Tolkkinen: Renters are getting restless and more powerful

Maybe I own some of Duluth’s decrepit rental homes.

If you invest in retirement accounts or mutual funds, maybe you do, too.

Ever since the 2008 crash, American housing has been swept up like monopoly pieces by investors and companies who recognize cash cows when they see them, bringing into our portfolios infinitesimally small micro-portions of homes occupied by people fighting against the odds to save for a house of their own.

Maybe I own a sliver of a rickety handrail.

Maybe you own part of a door lock that won’t fasten properly.

On Tuesday, the people who live in substandard rental housing in Duluth scored an important victory when voters overwhelmingly passed a right-to-repair ordinance allowing tenants to fix certain things when their landlords fail to, then deduct the cost from their rent.

There’s much talk about a housing crisis in America and a lack of affordable housing. Less talk about how, according to Redfin and other real estate observers, America is turning into a nation of renters. Some homes are owned by large private companies, others by a kaleidoscope of investors who have no idea that the wash machine quit working a month ago.

Olson said he’s heard too many stories about substandard rental conditions, including that of a Bemidji mom whose refrigerator quit and who kept her diabetic child’s insulin in a cooler because her landlord failed to replace the appliance.

More notoriously, in 2023, an apartment building for low-income, disabled and elderly tenants suddenly closed after Bemidji authorities deemed it unsafe, dispatching vulnerable tenants into motel rooms, some of them for months, before they could find alternate housing. It was the second time in a year that the city shuttered affordable housing due to safety concerns.

In greater Minnesota, as it is in the Twin Cities, renters and home seekers, both white collar and working class, are under tremendous cost pressures. In desirable areas, investors have turned single-family homes into vacation rentals, eroding the supply for would-be homeowners or long-term renters. Rents and home prices continue to climb, and if your household earns $64,000 a year, the starting salary of a Bemidji State University assistant professor, you’d better not have any student loans, car payments or child care costs if you want to buy a semi-decent home, mortgage calculators show.

The mounting pressure is looking for relief, and it is bubbling over across the country in the form of tenants unions, rent strikes and lobbying for rent control and policy changes. Last year, a national federation of tenants unions formed, and this year calls for eviction moratoriums until SNAP payments resumed found receptive ears among government officials in Georgia.

“I think it kind of parallels workers unions,” said Chloe Holloway, a member of the Duluth Tenants union, which mobilized support for the measure. “Working conditions started deteriorating rapidly. People were dying at work, horrific things were happening. They were making pennies on the dollar, and then they unionized, and were able to take back some of that bargaining power and advocate for better wages, safer jobs and better contracts.”

Landlords won one earlier this year when the courts overruled the state’s attempt to expunge eviction records, which landlords rely on to avoid tenants who won’t pay the rent or who damage property.

Landlords have horror stories of their own. As small-time landlords, my husband and I had one long-term tenant fail to heat the house while she was away in the winter. The pipes froze and burst and she didn’t tell us, and by the time we discovered the damage, the water had ruined floors, ceilings, fixtures, cabinets, and walls, only part of which was covered by insurance.

It was, truly, a financial disaster for us that still has ramifications. But we’ve also had really great tenants.

In a mom-and-pop model like ours, as long as tenants pay on time and take reasonably good care of the property, and landlords fix things as quickly as possible, and don’t overdo the rent increases, then everybody’s happy. The mom-and-pop rental model is generally not the problem, according to rental advocates I interviewed for this column. Local landlords generally want to protect their investments by maintaining their properties.

The model that hurts renters the most, said Nick Graetz, a University of Minnesota researcher who specializes in housing, is the one that relies on deferring maintenance and flipping properties every few years to cash out the rise in value.