Miriam de Santiago says she worries every day about the rent for her house. She calculates how she can meet her obligations without endangering the health of her son, who has epilepsy.
“Epilepsy medications cost between $780 and $1,000 [a month]and we have to have it at home and at school. With the rent increases, I have to decide which medicines I apply for first, see which is the 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 Park community in Boulder, Colorado, for 16 years. In 2020, a company purchased the property where the community is located. Before then, she said, her rent went up by about $10 or $15 a year, but in 2020, she said, her rent went up by $70, with subsequent increases of up to $35 a year and this year by $45.
“We’ve had anxiety and depression. And we’ve seen cases of people not sleeping and even losing their hair because they thought there was going to be a knock on the door and they had to leave,” De Santiago, who works at 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 experiences with rent increases were detailed in a report by Human Impact Partners, or HIP, a nonprofit focused on public health and social justice research. The study examined how corporate landlord practices are affecting the health of tenants in some parts of the U.S. According to HIP, a Census Bureau Rental Housing Finance Survey found that about 45% of rental properties are owned by “institutional investors,” a category that includes landlords who use corporate structures such as LLPs, LPs, LLCs, real estate investment trusts and real estate corporations.
“What we found is that corporate landlords use strategies to create harmful housing conditions. And that creates problems like homelessness, mental and physical health issues, and increasing racial and health disparities that disproportionately impact people of color, including Black and Latino communities,” Sukhdip Purewal, director of research programs at HIP, said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
The study analyzes data on housing code violations and interviews with government officials, housing researchers, community organizers and tenants in cities including Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans and Boulder.
HIP’s findings are consistent with other research. High housing prices and poor housing quality in the U.S. are directly linked to health outcomes, and many studies have found effects on things like the presence of mold, neighborhood air quality or access to green space, said Juan Pablo Garnham, director of communications and policy at the Eviction Lab, an evictions and housing think tank 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 a product like housing, you’re forced to cut back on spending on things like doctor visits, medicine or healthy eating,” he said.
Waiting for answers
According to the HIP report, commercial landlords harm public health through six strategies to increase profits: neglecting maintenance, conducting mass evictions, raising rents and adding fees, avoiding taxes, evading accountability, and influencing policy.
Some of those practices have had consequences for people like Nora Franco, who lived for more than 15 years in a Los Angeles home that burned down last year. She said she has still not been able to return to her unrepaired home or negotiate with her corporate landlord.
“We waited, but they wouldn’t tell us anything. The manager told me to find a place to sleep, that they would pay for the hotel. But they never gave me anything. Almost two months later, they cleaned up because the rubble from the roof of the house was left there. I had to throw out my living room and some of my personal belongings that were burned,” said Franco, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who has been in the U.S. since 2006.
Franco shared with Noticias Telemundo several emails she sent to the building management company, detailing how the family had continued to try to pay rent while seeking answers about their situation. In a phone call, she was told that the building management was no longer involved and that she would hear from the landlord’s attorneys, she said, but she never did.
“We, the tenants, are the injured parties and the company is profiting because the insurance company should have responded to them by now, but they haven’t responded to us and it’s been a year,” Franco said. Franco said 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 cooped up in her brother-in-law’s apartment with her husband and two teenage children. “Nobody expects to go through a situation like ours, and the truth is very harsh,” she said.
According to the HIP study, nearly 2 out of 5 households in the U.S. rent, and the renter class is growing. In addition, Blacks, Latinos, working-class people and young people are disproportionately represented in the renter sector.
“About 40% of renters identify as Black or Latino, and 34% are under age 35. The median annual rent for renters is $41,000, nearly half that of homeowners,” the researchers reported.
Purewal said: “The renter class, as we know, is more likely to be people of color and low-income. Additional research has shown that investment activity is higher in urban areas and in the Sunbelt. So this impacts the entire southern U.S. between California and Florida, which has large immigrant and Latino communities.”
While the study does not provide detailed figures on the impact of corporate practices on tenant health across the country, it does provide a comprehensive analysis of corporate landlords, housing conditions and the health impacts.
Wall Street’s foray into housing
Several studies show that Wall Street firms engaged in foreclosure operations on single-family homes following the 2008 housing crisis. Their influence has grown since then.
“Recent trends point to an increase in corporate ownership of the rental housing sector. They now own nearly half of the rental properties, and I think what’s unique about this moment is the increasing financialization of rental housing — in other words, treating our homes as something Wall Street can bet on,” said Will Dominie, director of HIP’s Housing Justice Program.
Several lawmakers have proposed legislation to regulate or restrict the activities of Wall Street firms in the real estate market.
In early November, California Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna, 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 attempt to curb rental price speculation.
“We have a housing crisis in the United States. I’m the son of immigrants, and my parents came to this country to buy a home so their children could have one,” Khanna said in an interview after the bill, which is still working its way through Congress, was introduced. “Now the largest group that wants to buy homes is the Latino community. In my district, a third of all new home buyers, almost 480,000, are Latino. And yet they’re being shut out. And the reason is because these big Wall Street corporate hedge funds are buying up the single-family homes.”
Meanwhile, tenants like Miriam de Santiago are working to improve rental conditions in their neighborhoods and ensure that mobile home parks like hers in Colorado have rent protections.
“These are very long fights, but we are fighting for them. And we are already seeing in other places that manufactured housing is being considered affordable housing, and we want that protection,” de Santiago said. “Many times we think that because we live in a manufactured home we don’t have rights, but they do exist. It is difficult to enforce them, but it is not impossible.”
A version of this story was first published in Noticias Telemundo.
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