Affordable Housing Crisis

[F]law School Episode 7: Profit Over People

Flaw School

November 24, 2024

Summary:

In this episode of [F]Law School, hosts Haley Florsheim and and Mirei Saneyoshi examine the systemic roots of the affordable housing crisis with guests Sofi Scotti, David Hernandez, and Steven Rome, each of whom have written about this critical issue for The [F]law magazine. 

From Boston to Newark to Miami, they explore how corporate landlords and developers are driving housing inequality, pricing out vulnerable communities, and wielding political power to shape laws in their favor.

Drawing on personal and community stories as well as as scholarly and legal analyses, the conversation unpacks the stark difference between small landlords and corporate entities, the importance of tenant organizing and advocacy, and some of the ways law students can get involved in this vital work.

Tune in to learn why housing is a human right—and how we can fight to make that right a reality.

Editors:

Special thanks to Haley Florsheim and Giovana de Oliveira for production and editing.

Guest Bios:

David Hernandez is a student at Harvard Law School in the Class of 2025. He is also a graduate of Harvard College. Before law school, David worked with the Robin Hood Foundation’s Early Childhood team

Sofi Scotti is a 2024 graduate of Harvard Law School. In her time at Harvard, she was the Co-Practice Area Head of Housing at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. She is passionate about housing justice in her hometown of Miami and beyond.

Steven Rome is a member of the Harvard Law School Class of 2025. He studied history and political science at Yale University, graduating in 2020. Before law school, he was a sixth-grade teacher.

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Additional Resources: 

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Transcript 

David Hernandez, Steven Rome, Sofia Scotti,
“Profit Over People: The Housing Crisis”

 (This transcript was created by an automated process and contains errors.)

Haley Hey, Welcome to Law School, a podcast that explores the flaws in our legal system. We’re today’s hosts. I’m Haley. 

Mirei And I’m Mirei. 

Haley And we are so excited to be hosting today’s episode. 

Mirei Every two weeks, we interview law students to uncover the role of corporate actors in producing many of our most urgent social problems and the troubling tale of corporate actors shaping, bending, capturing, and breaking the law in their favor. Today, we’re joined by Sofi Scotti, David Hernandez, and Steven Rowe. Sofi is a recent graduate of Harvard Law School. And David and Steven are incoming 3Ls . Welcome to the law school, everyone. Class is in session. 

Haley Our topic today is affordable housing, or, more accurately, perhaps lack thereof. Last year I was lucky enough to watch all three of you present on this topic, and in particular on a couple of articles that you had written for The [F]law magazine on the subject of housing. And I was struck by just how interconnected the stories really were. I’m really excited for our audience to have the chance to hear you in conversation with one another. I know I was having thoughts at the time of just how well these were interwoven. So let’s go ahead and start with a rapid round of introductions in a few words or perhaps a few sentences, what did you all write about? 

David Hi everyone. I’m David Hernandez. I’m a 3L at the law school. Thanks so much for for having us on and it’s really great to be talking to you all. I wrote about Newark, New Jersey. It’s the city that I was born and raised in. It’s unfortunately a city where residents are having a really tough time right now trying to access homeownership. We are clocking in dead last nationally with only 29% of our units being owner occupied. And at the same time, we have corporations that are swooping in and buying a lot of the residential real estate in Newark to the point that corporations now own more than half of the city’s residential properties. 

Steven Hi, everyone. I’m Steven. Thanks for having me. I wrote about the role of corporate landlords in driving the housing crisis in Boston. In particular, I focused on a building in Mattapan. Mattapan’s a working class majority black neighborhood in Boston. And I wrote about the community organizing happening there, resisting gentrification. 

Sofi Hi, everyone. I’m Sofi. I’m a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, and I wrote about the affordable housing crisis in Miami. Miami is where I grew up, and it’s very near and dear to my heart. It’s a majority minority community, and the median asking rent in this community has increased about 27% since 2018. It’s now ranked as one of the most expensive areas to rent in America, which is particularly significant because the mean hourly wage there is so much lower than the national average. And this increase in rent has led to a population loss in Miami-Dade County for the first time since the 1970s. 

Haley Thank you all. That’s a really helpful overview. I think this first question might sound a little basic, but it’s still where I’d like to start. How would you describe the importance of affordable housing in the communities that you researched? David, for instance, you use the term rent burden. What does that mean? 

David Yeah. HUD, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines rent-burdened or cost-burdened families to be those where paying more than 30% of their income for housing. And today, over half of all renters in the U.S. fall under that bucket of severely rent burdened or cost-burdened families are those who are paying more than 50% of their income for housing. And about 1 in 4 renters fall into that category. This is just a way that we can sort of keep a pulse on what the housing market is looking like and how renters are feeling, the pressures of rent. 

Haley Steven, this makes me think of a particularly interesting line in your piece about whether people’s homes ought to represent a market at all. Could you say a little bit more about what you mean by that and how that ties in to this idea of affordable housing? 

Steven Sure. I think we take for granted that housing is a private market where the landlord gets to set the price and you, the tenant, have to pay whatever the landlord asks for. And the cornerstone of the housing justice movement or people advocating for affordability is that housing is a human right. It shouldn’t matter how much you make. Everyone has the right to a home, and that isn’t something that corporations or LLCs should be able to profit off of. And I think right now, most of us have ingrained in us this idea that the fair rent is whatever the market says it is. And that is actually, I think, really pernicious. And that’s something that a lot of the housing justice organizers I interviewed for my article challenge because if we accept what the market spits out, then we’re conceding a lot of power to corporations and to landlords. 

Mirei Thank you both for that overview. I think, Steven, what you said about housing being a human right is something that has really resonated with me and honestly creates some sort of cognitive dissonance when you talk about like everyone has a right to a home, that’s something you kind of need to have. It’s something you need to meet the adequate standard of living. Then at the same time, you only get a house if you have this kind of job and you have this kind of background in this kind of family. So I kind of wanted to zoom in on that a little bit more and ask about the trends in housing costs affecting historically marginalized communities in Miami, Newark and Boston, particularly those marginalized on the basis of race or income. So, Sofi, can we start with you? What have you seen in Miami? 

Sofi Yeah. So as I said before, Miami is a majority minority community. Most of the people there are Hispanic. Many of the people there are immigrants. And the housing crisis there has significantly affected particularly those people who are low income and particularly people who are renters and black and Latino people in the United States and in Miami are generally more likely to be renters. So this affordable housing crisis really has affected minority communities a lot more and minorities in Miami a lot more than they have affected their white peers. Yeah. And most households that are making less than $75,000 a year are cost burdened in Miami. So it’s really just affecting people who are low income and people who are minorities much more. 

Mirei So now, David, I want to add you to this conversation. How would you say Newark compares? 

David Yeah. What we’ve seen in New is exactly what you’d expect to see. The transfer of land from individuals to corporate buyers is happening, unfortunately, disproportionately in the city’s black neighborhoods. So the Center on Law and Equality and Metropolitan Equity or CLIMB out of Rutgers. Newark released this bombshell report in 2022. It’s called “Who Owns Newark?”. And it laid out a lot of these statistics. What they found was that almost three quarters of institutional purchases between 2010 and 2020 took place in the city’s majority black West and South ports. And coincidentally or not, the West and South wards over that same period saw a 6% decrease in home ownership rates. 

Mirei And finally, how about Boston, Steven? And how would you say it kind of adds to this conversation? 

Steven  I think the story in Boston is basically the same story, unfortunately. The large investor landlords are most active, most prevalent in poor and majority neighborhoods, people of color. And it’s especially profitable to hike the rents and make money if you’re a corporate landlord in those areas. One, I think good measure of the housing crisis and how it’s affecting people is looking at the eviction rates. And in Boston, well, 52% of tenants in Boston live in neighborhoods where there are a majority of people of color. 70% of the total number of evictions occur in those same neighborhoods. So evictions are really disproportionately occurring in neighborhoods where there are a majority people of color. And those are essentially the same neighborhoods that were once redlined, where predatory lending was hitting especially hard, driving theforeclosure crisis. And we’re still seeing that to today. So the trend goes goes back for many, many years. 

Mirei Thank you all for that. So there’s this people side of the story. And I think all of your responses are indicative of the fact that this isn’t an isolated incident, but rather a trend which I think is incredibly important to understand. And on the flipside are the corporations, which I’d love to dive into a little bit to. You all spoke to how the affordable housing crisis is tied to corporate power in your papers. How have corporate developers come to control so much of the real estate market? Starting with David, I know that you mentioned cash, speed and scale. Can you elaborate a little more on that?

David Yeah, I think that that trio of cash, speed and scale does a really good job of summing up the corporate advantage that actually comes out of a paper out of Marquette by John Johnson. He writes about the rise and impact of corporate landlords in Milwaukee. Basically, there are different transactions available to corporations that you and I wouldn’t be able to take part in unless we were part of the ultra wealthy. Some developers have been known to buy properties directly from sellers before they can list it on a multiple listing service. Others have been known to buy directly from other landlords who are exiting the business. Sometimes they acquire multiple properties at once, often at a discount. And of course there are the all-cash minimal contingency offers that we’ve seen flood t he housing market with crowd out aspiring homeowners like you and I may be who would need to use debt to finance their home. So yeah, it is a combination of cash, speed and scale that really doesn’t make it a fair competition. 

Mirei So I think your answer has already kind of introduced us to this next question. But how would you say corporate landlords behave differently than small landlords and how do they specifically price tenants out of their housing? 

David So I think corporate landlords behave differently in the sense that they’re a little bit more trigger happy with evictions. So one study found that corporate landlords are 68% more likely than small landlords to file eviction notices, and that’s controlling for foreclosure status, the characteristics of the property, the characteristics of the neighborhood. There’s another another study right here in Boston that looked at over 4 million property tax records, 15 years of eviction records. And they found that large landlords file out eviction for 2 to 3 times the rates of small landlords. After you control for tenant characteristics. In that same study, they found that when a property is sold from a small landlord to a large one, eviction filing rates immediately and permanently increase with a particularly large spike in filings during the sale year. So you can see that it’s almost entirely attributable to those new owners. Large landlords, they file evictions more quickly for less money and more often as a rent collection strategy. They’re dealing in bad faith sometimes and pricing is also completely different. Corporate landlords are more and more relying on rent setting algorithms like RealPage to determine prices. And we’ve seen how algorithms like that have come under scrutiny recently in lawsuits claiming that they’re effectively operating the operating as a housing cartel, facilitating price setting amongst the landlords. 

Mirei Yeah. Thank you for kind of adding those statistics so we can kind of see the scope of this problem. I guess I wanted to move next to Sofi. If you had kind of your perspective from Miami on this distinction between corporate and small landlords. 

Sofi Yeah. So I would second a lot of what David said. I feel like we see a lot of the same trends in Miami Dade County. I would also add that corporate landlords just have the ability to really buy up a lot of housing and to drive gentrification in a way that smaller landlords maybe don’t because, you know, a smaller landlord might have 2 or 3 properties and they might try to make their prices a little bit higher there, but they just can’t drive that same level of gentrification that a corporate landlord who maybe has 500 units on the market can. And another thing that I think is really important is that corporate landlords have a political power that smaller landlords don’t. So in Miami-Dade in particular, corporate landlords are very powerful and they fund a lot of very powerful lobbies like Florida realtors. And one example of them doing this is that in 1974, there was a rent crisis, a housing emergency in Miami Beach, and the municipality decided that they were going to impose some rent control in the city to mitigate the effects of this. And the corporate landlords, among other parties, were angry about this, and they sued the county to challenge the ordinance. The legislature then got involved and started to make it really difficult for rent control measures to be passed. And that was something that has continued to this day. So the law that was kind of passed at that time basically made it so cities would need to declare a particular type of housing emergency to impose any sort of rent control. Then they would have to put it on the ballot and have everybody vote on it. And if it did pass, then they would have to repeat the process the next year. So it was only good for a year at a time. So they just made it very, very difficult. And this is kind of because of the money that corporate landlords are able to put into lobbying and into the legislature. And, you know, since this time, it’s been really difficult to pass any sort of rent control. And when cities have tried, they’re really met with a lot of strong opposition from corporate landlords. Orange County tried to impose 1 in 2022, and they were sued immediately by Florida realtors. Florida Apartment Association, which are lobbying groups that lobby for multifamily, rental industry  on things. And, you know, all of this money has just really affected the way that Florida deals with affordable housing. And it really is driven by corporate landlords and not smaller landlords. 

Mirei Well, that’s super interesting and it really speaks to how corporate landlords go beyond just, you know, having more rental properties than small landlords and how they have kind of linked to larger systems of corruption. Finally, Steven, can you tell us about how LLCs also play a role in rent hikes and evictions? 

Steven Yeah. So LLCs are limited liability corporations. And I would say anecdotally, at least in Boston’s housing court, a very large proportion of the landlords evicting tenants are LLCs because LLCs offer landlords, especially corporate landlords, the best of both worlds. They shield owners from personal liability, protecting those owners’ personal assets as a corporation does, but they are taxed at a lower rate more like partnerships. And so LLCs are a very effective tool if you want to get the most bang for your buck. In addition, LLCs also shroud the owners’ identities.LLCs because they are less accountable to the public because they have anonymous owners, oftentimes that is really driving worse conditions and worse outcomes for tenants.

Haley David, I found the personal anecdote that you shared in your article to be really interesting and really impactful. I was wondering if you would be able to speak a little bit to your own experience under a non-corporate landlord and what that looked like. 

David Yeah, I think what what made me want to think more about that is having rented in Newark all my life, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own experience. I think the. The fact that we’re even making a distinction between individual landlords and corporate landlords, to some may sound like a distinction without a difference. But I think that my experience growing up under an individual landlord, a real human, made me feel strongly that there there is a difference. It’s just my experience. It’s just an anecdote, just one data point. But I think it illustrates part of what we lose in that transition from individual landlords to corporate ones, as is currently happening in New York. So we had a landlord named Elvis. He was a pastor at a local church. He had three kids, and he lived on the first floor with his wife. His son and I actually went to school together and got along pretty well. We were actually in the same classroom. All that to say it’s a it’s a relationship, it means something. And, you know, we had issues. It wasn’t perfect. No landlord is perfect. You know, our or our roof leaked or, you know, things happened. We had spats here and there. But at the end of the day, I think that I was in a much better position than I would have been under a corporate landlord. So one example that really came to mind and that really solidified that for me is that when my mom separated from her then partner, when I was in high school, things were really tough. It was me and my sister with just my mom. It was just her working. It was unclear how we were going to get everything paid. And I remember Elvis coming up talking to us and, you know, consoling my mom and seeing how we were doing and he lowered our rent. I mean, that is unheard of for any landlord. I know that others living under individual landlords might be like, okay, cool. Like, that’s not that that’s what happened to you, it’s definitely not what happened to me. It’s once in a million. One thing I know for sure is that it is only possible in human to human interactions. And that one thing I know for sure is that it would not have happened under a RealPage algorithm. It would not have happened under a, you know, corporate management team that’s looking over hundreds and hundreds of units. This is somebody who saw us as real people. Somebody who saw us every day, whose son and I shared a teacher who, you know, we’re both members of the community. And I think that meant something. I think that the the consequences of, you know, being that sort of cartoonishly evil landlord are different when you’re both operating in the same circles. Not to say that that Elvis only did that because of that. I think he truly is an extraordinary human being. But I think that experience really helped me solidify that. You know, the corporatization of housing and the rise of corporate landlords is something that we should be concerned about. It is something that we should be thinking about and that we should be preparing for. 

Steven David, what you’re saying just makes me think a little bit about the conversations I had with tenant organizers at City Life Vida Urbana, which is a tenants’ rights group in Boston. And they view the housing movement as comprising tenants and individual owner occupants or small landlords. You know, your classic triple decker in Boston where maybe a family owns the house and rents out the floor below or the floor above, and they view all of those people aligned and the enemy or the resistance is against the corporatization and all the rest. They get some pushback from some people who see it more absolutely, but I think they view the real conflict in the housing justice movement along those lines, too, for the same reasons. 

Haley I think that makes a lot of sense. It is, I think to your point, David, true that when you have corporate landlords, you’re taking that possibility of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things for others really out of the equation entirely. And there’s another aspect of this experience under corporate landlords that I want to touch on a little bit too. It’s just like, how visible do you think these corporate landlords are in communities, these mega developers as well? Are people aware of their impact? Do they know who’s behind the affordable housing housing crisis? And you know, Sofi, it seems like Miami has had has framed a recent influx of wealthy individuals as something of a revitalization. I’m wondering how those narratives interact with the affordable housing crisis and sort of what your what your understanding of those dynamics are. 

Sofi Yeah. So I think that to answer this question, you really need to back up and sort of see what Miami was like in the wake of the pandemic and particularly right when it started. So Miami really at that time wanted to position itself as sort of like a haven away from more, I want to say, like liberal states who had mask mandates, who had vaccine mandates, things like that. And they were really trying to attract people from out of state to come in. And it worked. A lot of people came from New York, New Jersey, the Northeast in particular, and were basically working jobs that were still in those locations, making incomes that were relative to those locations, and living in Miami where the income in general was much, much lower. And at the same time, they were really trying to attract big corporations. So around this time, you had people in Silicon Valley kind of talking about moving to Miami-Dade County, and the mayor of Miami-Dade County said, or of the city of Miami said, how can I help? So he was trying to basically make the whole community as good as possible for these corporate individuals and high earning individuals to come and live there. And at that time, you know, all of these people started to come in who had much higher incomes and were really like demanding houses. I think at the time, about 22 people were vying for each individual unit. So with all this competition, locals literally couldn’t compete. Nobody was making enough money compared to all of these other people to be able to buy them. And it just jacked up the prices of the rent hugely. And then you had a lot of corporate like construction companies coming in and seeing all of this demand and basically starting to construct new buildings. And if you go to Miami right now, you can see there’s just construction cranes everywhere. And there’s these huge luxury buildings that are all kind of mushrooming up all over the place. So in terms of visibility, it’s very visible all on the skyline. Like you can see all of these new buildings coming up. And locals know that they’re not the ones who are the target audience for this, that they’re not the ones who are going to be able to afford that. And I think a really good example of this is one of my friends, Leo de Paz, who I wrote about in my article. He had lived in the community of Coral Gables for 15 years. He had lived in the same exact house under a small landlord, actually. And one day just in November, his landlord was like, okay, well, you have a month and you need to move out. And he was shocked because he lived there for such a long time and he was like, what am I supposed to do? I have two young kids. Like, how am I supposed to just find another place in a month? And the landlord said, okay, well, I’ll give you an extra month, but after that you need to move. And the landlord told him that it was because he wanted to, like, move back into the unit, that it was like, no hard feelings. But he kind of felt that the reason that he was being pushed out was because of all of this, like luxury construction all over the place, driving up the rents and the knowledge that the landlord could just charge way more than he was actually earning at the time for that unit. So eventually he was pushed out of his house within a month. And he looked in the same area to try to see if he could find anything that was affordable for him and he just couldn’t. He moved about 45 minutes to an hour out from where he was before. And you’re just seeing this all over the place. You know, I grew up in Miami and I’m seeing all of my friends who are living with their parents still because they’re just not able to afford anything in the area anymore. And it’s just driving people away. A lot of people are moving to Georgia or to other areas in Florida that like are just more affordable for them. So, yeah. 

Haley And I think it’s really helpful to sort of put that face to it. And there are a lot of different ways that different people are impacted by this, but it seems like the impact itself is pretty much across the board. So yeah, thank you for providing that additional context too. Steven, you mentioned this notion of underutilized properties. How does that concept fit into the narrative that we’ve been talking about? 

Steven Ithink I can answer that maybe by way of an example. In my article I wrote about a building in Mattapan, which, as I mentioned, is a historically Black working class neighborhood in Boston. And for years and years, the commuter rail in Boston, one of the lines, would pass right through Mattapan from the center of the city out to the suburbs and back without stopping. And that was hardly a coincidence, given its racial makeup. And community activists in Mattapan fought really hard for a very long time to get the train stop. And then as soon as that train stopped or the T, as we call it in Boston, eventually did arrive, a corporate landlord swooped in to this building I wrote about in Boston in Mattapan called Fairlawn Estates, purchased the building because now all of a sudden there was this new value that it was right near the train stop. And they viewed that this idea of “underutilized” is a quote from the new corporate landlords, DSF Group, which purchased this building because it saw this previously working class building where people had lived for decades and decades, suddenly had all this new value built up just by virtue of being near the T stop. And so the corporate landlords could buy the building. They could try to raise the rents, kick out the old tenants, slap a new name on the building, hike the rents, and make a ton more money. And that is exactly what happened. The building used to be called Fairlawn Estates. It was renamed SoMa at the T to emphasize its proximity to transit and the new owners,  DSF Group, slipped papers onto the doors of longtime tenants, raising the rent as much as $300 per month. I spoke with some very long time tenants there, Annie Gordon and Betty Lewis, and both of them were already struggling to make the rent, to make ends meet, living on fixed incomes and these rent hikes were threatening to just kick them out. And even though nothing had changed in the building except for the name. So this idea of where the value comes from in buildings is, I think, an open question. But for corporate landlords, they see that as an opportunity to take the value for themselves. 

Haley I can only imagine sort of the excitement of having a T stop opening and the ability to, you know, get places so much more easily. And as somebody who relies a lot on public transit myself, I, you know, I, I value that. And then having sort of the disappointment on the flip side of of that rent hike and the question of whether your place where you’ve been living is isn’t so affordable. So I think that’s probably something that if you’re if you’re from the outside looking in, you might not see. And it’s a really important point to to emphasize. And I think along those lines, David, you you mentioned that in Newark, it’s not just the big apartment buildings that are owned by corporate landlords, but also some single family homes. And I think this ties back to something you were talking about a little bit earlier, Steve, and about this idea of anonymity. And if you don’t know who’s behind or who owned these family homes, these single family homes, you might assume is just individual landlords. David, could you speak a little bit more to the role of anonymity in real estate investing and its impact in Newark? 

David Yeah, I think I think I’d say that Newarkers can see what’s happening, right? We’re asking the right questions. Who owns Newark? We want to keep Newark in the hands of Newwarkers. We’ve been a city that’s been undervalued for so long, and we want our residents to benefit from this rising tide in this in this new chapter in our city. Anonymity makes it so that you just don’t know who you’re telling, who you’re selling to or excuse me, In the Who Owns Newark Report,  we see that you have properties that are being bought by one LLC, that’s a subsidiary of another that is owned by a second, and these like complicated paper trails that makes it really difficult to keep our land for us. And so people are put in a position where they really need the money and they might sell for an amount that they that they might have said no to if they really knew who they were dealing with. I mean, sometimes you have entire blocks that need to be bought out for a huge development. And so, you know, you don’t allow the seller to understand the value of their property. You know that the example that Steven was talking about in Matapan, if I were a homeowner there, you know, it is it is to the corporation’s advantage to keep me in the dark about what the plans for the neighborhood are. Right. It’s in their advantage that I have no idea that this is going to be a hub for commercial activity, and it’s going to have transit and infrastructure. And so once it starts to get good, then it becomes corporate property. But we want to keep this in the hands of the people who have long-term investments in the city, who are really committed to the community and not just the profit. 

Steven David, on that on that point, exactly. One of the things that housing justice advocates are really fighting for Boston and all across the country is something called TOPA, or the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which basically describes the idea that when a building or housing is put up for sale and it’s going to, say, a corporate buyer, if the tenants in that building, even if it’s just a couple of units, can organize themselves together and then match the offer using funds from a nonprofit or community development group, then they can purchase the building or put it in a land trust rather than going to the corporate landlord. And that can really stabilize housing and is a really important legislative opportunity to stem the tide of of corporate investing. But also what we need even if you have that right, you also need the money because tenants on their own, of course, whether it’s a big building or small, are never going to be able to put up the funds to purchase their buildings when corporate landlords have so much more money. So there there are some really important policy fixes that we need to allow tenants to resist that type of buyout. 

Mirei Yeah, I think it’s super interesting to kind of be able to hear a potential problem solution. Obviously still kind of having to work within the structure of corporate power and always kind of feeling like you’re one step behind because corporations are like so connected to like lobbyists and lawmakers. I’d like to switch gears a bit and talk about some of the enabling factors behind the affordable housing crisis. Sofi, one aspect of your article that I found quite fascinating was your discussion of political dynamics in Florida, how corporate landlords and real estate developers leveraged political campaigns to their advantage. 

Sofi Yeah. So I think it’s really important to talk about the fact that Florida is a place where real estate is kind of king. Like, it is a huge part of the political landscape and a huge part of the community. Just as a personal example, the middle school that I went to was named after a corporate developer that developed the area that we lived in. So that was Arvida, which is actually like a developer that also developed like parts of Disneyland, things like that, and was later acquired by Disney. And that’s not like the only school that was named after a corporate developer. So they’re just like very cemented into the community in a way that I haven’t really seen in other areas. And this type of political power really just like permeates into the actual legislature. So, for example, the real estate industry as a whole was one of Governor Desantis’s largest donor base. They donated over $7 million to his last campaign. And between 2019 and 2022, Republican leaders in Florida received about $90 million in campaign contributions from developers, the real estate industry, and other related interests. The biggest one of these contributors that donated $3.1 million was Florida Realtors, which is a lobbying group that I’ve mentioned before. And basically their whole mission is to advance Florida’s real estate industry by shaping public policy on property issues. So this has very explicitly affected the way that the legislature passes laws in Florida. But it’s also just sort of permeated in the ideas behind housing in Florida. So one of the things is that they’ve just really prioritized development and these sort of free market ideas as a solution to housing, this idea of just build more and we’re going to solve the housing crisis as opposed to prioritizing building affordable housing or subsidizing affordable housing and things like that. So the Florida legislature over the past two decades has siphoned money from a housing trust that was basically set aside to create more affordable housing projects in Florida as a whole. And they’ve reappropriated over $2 billion in over the span of two decades, which people estimate could have led to the construction of 166,000 houses and affordable units. At this point in time, we’re really seeing the effects of that and the effects of all of this, like legislating, legislating that has just deprioritized affordable housing. 

Mirei On your story of having your school actually named after a corporate developer. That was actually so crazy to me because, you know, I live in like a New England town where all of the schools and the streets and the busses and everything is named after like Revolutionary War figures because everyone’s super proud of their like, Revolutionary War history. So kind of the idea that corporate developers have such a hold on the city is really powerful, I think. I also wanted to know how does this power manifest in zoning restrictions? And on the flip side, how can we change zoning restrictions to encourage developers to create more affordable housing. 

Sofi I think that there are two main ways that governments do zoning generally in terms of creating housing for low income people. So basically the idea of zoning for creating more affordable housing is called inclusionary zoning. So that’s just basically making sure that there are set asides in each building that is developed that would go particularly to people who are at a certain level of the area median income. And there’s two different forms of that. One of them is mandatory inclusionary zoning, which is when the government says if you want to develop here, then you need to have, you know, 60 units in this building that will go to people who are below a certain amount of income. And there’s voluntary inclusionary zoning, which is usually saying, we will incentivize you. We will give you a tax break if you create this affordable housing. 

Sofi So in the last couple of years, Florida has really tried to start solving this affordable housing crisis. But the way that they’ve been doing that has really been putting corporate interests kind of at the forefront. So one example of this is that Florida passed the Live Local Act in 2023. So the goal of that was to incentivize more affordable housing development. And in relevant part, they promised a tax break of about a 100% if developers built units that would be affordable for people making up to 80% of the area median income and a tax break of 75% if they created units that are affordable for people between 80 to 120% of the area median income. So just to sort of illustrate for people like what that looks like, 80% of the area median income in Miami-Dade County is $90,000 and 120% of the area median income is $136,000. So, you know, these units are, you know, affordable for some people, for people who are, you know, in the workforce area, but they’re certainly not affordable for people who are low income. And at the end of the day, a lot of the people who are developing these buildings were building things that were just in that one bracket of being affordable for people in the 80 to 120% area median income. So just in that higher bracket. So they could still charge as much money as they possibly could while getting a 75% tax break anyway. So because of all this corporate power and all of this lobbying, even the things that the laws that are passed to supposedly help low income individuals are still sort of prioritizing profit and still prioritizing the interests of developers and landlords over renters. 

Mirei Steven, I want to add another layer to this. Going back to your story about the T stop being added in Mattapan, you talk about how adding resources and amenities within communities can be a double edged sword. Communities will momentarily benefit, but those resources will make the community housing increase in value and members end up getting priced out of their own space. How can we balance improving community infrastructure while ensuring these communities don’t get gentrified shortly after? 

Steven Yeah, it’s a great question. And I don’t think there’s one easy or simple answer, but at the big picture level, we do need to rethink of housing as a human right and not always trying to squeeze profit out of working class people at every opportunity. In Mattapan, the value of that building, once it once the T stop arrived, came from the people who had fought and organized to get the T stop there. The value was not from anything that corporate investors did. They just seized it at the end. And so being able to verbalize that and identify that is a really important first step. I think another piece, you know, and as Sofia, I think really points out very, very right on point is that, yes, we need more housing, but we also need to protect people who are already living in relatively affordable housing. Just building new things without really strong protections is is not enough because the people who are already in somewhat affordable housing, like Annie Gordon and Betty Lewis, who were the tenants living in this Mattapan building for many decades, they’re the ones who are at risk and they’re also the people who are best positioned to really push back against the corporate landlords and fight for bigger change. And so all of those things might help. Community organizing is a really powerful tool. And the organizers who are working in Mattapan and all across the city have been pushing for TOPA, which I already mentioned, for rent control, for transfer tax, which would basically be a tax on real estate transactions that exceed a certain price. So when really valuable properties are being flipped for a profit, some of that money could go into a fund to help tenants purchase buildings through TOPA. So all of those things would help because of course, we do want investment in communities and we want amenities and transit and all the rest, but not at the price of forcing people out. 

Mirei Building off of your response Steven, I think it is super important for us to kind of reconceptualize what we think of as labor that deserves a payout because, you know, community organizers were the ones on the front line advocating for the T stop and advocating for resources to be added to their communities. Like corporate developers were not the ones attending meeting after meeting trying to get those resources. And the moment communities do all of that work and do all of that labor, it gets swooped away from them. I also kind of want to address the counter narratives that people typically use when affordable housing comes up. I think a lot of people hope trickle down economics and supply demand principles will save the day. But in cities both with and without housing shortages, we see that this isn’t necessarily the case. Sofi, can you briefly touch on why a “just build more” mentality hasn’t relieved the affordable housing crisis?

Sofi So there are a lot of communities throughout the United States that are experiencing housing shortages, and Boston is one of them. They do have a home vacancy rate of about 4.4%. However, Miami Dade County is not a place that is experiencing that same issue. So our overall home vacancy rate in Miami-Dade is 6.6%, which exceeds the national average of 5.5%. So there are enough homes in Miami. However, a lot of the homes that are available are bought up by people who are vacationing in Florida or who use them as investment properties or developers who are, you know, trying to charge high rents for them. And these homes will remain empty and nobody’s really like living in them. So when it comes to just building more housing, it has to be the right kind of housing to actually solve any sort of housing crisis. And one of the people that I interviewed, I think, said something really interesting where she said it’s kind of like what happens with roads. People think, I’ll open up the roads and I’m going to get less traffic. But that’s never worked and it will never work because the roads get wider and they get filled up with cars. That was Carie Penabad, a Miami architect and a professor at the University of Miami. And in Miami Dade County, what we have is a lot of luxury housing being built. So a lot of housing that’s sort of at this higher end. And people are coming in and they’re filling that demand, right? And the idea from people who believe in the trickle down economics type of thing is that earners are going to be moving into this luxury housing, freeing up a bunch of affordable housing for everybody else. But what’s really been happening is that this luxury housing then drives up the cost of the housing in the area, and you’re left with very little affordability in the area. So just kind of go back to those numbers on home vacancy rates. The vacancy rate in Miami-Dade County for affordable housing is actually 0.5%. So it’s significantly lower than the overall vacancy rate. So what we have there is not a shortage of housing overall. It’s a shortage of affordable housing. And I think that’s a really important distinction to be making when we’re talking about building more housing because you’re not really going to get any more affordability by building housing overall if you’re not prioritizing affordability within that construction. Something that’s really important when it comes to changing zoning restrictions is making affordability part of the cost of doing business in Miami-Dade County. And different people have different opinions about this. There are people who believe that having too much mandatory inclusionary zoning will create less construction. But at the end of the day, a lot of people are profiting off of this community by building a whole bunch of luxury housing. Driving up the prices for everybody else and doing very little for the community that they are profiting off of. They’re making so much money in these communities and providing very little affordability and very little housing. So I think that a big thing would just be doing mandatory inclusionary zoning and also maybe changing some other construction rules, such as lowering parking minimums, ]So in Miami-Dade County, you need to have 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom in a building. So if you have a three bedroom, that’s 4.5 parking spaces. And at the end of the day, that’s all space that could be used for housing instead. And every unit is then going to have to subsidize those parking spaces. So I think that that’s a way that you could actually drive down the cost of housing is by taking away a lot of those parking minimums and just allowing developers to build more housing in those units. And hopefully that would also drive down the price.

Haley David, I imagine some of these same dynamics with trickle down economics and the narratives that we see around that also play out in Newark. But I think your story offered a more hopeful depiction of what’s happening on the ground from a policy perspective and maybe even something that looks like progress. Could you speak to some of the steps that the city is taking to address housing issues and any lessons that we can learn from that more broadly? 

David Yeah. don’t want all that we’re saying today to, you know, basically convince people that there’s nothing to do here, that, you know, corporate power is overwhelming and we should just throw our hands up and just give up. That’s not that’s not the message that we want to send home. I think there are lots of states and cities all across the nation that are doing a lot to make a dent in the affordable housing crisis. Newark, thankfully, is one of those cities. You know, we might be in a tough spot, but thankfully our municipal government is really taking meaningful steps to make housing more accessible here. So, you know, we passed one of the nation’s strongest inclusionary zoning ordinances. So developers in Newark who are developing properties with 30 units or more, they’re actually required to set 20% of their units aside to be affordable for low and moderate income families. So those fancy buildings that are popping up all over the downtown that, you know, fairly or not, get a ton of criticism, they might not be built for Newark’s working class, but thanks to our city government, they’ll at least be a little bit helpful to more than just the wealthiest renters in the city. We also do that through incentives or disincentives. So we also passed an ordinance two years ago that places fines on landlords who raise rents more than 5% in a single year. So if you’re a landlord who wants to, you know, hike your rent by 20%, you can do that, but you will pay the city a fine because of the negative externalities that you’re causing for the community, for the city’s residents. And so Newark is taking action there. I think Steven had talked about earlier that one of the reasons why corporations end up having a lot more access to housing is that they’re the only ones who can really front that much money. And so Newark is taking steps to even the balance, even the scales, there too. So there’s a Live Newark program which gives municipal employees a $20,000 and no interest loan. So what we’re doing is we’re sending home the message that if you work for the City of Newark, you should be able to live in the City of Newark and that you deserve a stake in our city’s future. They’re doing something similar for long term residents of Newark, people who have lived in the city for more than five years. There’s a $1 home sale program that received a lot of press this year. And basically, we know that Newark is changing and we know that, you know, our city is not going to look the same. But that doesn’t mean that Newarkers can’t have some skin in the game. And it’s programs like these that are making sure that our residents have a seat at the table and that they aren’t being elbowed out by corporate developers. 

Haley That is really great to hear. And Steven, I think David touched on this a little bit. You touched on it before, but there is some hope in Boston, too. Could you talk a little bit more about the potential of tenant organizing to push back against corporate power in the housing space? 

Steven Absolutely. As I mentioned a little bit, City Life Vida Urbana is one tenant advocacy group working really hard in Boston to resist corporate power and to fight for housing as a human right all across Boston. And City Life’s organizers came to that building. I’ve been describing Mattapan and helped the longtime tenants organize and fight back against the rent increases. One just truly amazing thing is that these two tenants, Annie Gordon and Betty Lewis, both had their rents hiked. I think it was $275 and $300 per month for each of them, and that was at least six years ago at this point. And neither of them has paid a cent in that rent increase. And that is only possible because they have been banding together, not just the two of them, but with people all in the building and across the city who are really pushing back. One thing that that City Life does is they really try to shine a light on the corporate power that’s at stake here. One thing they did amidst this struggle against DSF was lead a protest at the downtown office of the corporate landlord, which is on Newbury Street in the fancy glass building, because they’re really trying to highlight this wealth disparity between the landlords swooping in to seize the profit for itself and the tenants living on fixed incomes who have lived there for decades. So I think, you know, in the same way, David, saying there really are things we can do and we don’t have to throw our hands up. City Life really shows that when tenants stand together, when they resist these outrageous rent hikes, they really can often win. The thing corporate landlords want to do, especially if they’re trying to clear out a building and rehab the units and raise the rents significantly, the corporate landlords will try to divide the tenants, try to push them out one by one. But when tenants organize and when they resist as a unit, they really can be very effective and negotiate for limits on rent increases and resist eviction. 

Mirei So today we talked a lot about the immense power these billion dollar corporations and anonymous investors have over housing development laws and prices. So as people listening to this episode or people that are just interested in this issue, what can we as everyday people do to address it? And what resources should we be looking at to learn more about this topic? 

Steven Well, I’ll jump in to start to just to say if you are in or around Boston, I would definitely encourage you to come to a City Life meeting.There really is a role for everyone, and there’s a lot they’re doing. They’re organizing all across the city, helping tenants stay in their homes and and resisting displacement. And I think whether with City Life or other groups, there’s a lot of community energy and activism trying to really demand that the state legislature, whether in Massachusetts or or anywhere else too, take these issues seriously and that, yes, need to build more affordable units, and we also need to protect people already in their homes, whether through rent control, through TOPA, through the transfer tax, through more accountability for LLCs. There’s some laws that were proposed here in Massachusetts trying to eliminate that that invisibility that you get if you own via an LLC. So there are a lot of legislative fixes that would make a big dent. 

David Yeah, I think Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, if you haven’t read it already, is a sort of classic in the area and does a really good job of explaining the affordable housing crisis and some of the dynamics between landlords and tenants. So if you haven’t read that, I think that’s a great place to start. 

Sofi You know, I think housing is really one of those unique political issues in that we are all affected by it. And I think for people in the Miami-Dade area, they should really get involved in their community and see how this is affecting yourself and your neighbors and everybody around you. And at risk of, you know, giving a basic answer, voting and talking to your legislators, especially on a local level, because so much of this of this rent control stuff happens on a municipal level. And a lot of the zoning stuff also happens at a municipal and city level. And it’s really important to just let everybody know that this is important to you and that it’s important to the community and to keeping people who live there housed for the foreseeable future. 

Haley It’s been really great to hear you all talk about housing, these different facets of housing today, but I was also wondering, and I know you all have some experience with this in law school, too. How has thinking about housing or working on housing issues shaped your law school education?

Sofi Yeah. So I and Steven were both involved at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. I was actually the practice area head last year for housing, and Steven is the current practice area head of housing. So both of us were very involved in eviction defense in our time in law school. And I think just getting that concrete experience with members of the community that we were in, you know, in the Boston area and seeing how corporate landlords and corporate developers have affected this community has completely changed the way that I view the law and the way that I view public policy and how it affects individuals. And I would just really encourage law students to get involved on a practical level in, you know, their housing clinics at their law schools and doing eviction defense and things like that to really get to know your community and seeing how, on a practical level, this affects your community. 

Steven And I can just quickly echo that and say. Being able to leave law school campus and go to City Life’s meetings in Jamaica Plain really always has provided me a bolt of energy for the rest of the week because it is just inspiring to see what these organizers are doing and to feel solidarity with the larger community outside of the ivory tower. And so I definitely encourage you, if you’re in law school, to find opportunities like that, to work with the people on the ground doing the work.

Sofi Thank you so much for having us. 

Steven Thank you. 

David Thanks. 

Mirei I also want to say thank you for a wonderful conversation. For me, at least, affordable housing is often felt like this huge, vast topic that’s kind of out of any one person’s hands. But I feel like through this conversation, I’ve learned kind of more about the day to day actions that can be taken and that are being taken both by bad faith actors and corporations as well as community organizers kind of fighting to counteract those forces. If you’re interested in reading David, Steven or Sofi’s full articles or learning more about the flaws in our legal system, check out The [F]law magazine at theflaw.org. 

Haley And my last little plug is, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out the show notes. There’s going to be some awesome links there and references to some of the things that our guests talked about today. You can go to those show notes and see those materials. And then of course, make sure that you subscribe to our podcast wherever you like to listen. You can also check out for flawschool.org For more content. Thank you all so much for listening and looking forward to talking at you and with you again in the future. And with that, class  is dismissed.

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