Miriam de Santiago says she worries about the rent every day, calculating whether she can pay it without endangering the health of her son, who has epilepsy.
“Epilepsy medications cost between $780 and $1,000. [a month]”I have to keep my medicines at home and at school, and because my rent has gone up, I have to balance which ones to ask for first and which ones are more urgent,” de Santiago said in an interview.
Her family and her two teenage children have lived in the Boulder Meadows Mobile Home Park community in Boulder, Colorado, for 16 years. In 2020, a corporation purchased the land the community sits on. Before that, her rent had increased by about $10 or $15 a year, but in 2020 it went up by $70, then continued to go up to $35 a year, and this year it went up by $45, she said.
“We’re experiencing anxiety and depression, and we’ve seen cases of people losing sleep and losing their hair because they’re worried that one day there will be a knock on their door and they’ll be told to leave,” de Santiago, who works with 9 to 5 Colorado, a nonprofit focused on economic justice, said of the situation in her community. Her landlord did not respond to a request for comment.
De Santiago and her family’s experience after the rent increase is documented in the report. Human Impact PartnersThe Housing and Urban Planning Institute (HIP) is a nonprofit organization that focuses on studying public health and social justice issues. The study condemned the practices of corporate landlords in some parts of the United States for affecting the health of tenants. According to HIP, the Census Bureau’s Rental Housing Finance Survey found that about 45% of rental housing is owned by “institutional investors.” This category includes landlords that use corporate structures such as LLPs, LPs, LLCs, real estate investment trusts, and real estate companies.
“What we’ve found is that entrepreneurs are using strategies that create toxic housing environments, which in turn creates problems like homelessness, mental and physical health issues, and deepening racial and health inequities that disproportionately impact people of color, including Black and Latino communities,” Sukhdip Purewal, HIP’s research program director, said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
The study analyzes datasets of housing code violations in cities including Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans and Boulder, as well as interviews with public officials, housing researchers, community organizers and tenants.
The HIP findings are consistent with other research: High housing prices and poor housing quality in the U.S. are directly linked to health effects, with many studies citing the impacts on issues like the presence of mold, neighborhood air quality and access to green space, said Juan Pablo Garnham, director of communications and policy at the Eviction Lab, a think tank on evictions and housing at Princeton University.
“However, recent Eviction Lab Research “Furthermore, studies have shown that tenants who pay higher rents tend to have shorter life expectancies and die earlier, possibly because when they are forced to spend more on everyday items like housing, they are forced to cut back on things like doctor’s visits, medicines and health foods,” he said.
Wait for a response
According to the HIP report, corporate landlords use six strategies to increase their profits and harm public health: neglecting maintenance, carrying out mass evictions, raising rents and adding fees, evading taxes, avoiding accountability, and influencing policy.
Some of these practices are affecting people like Nora Franco, who lived in a Los Angeles home for more than 15 years after it burned last year and said she has not yet been able to return to her unrepaired home or negotiate with her corporate landlord.
“We keep waiting and they don’t give us anything. The manager told me to find a place to stay, that he would pay for the hotel, but they didn’t give us anything. After almost two months, the rubble from the roof of our house was still there, so they cleared it out. We had to throw away our living room and some of our belongings that were burned,” said Franco, a Mexican migrant who has been in the US illegally since 2006.
Franco shared several emails he sent to the building management company with Noticias Telemundo, detailing how the family continued to try to pay their rent while seeking an explanation for their situation. Franco said he was told by phone that the building management company was no longer involved and that he would hear from the landlord’s lawyer, but he never did.
“We, the tenants, are the victims and the insurance company should have responded already, but there has been no response and it’s been a year already, so the company is profiting,” said Franco, who said he hopes he can negotiate with his landlord and did not want to give his landlord’s name because he fears repercussions.
Franco said she was worried about her mental state as she, her husband and their two teenage children are holed up in her brother-in-law’s apartment. “None of us expected to end up in the situation we’re going through and it’s a very tough reality,” she said.
According to HIP research, nearly two in five U.S. households live in rented housing, and the number of renters is on the rise. Additionally, renters are disproportionately represented among Black, Latino, working class and young people.
“Nearly 40 percent of renters are Black or Latino, and 34 percent are under 35 years old. The median annual rent for renters is $41,000, nearly half that of owner-occupiers,” the researchers reported.
“As we know, renters are more likely to be people of color and lower-income earners,” Purewal said. “Additional research has shown that investor activity is stronger in urban areas and the Sunbelt. So this impacts the entire southern U.S. between California and Florida, where many immigrant and Latino communities live.”
While the study doesn’t include detailed figures on the impact of corporate practices on the health of tenants across the country, it does provide a comprehensive analysis of corporate landlords, housing conditions and health effects.
Wall Street Enters the Housing Market
According to some studies, Wall Street companies Engaged in the business of acquiring foreclosed single-family homes Their influence has grown since the 2008 housing crisis.
“Recent trends show an increase in corporate ownership in the rental housing sector. Corporations now own almost half of rental housing, and I think what’s unique about this moment is the increasing financialization of rental housing, in other words, treating our homes as something that Wall Street can bet on,” said Will Domini, director of HIP’s Housing Justice Program.
Several lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate or limit the activities of Wall Street firms in the real estate market.
In early November, California Democratic Reps. Ro Khan, Katie Porter, and Mark Takano introduced the “Stop Wall Street Landlords Act” to limit the role of institutional investors in the single-family housing market and curb rental speculation.
“We have a housing crisis in the United States. I’m the son of immigrants whose parents came to this country so that their children could have a home, too,” Cana said in an interview after the bill, still under consideration, was passed. Passing through parliament“Right now, the largest group of homebuyers is the Latino community. In my district, one-third of new homebuyers are Latino, about 480,000 people. And yet they’re being left behind. And the reason is that big Wall Street hedge funds are buying up single-family homes.”
Meanwhile, tenants like Miriam de Santiago are working to improve rental conditions in their areas and to regulate rents for mobile homes like hers in Colorado.
“It’s going to be a long fight, but we’re fighting. Other places already treat prefabricated homes as affordable housing, and we want that to be protected,” de Santiago said. “Many times people think that because they live in prefabricated homes they don’t have rights, but they do have rights. They’re difficult to enforce, but not impossible.”
A version of this story was first published by Noticias Telemundo.
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