In May 2022, the housing justice movement in Miami-Dade County was celebrating new heights. Pro-tenant groups in Miami had successfully pressured the county Board of Commissioners to pass a Tenants Bill of Rights. The legislation’s sweeping regulations required landlords to make speedy repairs to their apartments or their tenants would be allowed to pay for repairs themselves and withhold the amount from their tent, provide 60 days’ notice of a change in building ownership, and provide a notice of tenant rights within 10 days of starting or renewing a lease. It banned requiring prospective tenants to disclose eviction histories.
With a whopping 64 percent of Miami-Dade renters cost burdened in 2021, these reforms were set to provide a measure of security to tenants who had enough to worry about without also having to deal with landlord negligence and abuse.
Miami-Dade wasn’t alone in achieving tenant protections in the wake of COVID-19. The prior year, with rents increasing steeply, the St. Petersburg City Council responded to demands for reform by increasing the required notice for ending month-to-month leases and making it harder to discriminate against renters who use vouchers or other government programs to help pay their rent. And in Orange County, Florida, the Board of County Commissioners passed a Tenants Bill of Rights of its own in early 2023.
But in June 2023, Florida’s Republican supermajority brought the hammer down against this spate of reforms, passing a law drastically limiting municipalities’ ability to make housing policy. The law rendered those new—as well as some long-standing—tenant protections unlawful, affecting more than 45 ordinances in 35 municipalities and counties, as Shelterforce has previously reported. Specifically, the law states that any municipality’s regulation of “residential tenancies or “the landlord-tenant relationship” cannot be more stringent than existing state regulations. Such a law is known as a ceiling preemption.
In the year since preemption took effect, housing organizers across the state say the new reality has limited the potential effectiveness of local organizing efforts and forced them to rethink what constitutes short-term success even as they reaffirm state-wide coalition building.
Right to Counsel and Administrative Changes
Preemption has not deterred Santra Denis, the executive director of the Miami Workers Center, an organization whose support for the county’s Tenants Bill of Rights proved critical to its passage. “We’re organizers and we’ll continue to move things forward,” she says. With reforms that would shift the “landlord-tenant relationship” currently dead on arrival in Miami, Denis and the Miami Workers Center are working on numerous campaigns with objectives that would not be preempted by Tallahassee but could still provide meaningful relief to tenants and help build power for Miami’s tenant movement.
Denis says that one of their most promising campaigns is working to pass right to counsel, which would guarantee legal representation for Miami tenants in housing court. Providing legal representation does not involve actually changing the legal relationship between tenant and landlord, it merely better empowers tenants to realize the rights they do have, so it is not affected by preemption. When enacted in other cities around the country, right to counsel has significantly improved the chances of tenants staying in their homes. In New York, which gained right to counsel in 2019, 84 percent of households represented by lawyers in court were able to stay in their homes. “People have experienced what it feels like to go to court to be on their own and felt like that was the difference in winning or losing their case,” Denis said.
Right to counsel can have transformative effects on housing justice organizing as well. The sense of security tenants gain when they have guaranteed access to competent legal representation can reduce their fear of retaliation for organizing for better conditions or doing rent strikes. It’s also been shown to incentivize improved behavior by landlords and housing court judges.
Aside from right to counsel, the Miami Workers Center is eyeing administrative changes to public and subsidized housing that could make it easier and less expensive for people to find homes. In Miami, people can wait for years to receive a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher, but when they finally get one, they have only 60 days to find an available unit before that voucher expires. Add to that what Denis describes as a costly and opaque application process for rental units and the result is a system where people are one or two missteps from homelessness.
“One of our tenant leaders is a mother of college-aged children. Because they’re adults, she had to pay an application fee for every adult in her household. In one building, she had to pay $735 for application fees just for them to reveal afterwards that there was a waiting list,” Denis said. And all those fees were for naught. That mother lost her voucher, which she had waited years to receive, because she couldn’t find a new place to use it.
Denis says that Miami Workers Center is collaborating with the city’s public housing authority to both provide more time to people with Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers to find available units and to look into ways to encourage lower application fees. Denis says that these changes could make a tangible difference in keeping people housed. “Typically, folks have leaned on policy wins, but we’re thinking that systemic change can happen in other ways as well,” she said. “Our ancestors have done more with much less.”
Community Benefits Agreements
In St. Petersburg, residents and organizers followed up their successful push for strengthened tenant protections with demands that the city declare a housing state of emergency. The declaration would have put rent control up as a ballot measure in November 2022. The vehicle for those demands was an organization called the People’s Council, supported by the St. Petersburg Tenants Union, which gained significant community engagement and media attention for its transparent and democratic practices as well as escalatory tactics.
Aaron Dietrich, a main organizer of the People’s Council, says the campaign gave ordinary people a sense of democratic control over their lives that preemption has since detracted from.
“Residents were actively engaged in determining strategy, escalating tactics, and voting on how they want to fight back,” Dietrich said. When the city wouldn’t budge on their demands for rent control, the People’s Council voted to escalate by organizing a tent city outside the city council that lasted for a week. Though their demands were still rejected that year by the Democratic-run mayor’s office and city council, the campaign breathed life into the housing justice movement in St. Petersburg and showed how popular rent control measures are. When preemption took effect, however, it took rent control off the table entirely, removing that momentum.
[RELATED ARTICLE: Tenants Unions Are How We Win in the South]
Post preemption, focus shifted to resisting the city’s multibillion dollar redevelopment plan centered around building a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, on Tropicana Field, according to Kofi Hunt, a housing justice organizer from St. Pete. “Tropicana Field was built on a majority Black community. That community was moved out. The area was flattened for a highway entrance to the stadium decades ago. Now they’re looking at redeveloping the whole plot,” Hunt explains. The redevelopment plan, which has been approved, would require over $743 million in public money. It includes provisions for affordable housing in a community benefits agreement, which other local groups fought for. The St. Petersburg Tenants Union maintained total opposition to the plan, saying it still threatens to displace surrounding residents through rising prices. “The benefits as they exist right now are not good enough,” St. Pete Tenants Union member William Kilgore told WFTS Tampa Bay in July.
As organizers anticipate increases in housing costs as a result of the redevelopment plan, the fact that tools like rent control are now blocked by preemption is all the more frustrating. Ultimately, Hunt says, preemption “means less democracy. One of the beauties of our system is the ability of everyday people to stand up, speak with their elected officials, work with them to create policy that benefits their community.” But for St. Pete’s residents, he notes, preemption means that’s no longer possible on the local level.
Next Stop: The State?
Camilo Mejia, a community organizer with the organization Catalyst Miami who was involved in the Tenants Bill of Rights campaign, says that this new reality is forcing local organizers across the state to think about how they can build more capacity at the state level. Given the demographic makeup and diverse array of partisan affiliations in the state of Florida, Mejia believes bridging the divides between city and non-city dwellers involves cutting right to the issues that affect working people and avoiding polarizing labels. “We tend to do a lot of damage to ourselves by working along political party lines,” he says. “We need to get closer to that approach where we’re not saying we’re against a particular party or candidate or politician, and instead say, ‘These are the things that are affecting us. They’re also affecting you. What can we do together about it?’”
When it comes to dealing with preemption and tenant protections, Mejia says it’s not about abandoning the local work, but “better coordinating that work that’s happening in different parts of the state, and then creating a unified narrative and vision for a more affordable state for everyone.”
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