Why PTU is withdrawing support from House Bill 2004
The Oregon Senate abandoned renters, so we’re abandoning the bill.
It is with both a heavy heart and righteous anger that Portland Tenants United is announcing the withdrawal of support for House Bill 2004 as it is currently written.
Whereas the original version of HB 2004 offered clear, broad, robust, and critical regulations that would have immediately addressed the fear and impact of displacement felt by Oregon’s renters, the remaining bill is a morass of confusing, painful, and reckless amendments that effectively eliminate or weaken all major provisions, and create huge loopholes for predatory landlords to easily maneuver around the scraps that remain.
More than a year was spent developing the original bill based on extensive research of similar policies across the country, and in consultation and coalition with housing economists, policy analysts, lawmakers, impacted tenants and advocates, responsible landlords, industry professionals, labor, culturally specific organizations, and intersectional community partners from across the state. But this thoughtful and considered hard work was rapidly undermined by an arsenal of landlord–lobbyists and unscrupulous lawmakers who wasted no time bludgeoning the bill with a maze of misguided and damaging amendments in order to inoculate landlords from any real regulation, ultimately rendering the bill largely symbolic.
These amendments were not proposed and passed based on sound policy analysis or in consideration of what protections tenants most need, but in order to get the votes of out-of-touch Democrats in both chambers who allowed themselves to be seduced by the landlord lobby’s lies, propaganda, and hefty campaign donations. These cuts leave their most vulnerable constituents bleeding without even a makeshift band-aid in sight.
Even after these grotesque concessions were brokered in exchange for votes, the bill’s passage is still uncertain!!
This is a deep insult to everyone who has dedicated the last year to this bill, and to the 45% of Oregonians whose lives depend on it. Lawmakers who are ignorant and indifferent to the plight of their most vulnerable constituents and who allowed themselves to be compromised by the landlord lobby’s largesse will not be forgotten.
The heart of House Bill 2004 was housing security.
The constant fear and threat of losing one’s home is never far from the minds of the almost half of all Oregonians who pay a mortgage to a landlord instead of a bank. Senior citizens, veterans, families, college students, school children, people with disabilities and health issues, workers, retirees, immigrants and refugees, and folks from marginalized communities across the state have had their lives, their dignity, and their financial stability destroyed by no-cause evictions and eye-popping rent increases. Our burgeoning homeless crisis is populated by more and more Oregonians who work full-time and were recently housed. Housing security transforms lives; forced displacement ruins them.
Housing is Sanctuary.
Housing security is also good for the economy, good for our congested freeways, good for schools, good for employers, good for safe neighborhoods, good for healthy communities, and good for taxpayers who are subsidizing landlords by funding our displacement related social safety net.
HB 2004, as originally written, would have made it possible for renters to feel relatively secure in their homes, jobs, schools, and communities by ending no-cause evictions. Instead of terminating a tenancy for no reason at all and without any recourse for a tenant, the bill would stipulate that a tenancy could only be terminated with a “for-cause eviction” (when the tenant has violated the rental agreement) — a process that does NOT require lawyers or courtrooms — or a “no-fault” eviction. In the latter case, a landlord could give a “no-fault” eviction (aka just-cause eviction) if they wanted to sell, move into the home, make major repairs and renovations, or otherwise take it out of the residential housing market. The landlord could only do this by stating the cause, giving tenants 90-days notice and 3-months rent to offset the significant cost of an unplanned move.
Absent of one of these “no-fault” reasons, responsible rent paying tenants would not have to constantly worry about where they will live next month if they ask for their fridge to be fixed.
And just in case dramatic rent increases were used as a form of “legal” no-cause eviction, the bill would have lifted the statewide ban on rent control allowing cities to protect tenants from landlords doubling their rent, based on convenient fictions such as speculative “market value.”
And in the original bill, these critical protections would have applied to all tenants.
And all landlords reaping the benefits of our hot housing market would have to play by the same rules.
Fast forward through two rounds of amendments in House and Senate committees — the bill now offers far too few renters far too little protection.
The first major cuts were to relocation.
Instead of requiring all landlords to pay 3-months rent when forcing a tenant to move through no fault of their own, it was reduced to 1-month, and exempted landlords who own less than 5 units.
Nevermind that relocation is a standard and necessary disincentive to hastily displacing tenants, and that 1-months rent isn’t even enough to pay required up front move-in expenses at the new place. (Maybe we could live with less relocation if the blatant theft that is security deposits were a bit more regulated.)
Nevermind that it’s practically impossible to figure out how many units a landlord owns across the state especially when that sweet small “mom & pop” is not a human but an LLC.
But what rationale were lawmakers using to determine that tenants of “small landlords” deserve smaller protections? Most tenants outside of Oregon’s metro areas rent from “small” landlords; why do they deserve less than city folk who rent from real-estate barrons?
Who determined that tenants of small landlords are more financially equipped to pay for an unwanted move than their landlords who are forcing it on them?
While owning 4 rentals might not produce the same profits as owning 400, it is still a significantly stronger financial position than the tenant who owns zero.
We get that paying relocation is a burden, we understand the burden real well from it repeatedly being foisted on us without mercy. But landlords can easily avoid paying it by not forcing their tenants out of their homes. Moving is expensive. When it’s not our choice or fault we shouldn’t have to bear that burden alone.
But the pillaging doesn’t stop there.
Under the most current version of the bill, instead of eradicating no-cause evictions for all tenants, no-cause evictions can now be used during the first 9 months of tenancy. (The six-month exemption from the first round of amendments was already inexcusable!) The first year in a new home is a vulnerable time for renters whose landlords might realize that their politics, lifestyles, or cultures clash. But we consoled ourselves by remembering that some of the elderly and disabled tenants we’ve worked with have faced no-causes after living in their apartments for decades — this bill would have still helped them!
The most dramatic cut was undoubtedly the loss of lifting the 30-year statewide ban on rent control.
This version of the bill now does nothing about the fact that a $1000 rent increase (for example) is still legal, and it remains illegal to do anything about it.
Even after an amendment that would have required that landlords be guaranteed a “fair rate of return”, plus additional amendments allowing them to appeal for higher rent increases, several Senate Democrats still refused to vote yes on the bill if cities were allowed to take any action on price gouging landlords. (Apparently, Salem hates legislating for Portland problems. Yet it refuses to let Portland legislate for itself!)
Why Democratic senators think price gouging senior citizens and 100% rent increases is okay is anyone’s guess. We surmise that pressure from the landlord lobby combined with willful ignorance and intellectual laziness was the cause. Oregon’s legislators — you know, the people who set public policy — showed precious little knowledge of or interest in understanding modern rent control policies implemented in over 150 cities.
And they didn’t seem clever enough to recognize the obvious contradiction of “good-landlords” railing against rent control at the same time as claiming that they barely-ever-raise-rent-and-even-then-not-by-much. Senators simply gobbled up the landlord lobby’s talking points that development would stop (false!), and that landlords would be forced from the business (good riddance to price gougers!), while ignoring the fact that rent control does what the policy is intended to do: protect existing renters in their homes, something we hope our lawmakers agree is important amid growing conversations about the destructive forces of gentrification.
“Rent control doesn’t work,” they said. But they were stunningly silent on explaining how our current system is “working” any better.
To its credit, the bill now limits rent increases to only once per year. So a landlord who wants to use a rent increase to get their tenant out may have to wait so long that they forget (unlikely). But this protection only applies to rent increases for month-to-month tenants; tenants with leases less than a year could face a rent increase every time their lease renews, or an even bigger increase if they are allowed to go month-to-month. For example, last year, one of our PTU members was given the choice of a $200 rent increase for another year-long lease, or a $700 rent increase to go month-to-month; this is a typical tactic to keep tenants in leases.
If buying a home is the answer to a beleaguered renter’s prayers, don’t first-time homebuyers need to be able to save for a downpayment and have flexibility of month-to-month so they can move without lease break fees (1.5 times the rent) when they win a bidding war on an overpriced starter home? Why isn’t the Realtor’s Association weighing in on this?
Speaking of the realtors…
A last minute amendment that apparently they demanded (who even asked them?!) eviscerated the just-cause provision related to landlords selling their home. Instead of giving a tenant 90-days notice and requiring the home be sold (offer accepted) to someone who intended to live in it as opposed to another landlord who would inherit the tenant, now all a landlord has to do is list the property for sale to terminate the tenancy (hello Zillow for-sale-by-owner!). And they only have to give 30-days notice.
Is this because the bar for protecting tenants should be lower when weighed against the urgent need of landlords to realize windfall profits by selling housing at the top of the market?
In San Francisco, slumlords spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting around their strict just-cause eviction rules using a similar loophole called The Ellis Act, and despite the Herculean effort required, it is single handedly responsible for massive displacement of low-income residents and the working class. (Click the link, it’s neat.) So, Oregon went ahead and made it super simple for our landlords to do the same thing here. Cool.
We can hardly wait for landlords to blame “unintended consequences” on “failed policy”, and not the loopholes they lobbied for that caused it to fail. Lawmakers are already noting that landlords are selling their properties in anticipation of this bill passing. Ergo, it hurts tenants. As if landlords selling hasn’t been a problem before this. (It has.) But if they passed the bill in its original form, these tenants would be getting 90-days notice and three months rent of relocation. That’s a big deal. The new bill says they’d get 30-days notice and zero relocation if their landlord owns less than 5 rentals (or claims to). That’s a big giveaway to landlords who will reap major profits from the sale.
It is tempting to assume that the loss of lifting the ban on rent control is the reason that PTU is abandoning this bill.
It was a kick in the gut, to be sure.
But not a deal-killer.
Many PTU members have endured the trauma of a no-cause eviction (and were radicalized by it) and recognize the importance of ending this heinous practice. Since lifting the ban would not actually impose local rent control — that fight would be city by city — losing the ability to wage that war for now wasn’t worth sacrificing the security of just-cause protections for tenants across the state.
So we stayed the course and kept up the fight to end no-cause evictions.
But as we read the amendments more carefully, we realized they were more devastating than originally understood.
In addition to the scandalous realtor loophole, we realized that the new amendments no longer “ended” no-cause evictions at all. Landlords could actually continue to issue no-cause terminations to any tenant… as long as that tenant is not month-to-month, but at the end of a lease.
Yes. Tenants in leases (which is a lot of them) would not be subject to any of the protections in the bill.
This was not just a surprise, nor an oversight by our lawmakers. We won’t mince words: This was a betrayal. We didn’t see it coming because originally, the bill was carefully and deliberately constructed to ensure that tenants in leases would be protected: Tenants would have the right to renew their leases (no guarantee rents would stay the same), or let it roll over into a month-to-month agreement. But in its current amended form, HB 2004’s protections no longer apply to leases. Full stop.
Landlords would have no obligation to offer a renewal or allow the tenant to go month-to-month; they would merely have to send a 90-day notice prior to the end of the lease declining to renew and terminating the tenancy, without cause.
Landlords have been losing their collective mind over losing the power to ruin someone’s life by giving a no-cause eviction. Current state law makes it illegal to terminate a tenancy for discriminatory or retaliatory reasons, but perfectly legal to do it for no reason at all. This provides a seamless way to get around the pesky Fair Housing Act and to legally retaliate for asking for repairs. Or to take out your anger on your disabled tenants.
So if leases are the way to avoid all the new tenant protections and regulations in the bill, why would any landlord continue to offer month-to-month tenancies? Especially in a tight housing market where they have all the bargaining power?
What if the landlord only offers leases? Or forces their month-to-month tenants into one?
In fact, in explicit anticipation of the landlord lobby’s ability to defang the bill through loopholes, they have already been doing this!
If the bill passes, the above letter would technically be illegal to give to a month-to-month tenant, because refusal to sign the lease means a no-cause eviction. But for a cunning landlord betting on an uninformed tenant, they could simply say: “We are now requiring leases. If you don’t like it, you can move.”
The letter below is more subtle and was given to an apartment complex full of low-income vulnerable month-to-month tenants, even though it suggests otherwise:
Will the tenant know that their “choice” to move is actually a no-cause eviction?
Are we overreacting by overestimating the intelligence of most landlords to realize that this huge loophole exists?
Maybe.
But should the strength of the bill rely on hoping that bad actors aren’t paying attention and those most vulnerable to their abuses fully grasp the intricacies of state law?
We reject any law whose strength relies not on airtight policy but instead on landlord ignorance and tenant legal expertise.
Landlords have money and industry groups; many tenants around the state don’t even speak English, much less have access to attorneys and advocates who will assist them in fighting their landlord — risking a financial catastrophe if they lose.
Practically speaking, any remotely determined landlord has multiple legal pathways to elude all of the provisions in this version of the bill.
This is not an accident. This is a direct consequence of Senate Democrats letting the conscienceless landlord lobby water down every protection, just in case the bill passes. Meanwhile, the landlord lobby will ensure that its members are educated on how to exploit all of the carefully-crafted loopholes. Tenants who know their rights and are able to access scarce legal resources might be able to fight egregious abuses, but for everyone else, these protections are largely symbolic.
Portland Tenants United is often and rightly confronted for only fighting for the rights of Portland’s tenants. Indeed, many of those most impacted by the housing crisis (which has been going on for few hundred years for Oregon’s People of Color, by the way) have already been pushed out of city limits. So we were eager to support the Stable Homes Coalition in the passage of this statewide bill. But categorically eliminating tenants in leases from the protections is not much different than eliminating everyone outside of Portland, especially when this provides an easy recipe for unscrupulous landlords to make sure EVERYONE is eliminated from the protections. Even the aforementioned seniors and disabled tenants that PTU has helped got their no-cause evictions at the end of their… leases.
It is depressing enough to field calls from tenants outside of Portland asking how they can get relocation assistance after receiving $500 rent increases, but to champion this statewide bill and then have to tell most of our callers that they are out of luck was just too much of a poison pill to swallow.
Will we be able to expand Portland’s strong relocation ordinance to other cities if their lawmakers think no-cause evictions have been fixed by this bill?
It is true that if the bill passes, then current month-to-month tenants whose landlords don’t force them into a lease or out of their home before the bill goes into effect (30 days after passage) will have more protections than they do now. And that’s not nothing.
Whether or not any net gain in protections is worthy of ongoing support is a compelling question that PTU has grappled with for months as we’ve faced the prospect of more and more concessions. We don’t reject the real needs of these tenants that this bill would address, but we reject cosigning on the compromised and corrupt process that got us here.
If the bill passes in its current form, we won’t denounce it. But there will be no celebration. More importantly, lawmakers who vote for the gutted bill after championing the slaughter will not be allowed to pat themselves on the back for protecting tenants.
Moreover, lawmakers who have held this bill hostage and, by extension, the clear needs of at least 40% of their constituents (a much larger fraction in some districts, such as lead-obstructionist Senator Rod Monroe), while using disingenuous accounts of our peaceful protests to scapegoat us for their bought-and-paid-for obstructionism will be held accountable.
Any blame for this bill being weakened or failing falls squarely on the shoulders of the senators who refuse to give this issue the attention it deserves and the dosage that is required to treat it. At the end of the day, they are the ones that decide what the bill looks like and if it passes or fails. Blaming it on peaceful protesr when it is clearly their affection for campaign donations is a fallacy of which we will not abide.
Protest creates public awareness and pressure. Our actions have generated hundreds of calls to Rod Monroe and other waffling legislators. For these senators to claim that our actions have hurt the cause is to admit that their fragile egos matter more than the housing catastrophe facing their constituents.
Electeds who are doing the right thing aren’t being protested. Those who are being protested can do better (there’s still time!), or they should expect push back and to be pushed out.
If they find protest scary and threatening they should try being a young single mother with a no-cause eviction.
Withdrawing support from this bill was an emotionally fraught decision for us. We deeply admire, respect, and appreciate the leadership and effort from the dedicated advocates in the Stable Homes Coalition as well as the legislative champions of this bill; particularly Speaker Kotek and HB 2004’s sponsors in the House. They have all lost countless hours of sleep and shed blood, sweat, and tears to get this bill passed. It is nothing short of a abomination that checks from the landlord lobby could dismantle their efforts so easily.
Our supposedly Democrat-controlled state government (one of only 6 left in the country) needs to do some serious soul-searching. The challenge will come from the left, not the right.
How much of our tenant protections did each vote cost us? How much of our rent money was used by our landlords to buy off our legislators? Why should we dignify this process by supporting the scraps they have left us?
This is without a doubt the biggest lift on tenants rights in 20 years since the formation of the (now defunct) landlord–tenant coalition, the former vehicle for making changes to landlord–tenant law. And by taking donations from a Lobby established for the sole purpose of killing this bill, the democrats shown in screenshot above demonstrated that they couldn’t care less about their responsibility to govern for the people.
It is in recognition and respect to our Stable Homes allies’ toil that we walk away from this bill.
It is too hard to see legislators disregard their hard work by gutting a bill with hasty and reckless landlord–lobby giveaways.
We understand that many will consider our position on HB 2004 a betrayal; we ask you to realize that it is renters who have been betrayed by our dysfunctional “democracy”.
We understand and respect ongoing efforts to fight for the bill’s passage, we hope further damaging amendments will give our partners pause, and encourage them to draw a line in the sand at some point. But our organization can no longer continue to fiercely advocate for passage based only on political expediency of doing something, anything, now.
Especially when that something is so far from what we wanted, and the result of Democrats equivocating with impunity to a lobby proudly committed to protecting the profits and power of its bad actors, regardless of the humanitarian impact.
We especially cannot champion doing “something” now if it gives our elected leaders at the state and local level an excuse to dismiss further efforts to strengthen tenants rights, justifying inaction by (falsely) believing this bill fairly and adequately addressed no-cause evictions.
We should not gut a bill to get votes.
We must demand that our lawmakers vote for a strong bill, or tell their constituents why they don’t deserve to be protected from abusive landlords.
We DEMAND that our lawmakers #Restore2004 to its original form, or explain to their constituents why their homes, their families, their health, their communities, and their security don’t matter.
If you feel the same way, sign our petition and join us in Salem on June 20th to demand that we #Restore2004.
Also, join the union. We don’t need to rely on the legislature if we have each other. #RentStrike
#TENANTPOWER
#WHENWEFIGHTWEWIN
