Five Questions With: Christopher Samih-Rotondo

Christopher Samih-Rotondo is the community organizer for the Tenant and Homeowner Association at DARE.
Christopher Samih-Rotondo is the community organizer for the Tenant and Homeowner Association at DARE.

Christopher Samih-Rotondo is the community organizer for the Tenant and Homeowner Association at DARE, or Direct Action for Rights and Equality, a Providence-based organization. He has held this position for five years. He is a graduate of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and an occasional contributor to local media, including the RI Future blog.
PBN: What is the Tenant and Homeowner Association and what is its primary purpose? Do you represent only Providence?
SAMIH-ROTONDO:
The Tenant and Homeowner Association is a group of renters and owners who have or are facing foreclosure and who organize, advocate and counsel each other to prevent individual foreclosures and evictions, as well as change public policies and bank practices to address the root causes of homelessness, housing insecurity and blight. The THA is a campaign committee of DARE, a social-justice organization based in the south side of Providence. For the past 30 years, DARE has been organizing low-income families in communities of color for social, political and economic justice. DARE members, who saw foreclosure, and subsequent no-fault evictions, as a widespread community issue, started the association in 2008. The THA was established at DARE in order to organize residents affected by foreclosure, including tenants and low- to moderate-income homeowners and to work with them to determine solutions to the housing crisis precipitated by bank foreclosures. Between 2008 and 2014, the group’s primary goal was to pass statewide legislation, referred to as “Just Cause,” which would require banks that took over property through foreclosure to follow the prescriptions of the Rhode Island’s Landlord-Tenant Act. This requires banks to have a “just cause” to pursue the eviction of occupants. After six years of organizing and advocacy, the THA won the law’s passage in 2014 and has since been focused on ensuring its implementation. The law should have put an end to the common practice of evicting both former homeowners and tenants from foreclosed properties without cause.
PBN: How significant is the foreclosure threat for tenants? Do they still face eviction if their landlord is foreclosed upon or did that change in 2014?
SAMIH-ROTONDO:
The threat to tenants is compounded by absentee landlords and deplorable housing conditions. Despite the passage of the Just Cause law, which prohibits the no-fault eviction of tenants from bank-owned property, tenants who find themselves living in real-estate owned buildings face other issues that often lead to “self-help,” or informal, evictions. Landlords facing foreclosure, either intentionally or due to financial hardship, often neglect water and sewer bills, as well as serious repairs. This can leave tenants facing not only the legal limbo of a recent foreclosure sale, but also uninhabitable conditions – no running water, unsafe structures, or faulty wiring – that lead to condemnation and summary eviction by local code enforcement.
PBN: What is the most challenging issue in 2016 for homeowners represented by your association?
SAMIH-ROTONDO:
There are two major issues facing the homeowners we work with: the unregulated housing market and an economy that promotes under- and unemployment. The deregulation of financial markets, which allowed consumer banks to buy and sell mortgage notes on the secondary market, has led to wild speculation in housing. Banks lent money to those without the means to repay in order to purchase homes at wildly inflated values, often rising and quickly falling between $50,000 to $100,000 in a few years at the height of the recent crisis. Those homeowners still holding on to the home they purchased on the promise of a now out-of-business mortgage lender (such as Countrywide) are now struggling to pay off a loan principal that could be up to $100,000 more than the value of their house. The promise of equity, which could enable lower-income homeowners to pay for higher education, or to start a business and raise their income and quality of life, becomes a pipe dream. Yet lenders, with the intentional support, subsidy and blessing of the federal government (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are responsible for many of the foreclosure-related evictions in the state, according to the THA’s initial research into court records), have continued to demand full repayment and refused widespread principal reduction, which would stabilize the housing market and support struggling families. The majority of modifications offered by lenders (and the slightly better government programs, such as HAMP and the Hardest Hit Fund) remain completely voluntary for banks and often kick the can of repayment down the road by lowering an interest rate and tagging a “balloon payment” of tens of thousands to the end of a loan. Not only is it ludicrous to a struggling borrower, it’s also a smash-and-grab business model that seems to be based on a logic of garnering as much profit as possible before an inevitable default.
PBN: The group earlier this year challenged the Elorza administration on its EveryHome program. What is the concern with that program, which rehabilitates dilapidated structures?
SAMIH-ROTONDO:
The association was initially excited about Mayor Elorza’s inauguration day promise to fix every abandoned house in Providence! The association sees abandonment, blight, the low-vacancy rates and high rents in Providence as the result of housing speculation and foreclosures, especially in low-income communities of color. After initial excitement, however, the association encountered resistance from the administration in providing more information about how the program was going to work, especially in regards to claims of producing affordable housing and local employment. The THA spent nearly a year asking for a meeting with the mayor to discuss the details of the program and, following a couple of frustrating meetings with city attorneys and staff, also asking for an advisory board, made up of residents who lived in the neighborhoods with the most properties targeted for the program. The administration refused any form of community oversight over the receivership and EveryHome initiatives and simply repeats the promise of affordable housing and local jobs, without any specifics, regulations, policies or proof. The overarching fear is that this program will bolster and publicly subsidize gentrification, by rehabilitating housing in “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, which will then be sold to investors with no mechanisms to prevent speculation or egregious rent increases.
PBN: What is the greatest misconception that business and city leaders have about tenants?
SAMIH-ROTONDO:
Fear and derision of tenants is rooted in the American ideal of homeownership, which was created in the post-war period through heavy subsidies by the federal government, highway construction and the expansion of suburban communities. The mortgage industry was also founded in exclusion and racism enacted through covenants and red-lining. Homeownership has become the aspiration of many Americans and the zenith of housing policy, with huge subsidies in the form of mortgage interest deductions, even while investment in public and affordable housing plummets. The belief that homeownership is the best housing policy and form of investment is a misconception and a failed public policy, largely supported by business and city leaders here.
Another major misconception, or, rather a prejudice, is that tenants add no value to where they live and, in fact, devalue the properties they rent and the neighborhoods where they live. This prejudice exists among homeowners who live side by side with renters in low-income neighborhoods. The THA combats the notion that only landlords and investors add value to their properties and neighborhoods, while renters largely mooch off of these investments, especially low-income, subsidized renters of color. The THA asserts that tenants add to and protect the value of the places they live, care about and invest in their neighborhoods. It’s quite a contradiction that downtown business and city leaders would lead a charge against panhandling and seek to use unconstitutional ordinances to push visibly poor people from downtown but not put the same amount of time and resources behind the production of long-term affordable housing. The foreclosure and eviction epidemic, coupled with the increasingly unaffordable housing market in Providence, are the root causes of the homelessness and panhandling situations in downtown.

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