” last week. “I don’t think that the American people, when they think of infrastructure, are thinking of home health aides and other things that are included in this bill.”In acknowledgment of both Republican resistance to Mr. Biden’s plan and the lure of bipartisan legislation, some lawmakers have raised the possibility of first passing a smaller bill that addresses roads, bridges and broadband with Republican votes before Democrats use the fast-track budget reconciliation process to bypass the filibuster and unilaterally push the remainder of the legislative proposals through both chambers.“I think that if we come together in a bipartisan way to pass that $800 billion hard infrastructure bill that you were talking about, that I’ve been urging, then we show our people that we can solve their problems,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said on “Fox News Sunday.” While the progressives’ proposal is largely unchanged from its original iteration in 2019, the political landscape is vastly different, with Democrats in control of Washington. Mr. Sanders now oversees the Senate Budget Committee, and a historic investment of federal funds to counter the economic and health effects of the coronavirus pandemic has some lawmakers and voters more open to substantial spending.“The time has now caught up to the legislation, and I’m really thrilled about that,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “You have a respiratory pandemic that’s layered on communities that are suffering from childhood asthma, that are already dealing with lung issues, that have pre-existing hypertension, which are all indicated by factors of environmental injustice.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives have championed a broader climate platform.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe Congressional Progressive Caucus, in an outline of five priorities for the final infrastructure product, singled out key elements of the housing legislation, including the energy efficiency standards. But with slim margins in both chambers and a huge lobbying campaign underway to ensure pet policies and provisions are included, it is unclear how Democrats would work this proposal in and whether every member of the caucus would sign on.Mr. Sanders acknowledged that the path forward for his proposal — and a number of other liberal priorities — could be difficult even with Democrats in control. He and other members of his party are exploring using budget reconciliation to pass elements of Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda, including his infrastructure plan. But without Republican votes, every Senate Democrat would need to remain united behind the entire package.“That is not easy stuff,” Mr. Sanders said. “People have different perspectives, people come from very different types of states, different politics, and that’s going to be a very difficult job for both the House and the Senate.” More

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    ‘One Property at a Time’: A City Tries to Revive Without Gentrifying

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterMarjorie Perry, a contractor, is one of the builders turning an abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times‘One Property at a Time’: A City Tries to Revive Without GentrifyingNeighborhoods in Newark are beginning to see a flurry of redevelopment, a decade after the city’s downtown gained vogue.Marjorie Perry, a contractor, is one of the builders turning an abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNEWARK — Construction workers in the South Ward of Newark, one of New Jersey’s most distressed areas, are busy converting a long-abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.A decrepit mansion in the Central Ward built by a Newark beer baron before the turn of the 20th century is being revamped as a “makerhood,” a first-of-its-kind co-working residential and retail space.Siree Morris, a developer, recently finished erecting six three-bedroom apartments on a formerly vacant lot. Next up: condos made from shipping containers and an affordable-housing complex named for his slain brother, Michael, on the street where they grew up.While the downtown corridors of Newark, a poor industrial city burdened by decades of disinvestment, have been on the rebound for years, much of the rest of the city had been largely left behind.But now even the city’s far-flung residential neighborhoods are in the midst of a slow recovery.The transformation, fueled largely by a push to expand affordable housing and homeownership in this city of renters, is part of a deliberate strategy with an ambitious goal: erasing Newark’s long legacy of blight without pushing out residents, 86 percent of whom are Black or Latino.“It’s coming up the hill, into the inner city,” Arnita Rivers, a Newark resident who runs a variety store and barbershop and also works as a housing contractor, said of redevelopment.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesThe challenge of avoiding gentrification while revitalizing a city once synonymous with urban decay is steep.More than a quarter of Newark’s 282,000 residents live in poverty and only 22 percent own homes. Many neighborhoods are still reeling from the 2018 discovery of elevated levels of lead in tap water.Streets are pockmarked by an estimated 2,000 vacant lots, haunting reminders of the middle-class exodus that began before the city erupted in flames during five days of deadly unrest in 1967 and accelerated in the decades that followed.And Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, is now struggling under the catastrophic weight of the coronavirus: One in 342 residents has died from virus-related complications.But there are also signs of hope. Side streets are alive with forklifts and hard hats. Older men gather on corners, sharing stories of days gone by and expressing optimism for even the most overlooked swaths of the city. A breakfast for homegrown entrepreneurs — an extension of monthly “men’s meetings” initiated by Newark’s mayor, Ras J. Baraka — attracted 2,500 just before the start of the pandemic.“You take it one property at a time, one parcel at a time,” said Mr. Morris, 38, who has continued to build throughout the pandemic. “That’s the only way to rebuild a community.”Fifteen miles from the heart of Manhattan, Newark’s downtown commercial district has successfully lured housing developers, a Nike factory store, a Whole Foods Market and the corporate headquarters for Audible, Amazon’s audiobook and podcast service.But in the last five years, more than 3,500 units of affordable housing have also been built or are underway, much of it outside downtown, city records show. Newark sold almost double the number of abandoned parcels at auction in 2020 as it did in 2019, and the average price of land — none of it downtown — was about 30 percent higher. Between 2015 and 2020, major crime, including murder, robbery and assault, plummeted by 40 percent.“This right here is extremely personal to me,” said Siree Morris, a lifelong resident of Newark whose company recently finished construction of two new apartment buildings on a formerly vacant lot.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesBig neighborhood projects, like a $100 million expansion of Beth Israel Medical Center, are moving forward alongside smaller ones, including a 51-unit housing complex for seniors and the renovation of three homes that will be sold to residents of public housing using Section 8 vouchers.Even the brutal economic fallout of the pandemic is not expected to erase Newark’s gains.“They took advantage of the growth in downtown, and the strength, and they put effort into all of the wards,” said Doug Goldmacher, an analyst with Moody’s Investors Service, a financial rating agency.The Coronavirus Outbreak More