{"id":596,"date":"2020-12-01T07:58:09","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T07:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=129780"},"modified":"2020-12-01T07:58:09","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T07:58:09","slug":"open-letter-to-my-landlord-the-word-of-the-month-is-renegotiation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/01\/open-letter-to-my-landlord-the-word-of-the-month-is-renegotiation\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Letter to My Landlord: The Word of the Month is \u201cRenegotiation\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Dear Randall Group\/CTL Management,<\/p>\n

(Please forward to corporate, as far up the chain as possible.)<\/p>\n

First of all, in this household, we\u2019ve long ago stopped responding to your bizarre annual surveys where you ask whether your tenants are content, without ever mentioning the elephant in the living room.  You give us options to rate how content we are, all of which are designed to reflect badly on your employees if we aren\u2019t happy.  The reason we stopped responding to your survey is because it\u2019s meaningless and pointless, but for the record, we think all of your employees are very nice, and you should pay them a living wage, too.<\/p>\n

As unlikely as it is that any of the relevant corporate investors or board members of the Randall Group ever see these letters of mine \u2014 this is what your CTL Management, Inc. firewall is there for, to absorb that sort of flak, so you can pretend you\u2019re just playing with stocks \u2014 I do try to make them interesting and educational, each monthly update on the rent strike a bit different from the last.  As you know, I also write because it is one of the requirements of some of the relevant evictions moratorium legislation that you be notified each month of whether your tenants\u2019 situation has changed since the previous month, with regards to loss of employment due to the pandemic.  It hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s so much more to be said, so much has happened in the past month, as with every month in this very dynamic year.  The word of the month in the New York business press, we are told by Marketplace, the NPR show that I know you and I both listen to every weekday day, is \u201crenegotiation.\u201d  They say corporate clients all over the city are renegotiating their rents, and that they have gone down by an average of 30%.  Still completely, criminally outrageously high by any sane standard, still a number representing a constant sucking sound of most of society\u2019s hard-earned money flowing upwards towards the pockets of folks like the Randalls and the Kushners every moment of every day \u2014 but less than it was Before Corona.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a quick look back at certain relevant dates and numbers for the sake of context, before I proceed further.<\/p>\n

March, 2007:  I moved to this building you own with my family, on lovely Francis Street, in southeast Portland.  Rent for a two-bedroom was $500 a month \u2014 a standard amount back then across the country, outside of the gentrified zones that I had been forced to leave in prior years, such as New York, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco.<\/p>\n

March, 2019:  after 12 years of continuous tenancy, paying the rent on time every month, raising our children on the same wall-to-wall carpeting that was here prior to our moving in, you raised the rent annually every March, and by March of 2019 the rent was now $1,175 per month \u2014 for a significantly deteriorated version of the same moldy apartment we moved into in 2007.<\/p>\n

March, 2020:  weeks into an unprecedented nationwide and largely worldwide pandemic lockdown that completely dominated the news and all of our lives, we received the standard-issue, annual every-March rent increase, as if it had been sent by automatic timer, no human intervention possibly involved.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll stop there in my timeline, because after that things get more month-to-month rather than year-to-year.  2020 has been like that, I imagine you\u2019d agree.  (There are at least some things we can probably all agree on.)  But first I need to stew on this point a little more:  you raised the rent during a global pandemic lockdown.<\/p>\n

See, this is when I fully, truly realized what I had already known:  that there is no \u201cyou.\u201d  You are just a figment of our collective imagination.  You are not human.  You are a faceless corporate entity, backed by corporate investors from around the world \u2014 speaking of which, I\u2019d specifically like to single out the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund putting its oil money into the US real estate market, fuck you very much, your investments are just as destructive to the lives of the American working class as your oil is to the Earth, contrary to your slick social democratic propaganda.  Like your Norwegian oil baron and Russian oligarch and New York billionaire investors, you, Randall Group \u2014 theoretically based here in Portland, Oregon in an ugly glass building on Barbur Boulevard \u2014 have no idea what is going on, \u201con the ground,\u201d so to speak.  Or should we say, \u201cin the theater of conflict,\u201d or where your renters live.  You know, that 50% of society that rents, and has to listen to people on TV every day telling us how stupid we are that we haven\u2019t taken out a massive loan in order to invest our nonexistent money in the impossibly over-valued real estate market yet to become \u201chome owners.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the bankers enjoying an espresso in the shadow of the towering statue of the iconic social democratic blue collar worker beside the Norwegian parliament, the Randall Group investors who may live in the suburbs of Oslo or in some gated community in Southwest Portland or Beaverton or Moscow or London would seem to be just as blissfully ignorant of reality on the ground among their thousands of Class C apartment complexes, be they in Portland or Kansas City.  While some of the real, human landlords across the country were doing things like canceling rent for a month and lowering the rent for the duration of the pandemic, actively trying to work with their tenants to get through this very difficult time, as they say, \u201ctogether,\u201d from your management company there has been nothing but silence, aside from the occasional helpful tip about applying for government aid that has run out, or about keeping the pipes from freezing in the winter.<\/p>\n

This deafening silence, of course, is the direct result of your lack of humanity.  I mean by the fact that you don\u2019t really exist.  There is no head on this beast, you\u2019re just a corporate creation, designed entirely to suck the money out of society and feed it to the rich.  That\u2019s why you doubled our rent \u2014 not because you had to, but because you could.  And it\u2019s all you know how to do, because it\u2019s the governing formula you gave to CTL Management, a corporate entity that exists only to serve out your instructions \u2014 raise the rent every year as much as you can get away with legally, don\u2019t fix anything any more than you need to to abide by the minimal legal codes, don\u2019t pay any of your workers any more than you can get away with.  Not only do I know this is how CTL is told to manage your properties, but you actually award the best property managers for doing exactly the sorts of things I\u2019m describing, every year, in downtown Portland, at a gala event which I have unfortunately had the displeasure of witnessing personally.<\/p>\n

So, catching us up to the end of November, from late March, when you raised the rent again.  That\u2019s when we stopped paying, along with a lot of other folks, for one reason or another.  How many aren\u2019t paying because they can\u2019t, and how many aren\u2019t paying because, like us, they believe in something called society, is unclear.  But with each passing month, your silence becomes more deafening, as with each passing month, your management company leaves us with a new invoice, indicating how many thousands of dollars in back rent we owe, all of which will come due as soon as the applicable local, state or federal eviction moratoriums expire.<\/p>\n

The thing is, with each passing month, shit is happening, you know?  I know you this.  Whoever you are \u2014 and I\u2019m envisioning mostly rich white guys in suits, in different locations, but whoever you are, perhaps a slightly more diverse group than that, I don\u2019t know \u2014 you read the business press, like I do.  So you know that even those of us who did finally get money for being unemployed \u2014 which in my case took seven months of waiting \u2014 that money runs out on December 26th.  Congress is gridlocked and can\u2019t pass any further aid packages, and we are facing what Marketplace referred to a few days ago as a \u201cfiscal cliff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are some statistics just in in the past month, which I have gathered from reliable, mainstream press reports, some of which you can find, if you like, by perusing the Facebook page of Artists for Rent Control, a network you inspired me to start up some years ago:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2022 1 in 15 people in the US currently has an active, contagious, coronavirus infection<\/p>\n

\u2022 over a quarter of a million people in the US have now died, overall<\/p>\n

\u2022 1 in every 1,000 Black people in the US has died of the coronavirus<\/p>\n

\u2022 in the time before the CDC\u2019s eviction moratorium went into effect, hundreds of thousands of evictions took place in states without their own moratoriums, which have now resulted in at least 10,000 more deaths from Covid-19<\/p>\n

\u2022 among professional artists like me \u2014 which includes some of your other tenants, and many of your former tenants who you long ago priced out of the city \u2014 65% are fully unemployed, and 95% have lost income<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I could go on with the statistics, but we all know how dismal the situation is for people who are not happily invested in the booming stock market.<\/p>\n

What we also know, importantly, is that you really don\u2019t give a shit about us.  Now wait, an astute reader might be thinking, how do we know this?  All we get is total silence from the landlord corporation with each passing month.  Ah, but there is something called Multifamily Northwest.  This is your lobbying arm, where you invest a small fraction of your profits from raising our rents every year, to make sure you can keep raising our rents every year.  Multifamily Northwest makes it very clear where you stand \u2014 you are against the eviction moratorium.  You are against the Oregon legislature reconvening in December to extend Oregon\u2019s eviction moratorium.  You have the ear of the governor, who constantly refers to you as a \u201cstakeholder,\u201d while she never refers to us renters like that.  The only stakes we hold, it seems, are the kind we can hammer into the ground to keep the tent from blowing away.<\/p>\n

Not that you\u2019re against a bailout of the landlord corporations, or the renters, as long as it means their rent money going straight to you.  But until that bailout can be worked out, you\u2019re against any eviction moratoriums \u2014 your dying and disease-afflicted renters with their hungry children be damned.<\/p>\n

So, once again, with feeling:  the word of the month is \u201crenegotiation.\u201d  We can keep on kicking the can down the road.  Prediction:  because the Oregon legislature is dominated by people much more intelligent than you, despite all of the money you regularly bribe them with (I mean donate to their campaigns) \u2014 people who can read the literal writing on the wall, and know that ending the eviction moratorium would cause untold suffering and death, and have a very destabilizing effect on society overall, because this is the situation, Oregon\u2019s eviction moratorium will be extended when the special session meets in December.<\/p>\n

But with the Congress in the state it\u2019s in in DC, whether there\u2019s ever going to be another bailout is very much a matter of question.  We can wait and see \u2014 with us continuing our nonpayment of rent, and continuing to encourage our neighbors to join us in this endeavor, and with you continuing to send anonymous invoices each month indicating our mounting debts \u2014 and see what eventually happens in Congress.  Or you can break your sociopathic silence.  You can communicate with your tenants, and renegotiate the rent.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of other things you could do.  But \u201crenegotiate\u201d is the word of the month, Grover.<\/p>\n

By the end of December, there\u2019s only one word any of us will be thinking of, unfortunately.  And it\u2019s one that you bear such a huge responsibility for, because the main reason all those expendable, I mean essential, workers keep going to work every day at their multiple full-time jobs is because they have to funnel their earnings upwards, to fill your overflowing coffers some more.  In fact, you and the system you support through your lobbying groups \u2014 through your campaign donations, which always go to Republicans, when they have a chance in a given race \u2014 you are responsible in such a significant way for the ongoing stratification of wealth in this country, for the widening divide between rich and poor, between Black, Brown, and white, for the fact that so many parents never see their children.  You did this.  With intention, if by means of lobbying entities and management companies, rather than by getting your own corporate, \u201cinvisible hands of the market\u201d dirty.<\/p>\n

And that word for next month of which I speak:  take a fucking guess.  Still don\u2019t know?  OK, I\u2019ll give it to you: exponential.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,
David Rovics and family<\/p>\n

P.S.  The dishwasher is still broken.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Randall Group\/CTL Management, (Please forward to corporate, as far up the chain as possible.) First of all, in this household, we\u2019ve long ago stopped responding to your\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":597,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}