About This Episode
Shanti Singh is the legislative director for Tenant’s Together, a statewide Coalition of local tenants rights organizations and one of California’s most important voices for tenants rights and housing protections. Shanti herself is one of the most interesting people I know in this business, someone with a diverse background—including time in finance—who understands both the technical and political side of housing. She’s an intellectual and an activist, and someone who I have learned I can trust— a trust that enables us to disagree from time to time, not just in person but on air.
In this episode, we discuss the past, present and future of rent control and tenant protections in California, the challenges and opportunity of Prop 33, and our shared love of social housing as an idea. This is also the first episode where my guest and I talk in depth about somewhere we disagree. I’m grateful to Shanti for coming on board to do this, and what enables this to work is partly that trust that we have built. It also comes from an important fact—we share a vision of a better housed California, where amongst many other things, tenants have real rights. Like with many housing disagreements, the issue is over how to get there, not where we need to go. There is more consensus about the destination than the path, and I hold onto this fact as a key source of hope for California housing.
This Episode’s Guest
Interview Transcript
Alex Schafran: Shanti Singh, welcome to Housing After Dark. It's great to have you.
Shanti Singh: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited.
Alex Schafran: So this is an episode that I've been excited to do for a long time. I think you bring a lot to the housing story that is pretty unique, as I said in my intro, including some of your background. So this is the Housing After Dark tradition where you come on, and the first thing we talk about is how you became a houser. So tell us Shanti, how did you become a houser?
Shanti Singh: It's almost like it sort of just happened. I did not study housing in college or anything like that. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (go Steelers). My father was a school teacher most of my life. My mom was mostly at home raising me. Our landlord was my grandfather (he was a pretty good landlord, I gotta say).
I grew up in a neighborhood that's definitely experienced quite a lot of gentrification and displacement, but that hadn’t fully kicked off in the 90s, at least. So I wasn't really thinking about housing as a child, but I do think back and reflect on it a lot. I went to college, I studied political science, economics, international political economy, things of that nature. So not completely out of the realm of possibility that we get into politics. But aside from campaigning for Obama and doing all of those things, I definitely still wasn't really thinking about housing specifically.
I worked in Boston for a few years. I just needed a job to pay the bills, in FinTech, actually, and then I moved out to San Francisco again, kind of on a whim. I always really thought San Francisco was a beautiful, wonderful city. I just just came out here, I was 23 and doing something that 23 year olds do—just move to a random city just because you want to and again, took another tech job to pay the bills that did not work out. It went very badly.
Suddenly I found myself with a market rate housing rent that I did not have the money to pay for. I moved in with my then boyfriend, kind of risky because we just started dating, but we're still together, and I'm still here in this apartment. I moved in with him into a rent controlled apartment and then I just started to see around me lots of evictions, lots of displacement.
There was a very drawn out Ellis Act eviction of a HIV positive veteran just a few blocks away from me. I started to kind of read up on what was going on and it was also 2014 right? So this is the aftermath of Ferguson, and this is when Standing Rock is going on. Occupied happened a few years earlier.
So I was definitely a politically conscious person. But I kind of latched onto housing because I was seeing people being evicted around me, and I needed a job. One day, my now husband met somebody on the street corner in front of Trader Joe's named Aaron Paskin, and he was running for supervisor of our district. My husband said, “You know my girlfriend, she has some political campaign experience before, and she's unemployed right now.” And he was like, “Tell her to meet me at the Cinch,” which is still my favorite bar, for campaign fundraisers. He’s like “Tell her to meet me tonight. She’s got the job.”
That’s pretty much how it kicked off, in the sense that. What stuck with me when I was canvassing (I live in the densest district in San Francisco, District Three, the northeast corner so a lot of hills, a lot of apartment buildings, just like mine). I would be door knocking asking them to vote for someone, but what really stuck with me was when people would actually bring me in and tell me their stories and just how deeply, deeply insecure they felt in their housing, even people who have rent control. There’s this narrative (which we can get into later) that rent control tenants are always sitting pretty. But I can tell you that's not true.
People being terrified of eviction, people who've been living there a long time, people who didn't necessarily know if they would have anywhere to go if they left their current apartment. And that just really stuck with me. And I just decided, “Hey, this is what I want to focus on outside of work.” I got yet another tech job to pay the bills, and started organizing on the side with all sorts of wonderful folks here in SF who've been doing this a long time and showed me the ropes. So I was basically organizing with tenants on the side, getting kind of involved in some of the hot policy topics that were going on in City Hall. Then in 2017 or at the end of 2017 somehow I got offered a job at Tenants Together, and I'm still there today.
Alex Schafran: We're going to spend most of the time today talking about the work you do with Tenants Together, we're going to talk about 1482, we're going to talk about challenges in the tenant rights system, we're going to talk about Prop 33, we're going to get into social housing, we're going to do a lot of stuff today.
But before we get into this. You and I share the experience of working directly with low income tenants, it's something that has really shaped my career and continues to shape it to this day. It's part of the reason why I continue to be an advocate for rent control and rent regulation of all different kinds, stress, cause, eviction, etc.
I know from last guest we had here on Housing After Dark, Ruby Bolaria Shifrin from the Chan Zuckerberg initative, she also has an organizer background before she got into development and more in finance. But you have kind of the opposite background in the sense that you spent time in FinTech and finance and in the tech space before, now you are the director at Tenants Together and you work in politics full time.
How has that experience that you've had in those financial spaces, in the business spaces, helped you understand the housing space that you work in, even if that's maybe not part of your day to day work?
Shanti Singh: I was in that job for like three and a half years or so. But it was my first job out of college, and I worked in a company like in the movies where you see people trading. I worked on the trading software. I had a very particular job with a very particular set of skills, which was really technical. So our clients were the hedge funds, right? But they have to send all their trades in and load their positions in the morning. They have to do a lot of reporting. Your Goldman Sachs future trades have to go in one file, and the other ones have to go in the other.
I was basically in charge of all that data management stuff. The thing that ended up being my specialty was over the counter derivatives. It was wild too, because when I would walk home from work, I'd pass the Occupy Boston tents on my way there and back. But it was really eye opening for me. I was not so much of a college socialist, I mean, I was socialist-ist. I studied political theory but it didn't all click for me until I had that job.
It really disabused me of a lot of the optimism I had. I thought I was supposed to implement the Dodd Frank reporting requirements. And I thought, “Oh, this is going to be so hard. This is going to mess with my whole summer. There are going to be so many advanced reporting requirements.” And it was nothing. It was just like thoughts and prayers. And I kind of started to realize between that and seeing these huge behemoth hedge funds (I can't talk about them, I had to sign an NDA) these products that were completely made out of thin air.
They were bets. They were just glorified bets. That's what a lot of over the counter derivatives are. You have two parties just making a bet that almost brought down our economic system. It really has material impacts on people's lives, but it’s so far removed, when you think about how those products work.
It made me realize how far removed it was from the underlying activity of people's lives that it could potentially be affecting. That just really stuck with me, particularly with respect to housing, like mortgage backed securities, things of that nature. I was handling the management side of trades around mortgage backed securities and everything.
I was really thinking about that and like, as these sort of supposedly monumental regulations were being implemented, and seeing that they really did nothing. I think that stuck with me, and I think that I still tend to try to dig into my understanding from the tenant side how the housing market works. I can see the direct experience and the direct result of material harms that are being caused to people. I see that everyday day. But I still try to work back and think about the economic mechanisms that are sitting under all of this.
Alex Schafran: We'll come back to this. I appreciate you saying this. There are times in this business, especially with folks who do housing politics for a living, I meet a lot of folks who forget or never really learn that it's really political economy, not just politics. And I think one of the things I learned to appreciate from you is that you know you clearly see both sides, and you know that the underlying mechanisms of ownership, the economic structures that underlie our housing really matter, and that policy is a piece of that but it goes so much farther beyond policy or even politics. Which is again, one of the reasons why social housing is a subject that animates both of us, and we'll get to that in a second.
So let's dive into this period of time. And by the way, I want to appreciate that you covered the entirety of your time in San Francisco politics in like three minutes, which is actually the legal limit on Housing After Dark for San Francisco politics.
Let's go to 2018. The life of Shanti Singh, the life of the state of California, and the beginning of the push towards what would be and still is, a historic moment for California renters, which is the passage of AB 1482 in 2019, which establishes statewide rent control for the first time and does some other really innovative things around single family homes and investor ownership and so many things.
So tell us a little bit about the story of 1482 and how it got passed, your own role, other important people that you want to give shout outs to. Help our listeners really understand how this important piece of legislation got made.
Shanti Singh: First of all, it came from a massive coalition. So definitely not just us, but especially ACE Alliance of California’s Community Empowerment, PICO, Western Center on Law and Poverty, Public Advocates, lots of housing focus groups, but also a lot of buy-in from labor. We come back to this a lot because labor is definitely interested in housing questions, because their workers are being squeezed, especially labor unions that tend to represent lower wage workers like SEIUs, United Here and other folks. So there was a big coalition. I forget how many groups ended up supporting, I think it was 100 or 150 that supported this idea of having a statewide rent cap.
But it was really bumpy the compromises that had to be made but also the shape of the law. Originally, there was this plan to have two separate laws, one was for just cause eviction, and the other was the rent cap. Then the just cause stalled out and died. Then there was a five alarm fire, there was a lot of attempts to water it down beyond 5% plus inflation that we see now. It would have been even higher allowable annual rent increases.
The opposition was very interesting. At one point, the realtors opposed and the landlord supported, and then the landlord supported and the realtors opposed. That was kind of crazy, But I think splitting the opposition actually did end up being helpful to us. But we had to have a lot of really difficult discussions, not just the normal process of negotiating a bill, but also what the relationship between this rent cap and rent control (like tighter rent control at the local level and repealing Costa Hawkins at the state level) is going to be right? Because for us, we meant this to be a baseline. But that's not always the way things work, especially when you're opposition. Like AB1482 passed, it was signed by Governor Newsom. So then there's this expectation that it's supposed to be a ceiling for policy instead of a floor which is not how we saw it. That's not how David Chu who wrote it, saw it. He also co-authored Costa Hawkins repeal and reform attempts too.
We wanted to make sure that folks who are in the areas that are or who don't really have a chance of having local rent control anytime soon, although we work very hard to change that, that they had some kind of baseline that they could fall back on. And that was 1482. It's also been used to kind of say, well, we have 1482 we don't need anything else. Which is very much not true.
Alex Schafran: We can get more into that story when we talk a little bit about Prop 33 coming up. Thank you for giving the shout out to David Chu. But in the end of the day we do get, I would agree with you, a limit on rent increases, otherwise known as rent control or rent stabilization, and you get basic Just Cause Eviction protection, correct?
Shanti Singh: Yeah, after 12 months.
Alex Schafran: After 12 months. Not necessarily as strong, where there are more loopholes, as I think the both of us would like to see closed. For those who are new to renters rights, or new to tenants rights, just cause eviction, the most important thing about it is that your lease is not necessarily the end of your tenancy. You have to do something in order to be able to be evicted. There are a lot of terms of the lease you can violate. You cannot pay your rent. There are still owner move-in evictions. There are still Ellis Act evictions. Ellis Act evictions are when a landlord wants to remove the property from the rental market, they have the right to according to the way the Ellis Act is written, to go out of the landlord-ing business, even though they generally are not going out of the landlord-ing business, they're just trying to sell the property or evict a tenant. So there still remain a lot of loopholes. It still remains a very imperfect system, but that is what 1482 established at the statewide level, which is a campaign that folks had been working on for decades, correct?
Shanti Singh: Yeah, a very long time. Just having some kind of statewide standard for rent stabilization. And of course there are property types that are exempted that we would like to cover, but those are the kind of the compromises that you make. So we wanted to set that baseline. I talked to folks in other states trying to pass their own AB 1482, as well. They face a lot of the same challenges that we do.
Alex Schafran: Those of us who support tenants rights and people you know who are working inside the tenant rights movement will often point to some of the loopholes, or the fact the rent cap numbers are too high, right? Essentially, 5% plus inflation can be a really, really high number if your rent is raised on an annual basis.
But sometimes I do feel that we don't talk enough about the successes or the people that have been protected by what happened in 1482. Are there ways that you and Tenants Together. Are there successes that you've seen that prove that 1482 again, even if it's just a floor and not the ceiling, is something that is important.
Shanti Singh: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the success stories don't call our hotline. We're usually hearing all the bad things that are happening more than the good things. I think it has given people a little bit of a sense of safety and stability, knowing that they have this law on their side, if they know that they have it on their side. Because a lot of what we do is know your rights, and teaching people how to do counseling.
I do think that it does create some kind of sense that, “Okay, I'm not going to get slapped with, like, a 20 or 30% rent increase if I'm in the types of housing that are covered.” 10% can still be a lot. That's how far it can go up, if you've got a 10% rent increase every year, in seven years or so, your rent would double. But still, it means you’re not going to get slapped with something overnight that is going to displace me for my home, necessarily. I think there is a broader sense of security that people feel from that.
Alex Schafran: So on the challenges side. I also know that part of it, and this is something that you know my clients deal with, is the challenge of actually enforcing it, of even just having an information infrastructure out there to be able to help people know their rights, or enforce their rights, or find legal representation if you need to. What are some of the challenges that you've seen tenants together in terms of implementation or enforcement of 1482?
Shanti Singh: Oh, so many. Tenants just don't have any recourse if their landlord doesn’t follow 1482, the ones who decide to try to find ways to weasel around it. We saw this a lot during COVID, like slapping utility charges or something on top of the 10% rent increase. Or just pretending that the tenant wasn't covered when they were covered, things like that. If you're a tenant, that's obviously really scary. But you also can't really call somebody up and report that. I mean, you can. We encourage them to report it to the state, but that usually doesn’t really go anywhere.
One example of sort of a lack of information or lack of transparency is that the 5% plus inflation number is regional, right? So there's not one big number for the entire state of California. And so, a lot of people did not know what their allowable rent increases were, because no one was telling them. We were calculating them looking up inflation data and coming up with our own numbers. I also remember talking to a reporter, who shall remain nameless but a pretty marquee housing reporter, who just called me and was like “Is this anywhere on the state of California's website? I'm just trying to figure out what your rent caps are.” And we were like, “No, we haven't been able to find anything like that being provided by the state about their laws.”
But then with enforcement. If you can't afford a lawyer, which most tenants in the situation cannot. That's why tenants organize, that's why there are tenant organizations, because we have to collectively support the tenant in enforcing the law on their own.
Alex Schafran: It’s really hard to see. I remember looking for 1482 on the State's website a good couple of years after it had been passed, and it was just absent. I see it with legal service providers that I work with, and social service providers, just how difficult it is to access information, and how much of the information either has to be bootstrapped by folks. It's true for tenants. It's true for landlords.
Landlords are also bootstrapping it. They're paying their attorneys to do it. We pass these laws, which are often the result of immense compromise, and then we often do so little to actually see that they're implemented correctly. It doesn't matter whether this is a production or preservation or protection law, all of the laws suffer from a lack of focus on implementation.
Shanti Singh: Yeah. And then with all the loopholes and different and carve outs, and again, this isn't just true of tenant protection law, but it gets to a point where you need a lawyer to read it sometimes.
Alex Schafran: If you talk to a property developer they will tell you the same thing about trying to find their way through laws that were passed, like tenants, laws that were passed to help them do their job. It’s just the amount of energy that is required to really interpret it. I think part of our challenge is how many bills that we pass every year. It's impossible for the state to have an implementation plan for every single law unless it's specifically in the budget to do so. And again, our budget process and our lawmaking process are technically part of the same legislative session, but they are so divorced from each other at times.
We seem to be our own worst enemy, and this is true across the housing spectrum. When you can get to that amazing compromise on law, we just don't have that follow through. I think the good news is I've been watching you all, the Debt Collective and other organizations build your own infrastructure around 1482, which is super impressive. Folks should look at the Tenant Power Toolkit if they're interested. I'm excited, with one of my clients we're going to be using the Tenant Power Toolkit. With other clients of mine that work in the production space we are looking at building our own implementation infrastructure, ways of getting our members to help them understand what's possible under state law, all of the things that have changed over the last number of years. How do you actually use this? How do we see changes on the ground? Because we just don't do it enough.
Shanti Singh: Yeah. It's also its own data infrastructure too. There's just not enough lawyers. There's not even close to enough legal aid lawyers, in general, for low income people in California or middle income people who can't afford lawyers. But if you get a court eviction notice, you only have so many days to respond, although we just extended that. But you're probably not going to find the lawyer in time.
But with the Tenant Power Toolkit, you’re auto you're putting information, you're auto filing your eviction response. But it's also helped us build our own sort of data set in terms of who's being evicted. What are they being evicted for? Trying to figure out who the landlord is? Trying to sort of see some trends, because we also just don't get eviction data from the state and it's all held up in all these different county courts. Some of them will give it to you. Some of them won't. Some of it's like, we can't open these PDFs. So we’re actually also looking at patterns of displacement and the impacts of displacement.
Alex Schafran: I know this is going to get me in trouble, but somehow, California is a state that has both too many lawyers and not enough lawyers simultaneously. There are so many lawsuits that are filed in this state that don't need to be filed and that make our housing system work worse, and at the same time, so many people who need quality legal assistance to keep their housing, to preserve their housing, to produce more housing, can't find it, or can't find it at a price that they can afford.
Building on 1482 has been hard. It's part of the reason why we're going to talk about Prop 33 which is the Costa Hawkins repeal, which is something that folks have been focusing on for a really long time. But there were a couple of important wins this year in the state legislature, one which is a very kind of legal topic around unlawful detainer. Can you give us just a little bit of a highlight of what for you were some of the biggest things that happened for tenants rights in the recently closed leg session.
Shanti Singh: Yeah. This wasn't a big swing tenants rights year in terms of last year. We tried to make some improvements to AB 1482, with SB 567, we got some things out of enforcement, better enforcement, and some closure of some loopholes. So that was last year with SB 567, that was a really big swing. This year was a little bit more chill, not necessarily chill in terms of the election, but at least in terms of the tenant laws that got passed.
But the unlawful detainer one, that's just a fancy word for when you're basically being evicted, and it becomes part of an official court process. Back when I started at Tenants Together, you had just five calendar days to respond. So you'd see a bunch of evictions filed on Thursdays and Fridays because people couldn't get a lawyer over the weekend. A few years ago that got extended. We helped get it extended with David Chu to five business days, and now it's being extended thanks to Ash Karla, to 10 business days. That sounds kind of modest, but that really can be the difference between being in your home and not having one.
So doubling that timeline, we think is really good, especially because there's a lot of ways in which California's eviction process is actually really unfair, and sometimes more unfair than even some other red states, just in terms of how long you have to respond. You can't actually sometimes cure the situation in California. You might be evicted for non payment of rent, and you have the money, which should stop the case, right? But once it goes to court, that's actually not necessarily the case. That's still true. So there's a lot of ways in which our court system in California, particularly the eviction system, is grossly unfair and sometimes even an outlier, right? I know we love to think we're the best in the nation and everything.
The other thing, and this is not yet settled, but it was signed by the governor, but AB 846, from Mia Bonta in the East Bay, and that is basically to put a rent cap on low income housing tax credit properties. That law right now says basically X percent plus inflation, what that X percent is going to be, it’s going to be a process to come to an agreement on.
Alex Schafran: First of all, Assembly Member Bonta is my assembly person, and I'm excited about the fact that this one got passed. As a triple member of EBHO, East Bay Housing Organization whose former ED Gloria Bruce has been a guest on this show, and whose staff I really love. I love being a member of EBHO. One of the hard parts of being a member of EBHO has been watching the organization oppose the extension of certain rent regulations to the nonprofit or to the LIHTC community.
For those who are not nerds in the housing space, the low income housing tax credit is not exclusively a nonprofit program. I don't know the exact percentage in California, but a big chunk of California's LIHTC properties are owned by for profit corporations who just participate in the program. And everywhere you go, you see challenges and rent increases in evictions. I've got one colleague who's a legal aid attorney who will constantly tell me about the number of evictions that come across her decks, that come from the local nonprofit housing provider. It’s really difficult. I've got other colleagues in the nonprofit side who struggle with, who at times, need to use the eviction system.
So one of the reasons why I love this law is that the answer is for there to be a system that includes all landlords, small, big—everybody needs to be able to participate in this type of system where we're able to regulate, support both sides in various ways to have a fair legal process. And so some sort of rent cap has been necessary for a really long time, and congrats on being able to push that one across the finish line.
Shanti Singh: Thank you.
Alex Schafran: So speaking of things that have been needed to do for a long time, let's talk about Costa Hawkins. So this is a big deal for me. For those of you who have listened to the show before, you may realize that I have ever disagreed with a guest about something. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, some of it might be that I’m not courageous enough to disagree with people. But mostly if the fact that I'm not a journalist, this isn't CBS News, I'm not bringing people on here to throw them under the bus or to ask them difficult questions or put them on a spot. Everybody who comes on this show is a colleague of mine. Many of them are friends, and we're here to talk about housing in positive ways and sort of push people to think about things in new ways.
But at times we disagree, and oftentimes I realize the good disagreements are when there's a disagreement about strategy and not a disagreement about outcomes. So anybody who has been watching a football game or TV knows Prop 33 is on the ballot. California has been fed all sorts of misinformation from both sides, in my opinion, about what Prop 33 will or will not do.
Costa Hawkins is a piece of legislation passed by the state legislature in 1995 which essentially prevents local jurisdictions from passing laws stronger than the state has around rent control. I think there were seven jurisdictions that were grandfathered in like San Francisco, Oakland, LA, that had rent control prior to that, but nobody else can make things stronger. That’s the basics of Costa Hawkins. Repeal of Costa Hawkins has been a priority for the tenants rights movement for a really long time, something I've very much supported, but now it's coming across up into the ballot, and 33 is something that I have some concerns about.
Before I get into that, why don't you give us a little bit of an understanding of how you and Tenants Together are coming to from about Prop 33 and how you sort of see its importance, because I know it's something that's been a big priority for you, and something that you think is really important.
Shanti Singh: I mean, I'm a rent controlled tenant myself. I feel between the Ellis Acts, which you already explained, and Costa Hawkins, I feel like I have a target on my back every day, right? Because there is an inherent incentive in Costa Hawkins that means that if my landlord were to behave unscrupulously, not that I'm saying my landlord is unscrupulous, but if my landlord chose to do that, or if they sold a building to a corporate landlord who chose to do that, which has happened a lot in San Francisco and some real horror stories. If they can find a way, by hook or by crook, to get me out of my unit and reset it to market rate, it'll still be rent controlled in terms of controlling the rate of increase, but the base rate could change.
They have a really strong incentive to find whatever way they want to get me out of my home, right? We see the limitations that Costa Hawkins puts on cities. I mean, it's really unfortunate. For example, in Oakland, I was talking to some folks who are really concerned because Costa Hawkins freezes Oakland's rent control back, not even in 1995 but in 1980 like where San Francisco was frozen in 1979 there's this huge issue with seniors who need rent controlled housing because they have fixed incomes, right? They can't afford these year over year rent increases, but they also have disability and access issues. And the fact of the matter is that newer housing tends to be more accessible, right?
Particularly, I forget when the Americans Disabilities Act was passed, I think it was in the 70s or something. So a lot of the rent controlled housing stock is older and not accessible. But then the newer housing stock that is accessible is just not affordable to people who have fixed incomes who can't swallow these rent increases. That's an example of the active harm that Costa Hawkins causes.
Oakland can't expand its rent control past 1980. There's a massive challenge with single family homes. There's this perception, that I think is false, that the size of the building corresponds to the size of the landlord. And so no single family home can be rent controlled. Some of them are subject to the rent cap, but they can't be rent controlled at the local level.
And ever since 2008 when people (Tenants Together was founded in 2008) were dealing with the double eviction of someone being foreclosed who was renting it out to someone who is renting their housing out to someone who's evicted. Since 2008 we have continued to see single family home rentals be a very lucrative opportunity for bigger landlords who pass these insane rent increases. And we just cannot touch single family homes, or local jurisdictions can't touch them at all.
So there’s the fact that the timeline is really arbitrary. And sometimes, we've even seen Costa Hawkins weaponized against local rent control campaigns. The the craziest example was in 2017, I think, when Santa Rosa almost passed rent control. It was only a few 100 votes shy, so anything could have made the difference. And what tenants got in Santa Rosa were these mailers from the landlords, the outside looked like an important notice from your landlord. Of course you're freaking out as a tenant, and you open it, and then it says, “Hey, have you heard of this right control measure that's going to be on your ballot. If you live in a single family home, or anything built after 1995 or a condo, don't vote for this because it doesn't apply to you.” They made it seem like it was a failure of rent control proponents, right? And that's really dishonest, but that’s the kind of thing that we see.
Some of these lawsuits, like from San Francisco, were just absolutely horrific. Rent control tenants from Veritas (the biggest landlord in San Francisco) falling into sewage that was pouring out of their sinks. So there are all of these different reasons why Costa Hawkins, we think is not just it's arbitrary, and it's like a poorly designed regulation on rent control, but also that it's like actively harmful to people.
Alex Schafran: Thank you for giving us the background, and also for reminding me that in my introduction to Costa Hawkins, I missed a bunch of really important things. As you mentioned, Costa Hawkins, in addition to sort of capping what local jurisdictions can do, it makes vacancy control illegal. That basically the what, exactly as you mentioned, it is sort of it makes it you cannot have rent control does not pass between tenancies, as it does in New York City. So that's the incentive that you're talking about. And then it caps the it prevents certain types of buildings, like single family homes, which I completely agree absolutely need to be covered, and then sets these kind of arbitrary dates.
So the thing for me is, you know, I am with you every step of the way about Costa Hawkins repeal. I guess the challenge for me is the method. So what is it about going to the ballot that you think is important? I mean, that is my concern about Prop 33 is Costa Hawkins a creature of the legislature as is 1482 and I'm a believer that that's where we need to solve this problem. But you're somebody who's worked in the legislature a lot more than I have. You've tried to repeal Costa Hawkins legislatively many times, and my guess is that you're at this point for a reason.
Shanti Singh: Yes, and no. I actually kind of take the approach that if it's on the ballot, I'll push it. If it's in the legislature, I'll push it. We even sponsored briefly, a sort of reform attempt that would have just changed the rolling the date that you can push rent control up to right.
I don't think that it's necessarily that I have given up, or that everybody's given up on the legislature in terms of solving a problem that they created, but at the same time, I just think that the legislature is not responsive. I mean, it's not responsive to renters full stop. It’s like, 5 out of 120 of the legislature are renters.
But I think that the reason that's on the ballot is just out of just a sense of increasing urgency, and the reason it's been on three times is because that urgency is not going away. It's getting more acute, especially as more cities pass rent control. I think ten in the last three years and are bumping up into the limits of Costa Hawkins. That's going to keep happening.
I don't see it as the ballot versus the legislature. I see it as like chipping away at it any way that we can. We're not the ballot proponent, we didn't make the decision to put on the ballot, but we are going to support it, because whatever way that this gets done, I think that's really where we're coming from in the tenants rights movement. We will try every single way to get rid of this thing.
Alex Schafran: So I know from many of my YIMBY colleagues and clients the challenge is what they see is kind of a poison pill that was added to Prop 33. Prop 33 does two things. One is it repeals Costa Hawkins, and two is it puts a clause in that prevents the state from taking action against jurisdictions that pass rent laws. I know that there are other advocates of Prop 33 who think that that concern is overwrought. Is that something that you and Tenants Together have thought about that particular clause?
Shanti Singh: Yes, I have. I do come from the school of thinking that it’s overwrought. But we are dealing with a different reality. I'm not saying that the YIMBY reality is not valid, or anything like that. I'm saying when you're pushing tenant laws, there are a lot of dynamics that are very different. For one, the really important one, is that you are constantly threatened by state preemption. I have seen attempts to do state preemption, where it’s a fancy way of saying local jurisdictions can't pass anything stronger. I've seen attempts to do that in almost every tenant protection that I have been involved in pushing in the state legislature. It was actually incredibly harmful with our sort of eviction quote unquote moratorium. I do use air quotes for that because a lot of people still got evicted during COVID.
The inability for local jurisdictions to pass stronger eviction protections. I know people who are living in their cars right now because of that, right? And I think that's very different from the way that people think about land use, where you think about all these local jurisdictions like Atherton or Huntington Beach sort of wilding out, so to speak.
And that local control is out of control, and we need the state to step in and really enforce housing production requirements and things like that, it's just very different. The way that we experience state preemption as tenant advocates is really incredibly harmful and makes people homeless. And that's just totally the reverse situation of when you're thinking about it in terms of are jurisdictions complying with their RHNA goals, are they trying to block affordable housing or market rate housing or whatever. I’m not saying one's valid and one's not. It’s just a very different experience. I think that is what is motivating this language in Prop 33. If the voters repeal Costa Hawkins, we believe that the state legislature could very much go back and basically do Costa Hawkins again. We've seen that happen before.
The one thing that was where I had hoped, maybe naively, that there would be some common ground, is on local rent control campaigns, which a lot of what Tenants Together does. It’s a lot of what I do is try to support infrastructurally, comms wise, policy wise, local rent control campaigns. We face the same kind of NIMBYism that people are rightly concerned about, the same kind of racist classist, “If rent control comes to your town, you don't know who your neighbors are going to be. They’re going to be poor.” It’s always implied that they’re going to be people of color. It's going to cause the downfall of your town because of all these people moving in. And the places where that attitude is strongest, including with respect to housing production, where that NIMBYism exists, they also hate rent control the most, and it's the places where local rent control, even under Costa Hawkins, is the hardest to pass.
Alex Schafran: We both appreciate the local campaigns. Particular shout out to folks in Marin County, you've been working on some very difficult campaigns, both to pass rent control and to prevent the repeal of rent control. I do appreciate you surfacing this kind of local versus state dynamic which is a really powerful one in Prop 33 and ultimately, I think where we disagree partly is that I don't share the same sentiment about state preemption and the role of the state.
Fighting city to city and village to village in California isn't going to get us the kind of system that that tenants ultimately need. I feel like we were making a lot of progress. Five years ago, I'd say it was not the norm in the pro housing movement to be pro rent control, and it's increasingly becoming the norm. And one of the things is that Prop 33 I think has done some damage to that.
I do really appreciate there are some really good pro housing groups out there that decided to take no position on 33 and to kind of stay out of it because they're all pro rent control, they’re just not going to get involved in this localism politics. Some of this has to do with who the sponsor is and how they engage in local versus state politics that I think is pretty toxic. You not being the sponsor, obviously.
That’s the concern for me, as somebody who cares a lot about rent control and cares a lot about Costa Hawkins and cares a lot about the housing politics, I just feel at the end of the day, I'm just concerned whether Prop 33 passes or not, that it's just done so much political damage to watch $100 million spent on pretty wild disinformation campaigns, more from one side than from the other, in terms of the quantity of of BS that is being put out, but just both sides saying things that are frankly sort of not true, and selling Californians who don't learn enough about housing in school a bunch of stories about rent control, all of which is just not true. It’s just making the situation worse, especially in a really brutal and difficult election where we need to be focused on other things. Again, less of an issue in California because it doesn't matter as much now Californians vote.
The whole thing ultimately makes me sad. I've given a lot of different professional advice to different professional advice to different organizations about where to go on Prop 33 and to different friends. I think one things is that you and I are both committed to working on these issues, no matter what happens in November. And the one thing I think I always leave people with is to just make sure that this doesn't divide you from anybody that you could possibly work with, because the day after the election, we all have to work on these issues together, no matter whether 33 passes or doesn't.
Shanti Singh: It’s a big political challenge. Sometimes we get wrapped up in discussions about reform versus repeal, and what’s the right kind. But I think the real challenge that I think was a very bitter pill to swallow, was that the last attempt, Prop 21, was not a full repeal of Costa Hawkins. It was a reform. Theoretically, had all a lot of things that people wanted, who say I wanted to reform Costa Hawkins but I have objections with going this far. But it didn't help politically, actually, and what we saw with the opposition ads was actually weaponizing that to mislead voters.
There was a vacancy control reform. I forgot what the percentage was, so it was like, “Okay, you can't enact total vacancy control, but you can act some vacancy control, and it'll be up to this percentage of the rent.” And what that turned out into ad wise was “Vote no on this, because if you live in rent controlled housing, or just in general, your rent will go up that same C percent.” And this is going to be a discussion that we have to have if we're going to do it in the legislature too, in terms of who's actually going to come to the table.
If there's a compromise that's being made, whatever that compromise is, it has to actually bring somebody to the table. Because if you discursively find there was less contention around Prop 21 between the folks you're talking to and folks like me, but at the same time it didn't. Not only did it not make a difference to the electorate, but it was actually weaponized against us, which was really upsetting, and that's not anybody's fault but the opposition, right?
When we’re thinking about whether we’re going to do this, or how we’re going to do this, or what’s the right level, we have to bring someone to the table when you make a compromise.
Alex Schafran: Well, I hope that when that happens, I'm pretty confident when that happens, it's going to be in the legislature and not at the ballot. Perhaps you can come back. If I ever do an episode on why California's ballot system is so undemocratic and awful, and not just because of the massive tide of misinformation that interrupts my football then, I would love to have you back. It's a tragic system. It's so sad that people think that this is neither direct nor democracy, certainly not direct democracy.
Shanti Singh: But I thought it was the coolest thing ever. When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, I was like, “Oh, that's so cool. They just go straight to the voters.” And then I moved here 10 years ago, and I was like, “Oh my god, this is a nightmare.”
Alex Schafran: So not cool. And you know what animates both of us almost as much as the subject of tenants rights, is social housing. So with the time we have left, I do want to talk about some of the work that you've done in San Francisco, and that you are also hopefully going to be part of, in some ways, on SB 555, which is a statewide study of possible ways of doing social housing in California, which is part of a bill that you helped write and pass last year. Tell us briefly about the San Francisco plan, and a little bit about 555.
Shanti Singh: San Francisco plan, in so far as it is a plan, much like all things San Francisco, it's chaos. But we passed a real estate transfer tax in 2020, Prop I. It was very much opposed by real estate folks, it was outspent 20:1. It's still passed, but unfortunately, due to a legal technicality that I still don't fully understand around our charter or something like that, that funding could not be dedicated to its purpose of social housing. The other half was rent relief, and that was duly dedicated by the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, and that became our Rent Relief Program, which was really instrumental during COVID, when the state money ran dry.
But the other half of social housing has been hotly, hotly contested and I think politicized in deeply unfortunate ways. Our city's small sites acquisition program (to acquire multifamily housing) has basically been defunded. We've talked about land banking and other things and I mean, there were some budget deals that were made. There's one budget deal that was made a couple years ago where we kind of all the different sides, resolved their differences and allocated this money. That money's been spent down. But I'm on a policy body, we don't have any decision making power, but called the Housing Stability Fund Oversight Board, that's supposed to have oversight over the Housing Stability Fund, which is the fund that was that has now run dry, that was supposed to be populated by that tax, right?
It is unfortunate that a lot of ideas that I think people should agree on have kind of devolved into political factionalism. But that being said, we have accomplished a few things. We have bought land for affordable housing, although it's not quite land banking, which is what we want. We did fund quite a few small site acquisitions, which means that we're not just stabilizing tenants who would be evicted, but also, building an appropriately affordable housing stock for people who move into those units in the future. So we did get some acquisitions out of that. I'm not saying that we haven't won things, but it's still not the sort of systematic approach that we need to scale subsidized and social housing, specifically through, either both through acquisition and through production, right? That's what we're trying to fight for. Having an ecosystem and not just making one off decisions about why we are buying this land for housing, but having an ecosystem and more coherent policy that allows us to scale. So we're not there yet.
It's unfortunate that we're not, because I think that these should be things that people on both sides of SF housing wars should agree on. But we're not there yet. Yet being the operative word. We are doing a San Francisco study on what kind of municipal social housing we could fund. There's some cost analysis out. We're going to start looking into agencies and stuff, because actually having the bureaucracy problem is a whole other can of worms. It’s slow going, I think because the political constituency for social housing isn't quite there yet, and because there's just a lot of opposition.
It’s hard in San Francisco. Even when there’s a good idea that people agree on, it’s hard to get everybody on board for it's tied up in electoral BS.
Then there’s SB 555, which is that was a state bill to basically figure out, how can we get 1.2 million units of for low and middle income people of social housing defined broadly across a range of models, including land trusts, co-ops, public housing, nonprofit ownership with some guardrails around it that LIHTC housing doesn't currently have. That's what we're trying to do at the state level, is figure out the tough answers. It might be like, “Oh, you, we need to do something that's going to be very difficult politically,” but we want to start asking those questions.
Alex Schafran: I’m excited about 555. The Terner Center is running this study for HCD, it's going to be an adventure. I'm kind of curious to see what they can come up with, what perhaps we can come up with, I know they're going to be doing outreach to all manners of other housers. Maybe there are listeners on this show that will be somehow part of the 555 process. There are a lot of different ways to think about and define social housing. I think we probably defined it somewhat differently. But I think we'd agree it's a different way of approaching the affordable housing problem than we've traditionally done.
It's ways of looking at European and Asian and Latin American models for how we do housing. It's some mix of what the YIMBYs think about is and the Green New Deal folks and others as a state agency that becomes a developer? Is it a way of defining housing is a way of building housing is a way of owning housing. I think these are all questions for debate, but for me, what animates me is that social housing is a way of really, sort of thinking about the housing system, systematically thinking about the true political economy of housing. You can't escape the housing industry if you're thinking about social housing, and nor should you want to, because without a housing industry, no housing gets built, no housing gets maintained. Nonprofit housers are part of the housing industry. Community land trusts are part of the housing industry. I'm curious, what is it about social housing that animates you? I like to think again that it's that you're a true political economy person, and maybe it's some of that background and derivatives that animates you. But what gets you excited, particularly for the state work, you’re going to be part of this study.
Shanti Singh: I mean, in the grandest possible version of this is like, in a functioning society, I think my job would be obsolete. So always be organizing yourself outside of a job. I mean a lot of other people use the word abundant, but I really think real abundance means having a big non-market system of housing.
I always think about what it would be like for tenants to not have to live in fear all the time, or just have this insecurity constantly on them and that's really what animates me from an ideological perspective or just experiential perspective. I really do think it’s a path that’s broad enough to bring a lot of people to the table, right? And not everybody agrees on what everybody agrees on what social housing is, and there's going to be a lot of very spirited disagreements about that. And there's a lot of valid points that are made right? Like I hear from even just our member organizations, they have very different visions of social housing. Some of them are just like, “We need public housing. We need to fund the public housing the government owns, and I just want to rent it.” And other people are like, “No, I want to own my housing cooperatively.” People have a lot of different opinions, even within our tent.
What excites me, from an economic perspective, is I'm just tired of having to say no to things that we know we need when we're just talking about our current housing system. And I'm not going to point fingers at certain pieces of it, but when you look at the whole system, what it's amounted to is having to say, “Here are these people. Here are so many millions and millions of Americans and millions of Californians who just simply cannot afford the housing market. And for one reason or another, we kind of have to say, ‘No, this isn't for you.’” And I'm tired of saying that.
Alex Schafran: California's housing markets, I'm going to use the plural here, make me sad in so many ways. Not to disagree with you twice on my show. Thank you so much, by the way, for coming and being the first guest that I've really been able to have a disagreement with, I truly appreciate it.
There are two things. One thing that we agree on, which is that there are a lot of different definitions of social housing. As the 555 starts, one thing I hope that people And the one thing I hope that people, as the 555 process starts, when you meet somebody who has a different definition of social housing than you do, that's a sign of success. That's somebody you need to hug because they're actually thinking about social housing. If they're thinking about social housing, they're thinking about sort of systemic change. It's folks that aren't thinking about social housing that we need to bring in. If we fight amongst ourselves about what's the right definition, we're never going to get there. And so I hope people see other social housers, even if they have a different understanding, as ultimately allies that they need to be able to make.
I think social housing has to have room for individuals who want to own things individually, who are not as excited about having meetings and going to meetings about their housing. We need to understand that housing is always a market. I mean, CLT is operating in a market, Habitat for Humanity, both of whom are across the street from me and I'm really proud of this, they operate in a market. It's not the same market as my house operates in, or that your rent controlled apartment operates in, and I've been a rent control tenant and a homeowner and a landlord and all these things. They're all markets in some ways. They all have some aspect of market logic, and it's getting them to work, it's getting them to be fair, it's getting them to have real rules that everybody pays attention to and that everybody has rights in.
To me that’s not caving into the market system. It's just recognizing the certain aspects of markets. Markets have been turned into an ideology, but they're still a real thing. And I hope that’s what social housing is doing for us, is at least getting the discourse to be a little bit more political economy and not just politics, which I think is wonderful.
But I wanted to end this show with actually how originally I was going to do this show. The original version of this show was not just Shanti Singh, it was Shanti Singh, with your friend Annie Fyman. So those of you who know housing in California and especially in the Bay Area, probably know Annie, a kind of YIMBY legend, former staffer for Scott Weiner, one of the architects of SB 50, and currently works at SPUR, one of the smartest people I think we will both agree, in housing. You and her are on very different sides of this housing situation, the people who love her and the people who love you don't really love each other very much at all, but the two of you are really good friends.
I had known this about you and Annie for a really long time, that's always really inspired me. Somebody that we both know once called my current work “Why can't we all get along YIMBYism”, which is a really good dig, and I will fully accept it, but one of the reasons why I do believe that we can all get along is that I've seen your and Annie's relationship. Tell us a little bit about how you became friends and what it's like having a very close friend who sometimes you're on different sides of this housing business.
Shanti Singh: Well, you mentioned she wrote SB50. I met her because I was testifying against it. So there's a meet cute, right there. I think immediately through that process I was taking a specific kind of position on SB 50 on behalf of our membership who asked me to take it right in terms of their concerns about displacement and specific communities.
But I think the thing was (and I don't want to put words in her mouth. Maybe that's not how she felt) but I don't know if we necessarily expected originally the other person to have certain things in common. I think there were things that she probably was expecting me to say that I didn't say, and vice versa. The negative expectations that just didn't happen. I think it's just seeing where somebody's coming from, if they're able to articulate that well. I understand where she's coming from, she's a trained architect who's looking at these maddening governance problems, and that's what brought her to the work that she does. And I think she understands, I already told my story at the beginning of this episode so I won’t repeat it, but she understands what I'm doing and where I'm coming from and who I am responsible to, right?
It's kind of cheesy to say it's just about where you're coming from. I'm not saying that everybody is going to necessarily agree on that. But then also I can also see the logic in it, and I hope that you can see the logic what I'm thinking.
There’s a little bit of a trust thing there. If you trust that the person that you're working with, in some fashion, is genuinely taking your concerns to heart, which is, unfortunately, very rare in Sacramento, right? Most of the time your mindset in Sacramento is, even when someone's being nice to you, how is this person trying to screw me? I just never had that with her and I think that’s basically it. But we argue a lot. But when we argue, I just remind myself, she's trying to solve this governance problem. And Annie, I think, probably thinks Shanti is trying to house people who are just completely shut out and exploited.
Alex Schafran: Yeah, you've also told me the story of the evening, I think there was a marathon session in person somewhere, was it in Long Beach? Or did I make that up?
Shanti Singh: LA
Alex Schafran: LA. I think some of it is also the story of being able to break bread, to be in a room together. Building that trust is so hard. You know, even just this little conversation that we're having, which involves some very minor disagreements about strategy, is happening on Zoom, but could never have happened if we had only ever met on Zoom. I think there's just ways of getting people together, you've established that trust that enables that kind of disagreement.
As much as we're going all online, I hope that people find the time and the space to be able to make that happen. It's great to hear that story. I've always been kind of curious, and imagine being a fly on the wall in some of your arguments. But the good thing is that you're not alone. I have watched folks particularly across this YIMBY/equity divide that makes me so sad, which is one of the reasons why I've reacted to 33 the way I have is that it's sort of dredging up so many of these divides again which pains me.
I try really hard to have a consulting business that works on both sides, that tries to bring people together. Your relationship really continues to inspire me. There are a bunch of others out there that are the same way. I think you're right. If we ask them, it would be about trust, and trust about kind of where that person is coming from, and where their heart is, and what they're ultimately trying to achieve. And I think sometimes it's just a disagreement a lot of times on strategy, and I would ultimately argue that that's a way to think about the majority of the housing movement as a whole. I do think ultimately that there is a growing consensus about where we need to go. I think it's where social housing is going to help push us. And I think once we can finally get over our really vociferous arguments about strategy, I think that hopefully we'll be able to find that common ground to be able to do the kind of radical things that California wants to do.
Shanti Singh: We’ll see. I mean, I just want this election to be over honestly, and then when the dust clears, depending on what happens. That's the thing too. I'm not forgetting the possibility that a lot of our disagreements will become academic because something worse is happening. But I want to end on a happy note. We'll figure it out.
Alex Schafran: In some ways that is the only note you can end on. And we're recording this on October 14, it'll be out before election day. I think one of the things that you and I know, that you and Annie know, is that if the wrong thing happens in November, that we're on the same side, and we're on the same team, and we're really fighting for the same things, and we're going to both have to fight to protect California and to continue to build what is possible in the state.
Shanti Singh. Thank you so much for being a guest here on Housing After Dark, it was a real pleasure. Annie Fryman, I hope you were listening and that you felt the love and that you too want to come on and be a guest and so that we can talk about Shanti.
And I hope there is a chance for you to come back when we're talking about SB 555 in the future and where it's gone and what it's achieved. Everybody pay attention if you get an invite to participate in SB 555, discussion from Terner Center, from anybody else, please say yes. It's very important.
Thank you. Shanti.
Shanti Singh: Thank you, Alex.
Housing After Dark Episode 16: Shanti Singh on Prop 33, Social Housing and Productive Disagreement