Business Owners’ Actions Affect Tenants’ Health, Report Finds

Miriam de Santiago says she worries every day about the rent on her house and does calculations to make sure she can meet her obligations without compromising the health of her son, who suffers from epilepsy.

“Epilepsy medications cost between $780 and $1,000 (per month), and we have to have them at home and at school. With the rents going up, I have to decide which medication to ask for first, see which one is most urgent and find a balance,” De Santiago said in an interview.

Her family has lived with her two teenage children in the Boulder Meadows mobile home community in Boulder, Colorado, for 16 years. In 2020, a corporation bought the property where the community is located. Before that, she says, her rent increased by about $10 or $15 a year, but in 2020, she says, her rent increased by $70, with subsequent increases of up to $35 a year and this year, $45.

“We’ve had anxiety and depression. We’ve seen cases of people not sleeping and even losing their hair because they thought at some point someone was going to knock on their door and tell them they had to leave,” De Santiago, who works for 9 to 5 Colorado, a nonprofit that focuses on economic justice, said of the situation in his community. His landlord did not respond to a request for comment.

De Santiago and her family’s experiences with rent increases are featured in a report from Human Impact Partners, or HIP, a nonprofit focused on research on public health and social justice issues. The study highlights how corporate landlord practices are affecting the health of renters in some parts of the United States. According to HIP, a Census Bureau survey of rental housing finance found that about 45 percent of rental housing is owned by “institutional investors,” a category that includes landlords using corporate structures like LLPs, LPs, LLCs, real estate investment trusts and real estate companies.

“We found that business owners are using strategies to create harmful housing conditions. And that creates problems like homelessness, mental and physical health issues, and disproportionately widening racial and health inequities that affect people of color, which includes Black and Latino communities,” said Sukhdip Purewal, HIP’s director of research programs, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.

The study analyzes data sets on housing code violations and interviews with officials, housing researchers, community organizers and tenants in cities including Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans and Boulder.

The HIP findings are consistent with other research. In the United States, high housing prices and poor housing quality are directly linked to health impacts, and many studies point to effects on issues such as mold, neighborhood air quality or 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.

“But a recent study from Eviction Lab goes further, showing that renters who pay high rents tend to have shorter life expectancies and die younger. That’s likely because when you’re forced to spend more on an asset like housing, you’re forced to cut back on things like doctor visits, medications, or healthy food,” he said.

Waiting for answers

According to the HIP report, business owners harm public health through six strategies aimed at increasing profits: neglecting maintenance, carrying out mass evictions, raising rents and adding fees, evading taxes, avoiding accountability and influencing policy.

Some of these practices have impacted people like Nora Franco, who lived for more than 15 years in a Los Angeles home that burned down last year. She said she still hasn’t been able to return to her unrepaired home or negotiate with her landlord.

“We waited, but they didn’t tell us anything. The manager told me to find a place to stay, that they would pay for the hotel. But they never gave me anything. Almost two months later, they cleaned it up because the debris from the roof of the house was still there. I had to throw out my living room and some of my belongings that had burned,” said Franco, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who has lived in the United States since 2006.

Franco shared with Noticias Telemundo several emails she sent to the building’s management company, explaining that the family continued to try to pay the rent as they searched for answers to their situation. She was told in a phone call that the building’s management was no longer involved and that she would hear from the landlord’s lawyers, she said, but she never heard back.

“We, the tenants, are the injured parties and the company is taking advantage of this because the insurance company should have already responded to them, but they haven’t responded to us, and it’s been a year,” Franco said. She added that she didn’t want to name her landlords because she hopes to negotiate with them and fears repercussions.

Franco said she fears for her mental health as she is crammed into her brother-in-law’s apartment with her husband and two teenage children. “Nobody expects to go through a situation like we’re going through, and the truth is very difficult,” she said.

According to the HIP study, nearly 2 in 5 households in the United States are renters, and the renter category is growing. Additionally, Black, Latino, working-class, and young people are disproportionately represented in the rental sector.

“About 40% of renters identify as black or Latino, and 34% are under 35. The median annual rent for renters is $41,000, nearly half that of homeowners,” the researchers reported.

Purewal said: “As we know, the renter class is more likely to be people of color and lower income. Additional research has shown that investor activity is higher in urban areas and in the Sunbelt. So this affects the entire southern United States, from California to Florida, which is home to many immigrant and Latino communities.”

While the study does not include detailed figures on the impact of business practices on tenant health nationwide, it does provide a comprehensive analysis of business ownership, housing conditions and health impacts.

Wall Street’s Foray into the Real Estate Market

Several studies show that Wall Street firms began buying up foreclosed single-family homes after the 2008 housing crisis. Since then, their influence has grown.

“Recent trends indicate an increase in corporate ownership in the rental housing sector. They now own nearly half of all rental housing, and I think what’s unique about this period is the increasing financialization of rental housing – in other words, viewing our homes as something Wall Street can bet on,” said Will Dominie, director of HIP’s Housing Justice Program.

Several lawmakers have proposed laws aimed at regulating or limiting the activities of Wall Street firms in the real estate market.

In early November, Democratic Representatives Ro Khanna, Katie Porter and Mark Takano of California introduced the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act to limit the role of institutional investors in the single-family real estate market and try to curb rental speculation.

“We have a housing crisis in America. I am the son of immigrants and my parents came to this country to be able to buy a home so their children could have a home too,” Khanna said in an interview after the bill, which is still working its way through Congress, was introduced. “Today, the largest group looking to buy a home is the Latino community. In my district, a third of all new home buyers, almost 480,000, are Latino. And yet they are being left behind. And the reason is because these big Wall Street hedge funds are buying up the single-family homes.”

Meanwhile, renters like Miriam de Santiago are working to improve rental conditions in their neighborhoods and get mobile homes like hers subject to rent control in Colorado.

“These are long-term battles, but we are fighting for them. We are already seeing that other places are considering manufactured homes as affordable housing, and we want that protection,” de Santiago said. “A lot of times we think we don’t have rights because we live in a manufactured home, but they exist. It’s hard to enforce them, but it’s not impossible.”

A version of this story first appeared in Noticias Telemundo.

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