Election Day Brought Thrilling Victory—and Devastating Defeat—to the Housing Movement
“From California to New York to Texas to Illinois, tenant activists had worked feverishly over the last few months to build support for a slew of new renters’ protections and affordable-housing policies. On election night they had ample reason to celebrate. In Austin, Texas, voters approved an enormous $250 million bond that will fund an ambitious program of public land acquisition and affordable housing development in the city. In Chicago, residents passed three separate resolutions that effectively call on the state government to rescind Illinois’s long-standing ban on rent control. In San Francisco, housing advocates pushed through Proposition C, a measure that will raise taxes on wealthy businesses and provide roughly $300 million each year to provide services and housing to the city’s homeless population. And in New York, Democrats took control of the State Senate for the first time in a decade, immediately lifting the prospects of New York’s Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance, a tenants’ coalition that aims to expand and strengthen New York’s rent-stabilization laws during the coming legislative term.”