Democratic Socialists of Corvallis

Author: dctalkin94

  • June Newsletter – Housing is a Human Right

    Hey neighbor,

    I hope you’re doing well and staying cool in the summer heat! My name is Kasey and this is our June newsletter for the Housing is a Human Right campaign. This month we’ll cover our campaign activities and how you can get involved, then we’ll deep dive into rent control. Next month’s newsletter will include a deep dive into public housing. For now, let’s act like we’re at a summer pool-party and jump right in!

    In April, we started petitioning one day a week. This month, we doubled our efforts and started petitioning two days a week. We’ve now collected over 250 signatures, and we’re averaging around 40 new signatures a week. Thanks to nice folks in our community, canvassing has been a pleasure. We’re very proud of the support shown by our community in signing and the effort of our volunteers in gathering those signatures. But what is most important to our campaign, and most important for demanding our city respect that housing is a human right, is the connections we’re making, the wonderful conversations we’re having, and the hearts and minds that we’re changing.

    If you would like to join us in canvassing, please email our campaign and let us know! We are eager to expand our canvassing efforts so that we can reach our goal of 1,000 signatures as soon as possible and move onto the next phase of our campaign. But in order to do that we need more people signing up to volunteer. We always canvass in pairs, so you don’t need to know all the things to say on your first day. Right now we are tabling at the farmers’ market (Saturday, 9am-1pm) and North Co-op (Sunday 10am-3pm). This is a great opportunity not only to help in fixing a big social problem, but also to learn more about the campaign, gain experience in political advocacy, and feel a little more connected with your community in these difficult times.

    Rent control: what it is and how it can be implemented? First, a basic definition. Rent control is any kind of regulation, policy, or program put into place to control the price of renting housing in a specific area. Controling the price of rent means keeping rents within certain absolute limits, not merely limiting how much the rent can be increased each year. Limiting how much the price of rent can be increased each year, without any overall limit on the price of rent, is known as rent stabilization. Rent stabilization is good for tenants because it prevents cold, heartless landlords from enacting sudden, massive rent increases, which can sometimes lead to mass evictions. However, rent stabilization does not prevent rents from heating up so much over time that they become unaffordable, because it doesn’t actually control the price of rent. Corvallis is a clear example of this problem: we have had statewide rent stabilization for many years, but not rent control, and our housing is very unaffordable.

    Oregon has a statewide ban on local rent control laws (ORS 91.225). This ban was first put into place in 1983, and to this day, cities and counties in Oregon are prohibited from adopting rent control or rent stabilization laws. This 42-year ban has made Oregon one of the more unaffordable places to live in the U.S. Oregon has the 16th most expensive median rent and 14th most expensive median home-owner costs of all states and D.C. 

    Corvallis has been doing a particularly bad job with housing costs. We are the most unaffordable, rent-burdened city in a state already suffering from very unaffordable housing. According to the most up-to-date, publicly available data at the time of writing (which is the case for all figures cited in this newsletter, most coming from the American Communities Survey), a majority of Corvallis residents are renters, with about 59% of all occupied housing being rented. Statewide that rate is only about 37%. Even cities like Portland (49%), Eugene (52%) and Salem (43%) don’t have as high a rental rate as Corvallis.

    You might already know this, but severely rent cost burdened is an official term that indicates when a household must spend more than half of their monthly income on rent and utilities. Not only does Corvallis have the highest rental rate in Oregon, but we also have the highest rate of people severely burdened by the cost of rent. 37% of renting households in Corvallis are severely rent cost burdened. That’s very high even for a college town, with cities like Ashland (32%), Eugene (31%), and Portland (25%) having significantly lower rates of severely rent cost burdened households. About 5,200 households (22% of all households) in Corvallis, well over 10,000 individuals, are severely rent cost burdened and on the cusp of homelessness. I, Kasey, am one of those individuals, and I’m so sorry if you are too. It doesn’t have to be this way.

    So how do we get rent under control in our city? There are two ways this can be done and our campaign prefers one over the other. When we demand “rent control”, we want the city to adopt a policy that legally circumvents the state’s prohibition on directly controling the price of rent. This can be done simply by having a significant amount (between 5% and 25%) of the rental units within the city be publicly owned, and their rental rates kept truly affordable. Once there are enough of them, these affordable, publicly owned rentals will put pressure on all other rental units throughout the city to bring down their rent prices to a more affordable rate, or otherwise be outcompeted on the market.

    Our market-based method for getting the local cost of rent under control is preferable mostly because it only requires a city council with the political will to do it. The alternative, more direct method would first require a statewide ballot initiative to repeal the state’s ban on local rent control, and then also a city council with the political will to adopt rent control after the ban has been repealed. This direct method requires everything that the first does, plus a whole lot more. While we support a repeal of the state ban on local rent control, we prefer the public housing method of rent control for our Corvallis community.

    Stay cool neighbors, and take care,

    -Kasey Haxton

  • May Newsletter – Housing is a Human Right

    Hey neighbor,

    I hope this message finds you well on this lovely, cool late spring evening. My name is Kasey Haxton and I’m the chair of the Housing is a Human Right campaign committee. I’m writing this newsletter today with the help of my fellow committee members. Thank you for showing your support for a better, more humane Corvallis, and for signing up to our mailing list. If you would like to stop receiving these newsletters at any time, please reply or send an email to [this email address] with the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line. This is our first ever newsletter for the campaign! We are still setting up our website. Future newsletters (though not necessarily next month’s newsletter) will be sent from an email address ending with @humanright.house.

    First, we want to give you an update on what our campaign is doing and how you can engage with it more if you would like. Then, we’ll give a brief explanation of our campaign’s origins, and what we aim to accomplish. Lastly, we’ll cover decriminalizing homelessness, one of our three policy demands, in detail, in the second part of this newsletter. The other two policy demands will be covered in detail in the next two newsletters. This will likely be our longest newsletter ever, as we have a lot to cover. We hope you find it all useful!

    Our campaign volunteers have been petitioning since April and we’ve collected more than 100 signatures so far. That’s probably how you first met us and where you signed up for this newsletter. Starting in mid-June, we will be increasing our petitioning to two days a week. We’ll be tabling at the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays and the First Alternative Co-op (North Store) on Sundays. Our goal with this petition is to collect at least 1000 signatures before the end of summer, and then give the petition to the City Council along with some public testimony. If you’re interested in helping to collect signatures or volunteering with the Housing is a Human Right campaign in any capacity, feel free to let us know by replying to this or future newsletters.

    The origin of our campaign lies in the brutal contradiction that housing is a human right, and this right is regularly violated for our city’s poorest residents. This right is violated every time our city government performs a so-called sweep. If you’re unfamiliar, a sweep is a euphemism for the forced removal of people from their only home because their housing is deemed illegal for some reason or another. Many of us in this campaign have witnessed these sweeps take place in Corvallis over the last year. As far as we have seen, no realistic alternative for housing was offered when those folks only shelter was destroyed.

    I saw people being forced out of their housing by Corvallis Police and then nearly all of that housing and their belongings within it, cleared and dropped into a dumpster by a bulldozer. I helped people take what they could as Corvallis Police were threatening them with arrest. I watched with them and other brave volunteers as their tents, shacks partially built with pallet wood, and tarps that they had just moments earlier called home, were swept into the trash. Most of those folks started rebuilding their housing again later that same day, just a little further away from the town’s core, further from any social service providers, just outside of city limits. Some moved only a few feet away from the park, just far enough to avoid their belongings being taken in the sweep. Some I never saw again.

    The right to housing is affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 17 and 25) which the USA helped to create and of which the USA was an original signatory in 1948. But more importantly, housing is a fundamental human right as much as is the right to life, because housing is necessary for humans to live and the right to live is the most essential of all human rights. Depriving someone of their housing is tantamount to depriving that person of food or water. Oregonians experiencing homelessness die at a rate three times higher than Oregonians with legal housing.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. Housing is a Human Right is the name of our campaign, it is our slogan, and it is what we believe in. We will not stop our campaign until housing is respected as a human right in Corvallis. We can protect this vital human right with public policy; not merely ending the cruel and inhuman sweeps that only make people more homeless, but also by significantly investing in public housing and enacting real rent control. 

    Stopping the sweeps is the easiest of our three policy prescriptions for the city to achieve, as it costs nothing and could be adopted at any City Council meeting. As far as we know, there is no policy nor directive from Council mandating that sweeps be carried out. If that is indeed the case, a policy announcing an end to sweeps could be adopted and announced by the City Manager at any time. It only requires the city stop proactively ordering its police and parks departments to disregard the human rights of its most vulnerable residents in destroying their homes. These sweeps are the primary punishment for the crime of being homeless. Our campaign’s demand for decriminalizing homelessness means first and foremost an end to the sweeps.

    Rather than an essential human right, in Corvallis housing is primarily treated as a profitable commodity. Moreover, Corvallis housing is mostly rented rather than sold. A majority of our city’s more than 60,000 residents are renters, with about 59% of all occupied housing units being rentals. In next month’s newsletter we will cover rent control in detail, including how it can be implemented in our city. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this wonderful day in the neighborhood.