Sharing Recent Housing Articles

For this edition of the newsletter, I want to share excerpts and links to recent articles I have published about some important housing topics:

The Problem with Preemption

 Residents of many cities across the country want to pass stronger protections for tenants, such as rent control, good-cause eviction requirements, and anti-retaliation rules. But they are blocked from doing so by state legislators who follow the bidding of landlord lobbyists and campaign funders. The legal term for these policy-making handcuffs is pre-emption. Unfortunately, my home of Indianapolis is one of those pre-empted cities, and I wrote about it in May for The Indianapolis Star here. An excerpt:

For years, our state legislature, dominated by white Republicans, has been clapping the policy-making handcuffs on large Indiana cities, usually led by Democrats who represent far more persons of color than the legislative majority does.

The Indiana General Assembly has blocked Indianapolis and other large cities from passing laws on critical issues like gun violence, employee rights, environmental protections, and tobacco regulation.

As for housing, the crisis my students and I work on, cities across the nation are leading the way in protecting those who struggle to stay safely housed. Not here. State legislators moved aggressively to squash even modest protections Indiana cities might provide to protect tenants from retaliation, rent price-gouging and exploitation by out-of-state corporate landlords.

Pump the Brakes on Our Government Eviction Machine

A longer version of my article originally published June 17^th in The Hill is on this newsletter site here. An excerpt:

These studies, and the scenes we witness in court each week, all point to a serious problem: our government runs a cheap but ruthlessly efficient collection and repossession machine for the benefit of landlords, particularly corporate landlords. But with that problem comes an opportunity: we the people run this machine, and we can decide to pump the brakes.

Religion and the Human Right to Housing

As part of an ongoing project of writing about religion and the human right to housing, I published an article in the March issue of the Roman Catholic magazine Commonweal. An excerpt:

Shifting public opinion in the United States toward a more wholehearted embrace of social housing remains a serious challenge. Fortunately, the country’s different faith communities can help. Most, including the Catholic Church, already support in principle and practice the very kind of reform we need . . .

From Jesus’ earthly struggles with homelessness and the parable of the Good Samaritan to the sharing economy created by the earliest Christian communities, the biblical imperatives are clear. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the constitutions issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and the official statement on Catholic social teaching put out by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops all insist that housing is a human right—a direct challenge and inherent rebuke to many Americans’ ingrained deference to capitalist markets.

Catholics hardly have a monopoly on the issue. Other churches, along with Jewish and Muslim congregations, have been staking out similar positions. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church all embrace the right to housing. Judaism features an abundance of strong calls for a human right to subsistence, including housing. So does Islam.

There are more articles in the pipeline—all part of the path to a book project with the working title Lessons from Eviction Court--and a few more published ones to share in a future post, too. Thank you for reading!