Marketwatch - For the last two months, Mark Osgood from Chicago said he has not been able to pay rent. He’s 32, an Uber driver, and says work has dried up due to the virus. He said neither his stimulus nor his unemployment checks have come in yet.

“I mean, I live paycheck to paycheck as it is,” he said. “And if there is no income coming in, there’s no bill money going out.”

Today is May 1, rent is due, and he said he won’t be paying. Neither will many others — there are rent strikes across the country today, as a response to job losses and economic damage from the pandemic. Worker rights activists across the country are also calling for a day of action to bring attention to workplace issues around COVID-19.

kpbs - A caravan of protesters wound through San Diego on Friday, part of a statewide rent strike.

More than a month into the coronavirus lockdown and resulting local economic collapse, many tenants are stuck between having to choose between paying rent or paying for other necessities.

Some tenant advocates say the government hasn’t done enough to support renters.

"The government is more concerned on this economic crisis than the people that make this economy work, which are workers. We’re exchanging this pandemic for a mass eviction crisis," said Grace Martinez, an organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Her group helped organize the caravan and strike Friday.

The TODAY Show - The economic toll continues to mount with 30 million Americans now out of work during the pandemic, and many others are saying they’ve been unable to file their jobless claims, @jolingkent reports.

CBS News Moneywatch - Thousands of people around the U.S. are calling for politicians to cancel rent and mortgages, with temporary legal restrictions on evictions set to expire in many states in a matter of weeks.

"Can't pay in May? Don't pay May," was the message sent out by an Oakland, California, tenants' group on 50,000 postcards. In New York state, 15,000 residents in apartments and other housing have pledged to not pay their rent on May 1, according to organizers of the protest. In Los Angeles, strikers are rallying near City Hall to demand that local officials suspend rent, mortgage and utility payments. 

"I've been practicing law for over 40 years and I've never seen something like this," said Andrew Scherer, a housing lawyer and the former head of Legal Services NYC, a non-profit group that offers legal aid to low-income people. "This is a very unusual occurrence — having a fairly large group of people saying, 'Something's got to give here.'" 

KPFA - KPFA News: Now a look at organizing. Housing rights advocates are trying to build momentum behind a demand they call “cancel rent”–a call to go further than the limited eviction pause ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom under the state of emergency. KPFA’s Scott Baba reports. 

Business Insider - "Before the COVID-19 virus, 70% of our income went toward rent," said Vanessa Bulnes, 61, her voice crackling over a Zoom call with housing organizers and media on Thursday. 

Like tens of millions of tenants around the country, Bulnes and her 71-year-old husband, who live in Oakland, California, are out of work.

Even before the crisis, housing was not affordable, she said. Her husband suffered a stroke just before the 2009 financial crisis, and she's been the sole breadwinner ever since.

"We've always been on the edge of homelessness," Bulnes, an organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, said.

On Friday, May 1, Bulnes will join the legion of tenants unable to pay rent. It's not clear exactly how many renters will go on strike, but organized efforts in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Colorado, California, Washington state, and elsewhere point to the largest rent strike in decades.

KQED - It started with a message Jason Krueger taped to the laundry room wall: “Tenant mutual aid and support!”

It was late March, and Krueger, who uses they/them pronouns, was looking for ways neighbors in their eight-unit Alameda apartment building could help each other during the pandemic. California’s shelter-in-place order had been in effect for a little over a week, but Krueger was already thinking of the recession that was sure to follow.

Millions would soon be out of work, so Krueger thought the next step would be to organize a rent strike — withholding rent as a form of protest.

“Here, of all the places, it seemed like rent strikes would be a life-preserving measure,” Krueger said. “I just don’t see how else you would get property owners to respond without that large level of collective action and solidarity.”

So, to start, Krueger decided to try to form a tenants' council, an organization representing residents in a single building, or who share the same landlord, to bargain collectively.

Krueger's not alone. Tenants' rights organizers say they are seeing more tenants, like Krueger, turn to collective action. And on Friday, hundreds of protests are planned across the country to decry high rents, mounting debt due to the pandemic and growing income inequality.

Laid-off workers say they face insurmountable debt and homelessness if they have to pay back months of rent after the pandemic.

The Appeal - Tenants across California are poised to launch a rent and mortgage strike on May 1 if state leaders fail to provide immediate rent relief to residents who have lost their income due to COVID-19.

California Governor Gavin Newsom handed down an executive order one month ago banning the enforcement of evictions until May 31, after stay-at-home orders shut down businesses and unemployment claims surged. But renters, activists, and legal advocates were quick to point out that the measure doesn’t provide rent relief—residents will still owe back rent after stay-at-home orders are lifted. Over the past month, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment has been organizing a movement of both tenants and landlords who are seeking lasting rent relief from the state government.

LA Times - Una coalición de una docena de organizaciones y activistas comunitarios se unen para exigirle al gobierno de Sacramento, el gobierno del condado de Los Ángeles y la ciudad, el alto al pago de alquileres, hipotecas y encarcelamiento durante la crisis del coronavirus.

San Francisco Curbed - With so many people in the Bay Area out of work and unsure how to pay next month’s rent, tenant groups are suggesting a singular solution: that renters refuse to pay their landlords and instead opt for a rent strike.

“Systems have come to a halt, industries have crashed, and millions of people have lost their jobs,” notes Bay Area Rent Strike, a grassroots effort that hopes to organize tenants into a region-wide nonpayment movement.

“Without any reliable source of income, without work, sick days, and access to the most basic needs like food and safe shelter, many of us will not survive,” notes the would-be strike organization.

Center for Health Journalism - As virtually everyone in the nation endures some form of sheltering-at-home, many homeless people and those without secure housing do not have a place to keep safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The state of California has been facing a housing crisis for many years. When we have a pandemic, the housing shortage becomes a public health crisis.

I am a mother of two daughters who for the past 18 months has been sleeping on spare beds, couches, or sometimes on the bare floor. Until recently, my family would go from house to house, often using public transportation, toting just our clothing in bags. This instability has led to a lot of anxiety and depression for my two daughters and me. For my daughters, it has undermined their ability to concentrate and learn. 

Three years ago, I was living in Boyle Heights, paying $1,200 for a two-bedroom apartment. I left the country for two years to visit friends in South America and lived in a rural area away from the city. When I returned to Los Angeles, rents at the places I was looking at had doubled. I was unable to afford to live on my own. My daughters, 10 and 8, were forced to live with friends and family. We made do in crowded spaces, sometimes on a spare bed, other times on the floor or on couches. We lived out of clothing from bags that we moved around with us. It made it really hard to provide the kind of stability we know children need to thrive.

From Boston to San Jose, new initiatives help thousands of renters face COVID-19. But low funding, poor tenants’ protections, and overwhelmed systems have housing advocates worried the programs are falling short.

THE APPEAL - On April 1, Mayra Molina didn’t have the $2700 she needed to pay rent. When the novel coronavirus started spreading in Boston, the families that employ her as a housekeeper called one after another to tell her not to come to work. Her two sons, with whom she shares her East Boston apartment, had their construction jobs canceled, too. 

When Molina heard that the city was launching a rent assistance program, she hoped it would help her cover next month’s rent, at least. But she has gotten no response since she applied weeks ago. Because she’s undocumented, she’s not eligible for the stimulus check, nor for unemployment benefits. The situation is causing her insomnia and severe anxiety, which spikes her blood pressure, she told the Appeal: Political Report. When she went to a clinic, a counselor told her  not to worry about the rent, she said. “Well, that’s what worries us all, I think.”

Molina is one of the 31 percent of Americans who couldn’t pay rent at the beginning of this month. With more than 22 million having lost their jobs in the last four weeks, that number is likely to be even higher on May 1. 

Move aimed to help tenants during COVID-19 outbreak

East Bay Times - Alameda County broadened its moratorium on evictions Tuesday, extending protection to most renters during the coronavirus pandemic.

“There are things we are doing now that we would not typically do,” Supervisor Nate Miley said, referring to the health crisis. “And I think the same thing relates to this ordinance.”

In order to keep people in their homes, the temporary moratorium now bans not only no-cause evictions, but also most just cause evictions, where landlords could evict a renter for things such as non-payment or violating terms of the lease.

However, landlords still can evict people in some circumstances, such as for health and safety reasons, which can include criminal behavior, as well as if a landlord is going out of the rental business and plans to take the unit off the market.

San Jose Mercury News - Contra Costa County on Tuesday approved an urgency ordinance that temporarily prohibits evictions of residential and commercial tenants affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and stops rent increases.

The ordinance is similar to those already passed by San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Clara counties, as well as some cities including Oakland, Concord, Richmond Pittsburg and Antioch.

The ordinance bars landlords and sublessors from kicking out tenants who fail to pay rent if they can show they lost income or have to field “substantial” medical expenses related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Tenants must provide documentation to prove their loss of income or out-of-pocket medical expenses, according to the ordinance. Supervisors said a form, like one Santa Clara County has created, could quickly be made available on the county website for renters to use. Other documentation could include pay stubs, bank statements or a notice from an employer.

In the Bay Area—the most expensive place to live in the U.S—residents are going on a #RentStrike.

YES! Magazine - Terra Thomas, a florist in Oakland, California, doesn’t know when she’ll receive her next paycheck, a concerning predicament millions of Americans are now facing. 

“It’s terrifying for sure,” she says. 

Even before Bay Area officials announced a shelter-in-place order on March 16—to start the next day—Thomas was already noticing her event’s calendar thinning out. As a florist, she had weddings, graduations, and other special occasions booked for the rest of the year, but as the news of the coronavirus spread, her clients started canceling. 

Because of her precarious situation, Thomas, a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, who had been initially striking against her corporate landlord Mosser Companies Inc. over repairs and other negligence with her neighbors before quarantining, decided to withhold paying her April rent. 

“I need to allocate my money for food, health care and other necessities, not to pay rent to corporate landlords,” she says.  

Thomas pays $833 a month in rent. She’s lived in her building for seven years and is under rent control. Still, even with rent control, coming up with that kind of cash without income is a prospect Thomas never saw herself having to consider. 

The Bay Area continues to be one of the most expensive places to rent in the country, with the average cost of $3,446 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. Many low-income renters live paycheck-to-paycheck. Like Thomas, a growing number of tenants in the Bay Area, around California, and a beginning of a movement throughout the country are rent striking—proactively choosing to not pay rent. 

The Real Deal - Editor’s Note: This story originally published on April 10, 2020. On April 16, news broke of Housing Justice For All and the Philadelphia Tenant Union’s planned rent strikes for May 1. 

“Escalating actions help,” the union wrote in the manual released last week, at a time when landlords are grappling with nonpayment of rent. “Many tenants who are hesitant about an action that is ‘too radical’ may be radicalized when the group decides to settle on a less scary step first, and find it doesn’t meet their needs.” The union suggests incremental efforts such as “simultaneously paying rent late on the same day” and “car protest circling landlord’s house” and offers a thermometer graphic to help tenants keep progress on the way to a rent strike. The maximal point? “Celebrate victory!”

The New York Times - First it was the waitress whose restaurant closed. Then the waiter, the bartender, the substitute teacher, the hairdresser, the tattoo artist and the Walgreens manager.

One after the other, the tenants called and emailed their landlord, Bruce Brunner, to say they were out of work and the rent was going to be late. A week after the bill was due, some two dozen of Mr. Brunner’s 130 tenants had lost their jobs or had their hours reduced. He’s working out payment plans and using security deposits as a stopgap while directing tenants to the emerging patchwork of local, state and federal assistance programs.

“Six weeks ago, you could name your price and you’d have multiple people applying,” said Mr. Brunner, who lives in Minneapolis, where he owns and manages 20 duplexes and triplexes across the city. “Now you’re deferring and working out payment plans, and it’s only going to get worse.”

One week after the first of the month, tenants nationwide are already struggling with rents. In interviews with two dozen landlords — including companies with tens of thousands of units, nonprofit developers who house the working poor, and mom-and-pop operators living next door to their tenants — property owners say their collections have plunged as much of the economy has shut down to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Sacramento News & Review - Despite actions by Gov. Gavin Newsom and local politicians throughout the state, an untold number of California residents could lose their homes because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Newsom issued two executive orders last month pausing the enforcement of court-ordered evictions through May 31 for tenants unable to pay their rents or mortgages due to COVID-19. In Sacramento County, these “unlawful detainer” court filings, as they’re officially known, have been trending downward since the Great Recession and were at some of their lowest levels at the start of 2020. But then the coronavirus began spreading here, forcing a halt to daily life and costing more than one million Californians their jobs in just two weeks.

Newsom’s executive actions were meant to reassure residents they wouldn’t be forced onto the streets during a global health crisis in which people are being urged to stay home. But the governor’s orders don’t actually prevent the eviction process from unfolding; they just give vulnerable tenants extra time—60 days instead of five—to respond to legal eviction notices filed in court during the state emergency.

Monday, the Judicial Council of California extended that grace period to 90 days.

Newsweek - California tenants are planning rent strikes as spiking unemployment and economic uncertainty have left many facing financial troubles. Activists have suggested that measures taken to protect renters in the state during the pandemic need to go further, with one renters' union co-founder telling The Guardian that California had to "do right by a majority of its constituents."

Several outlets have also reported that the rent strikes are due to take place this month in some of the Golden State's largest cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has led to business shutdowns and stay-at-home orders, initial jobless claims have soared to recording breaking levels, with more than three million recorded in the week ending March 21.

CapRadio - Just a few weeks ago, Uma Tufekcic was hustling two jobs: at a restaurant and an art gallery in Sacramento. Then, like millions across the globe, the coronavirus crisis yanked the rug out from under her.

Now, she has no income. She isolates at home every day with her kitten, Iris, and occasionally paints or sneaks out for a walk in the park. 

But on Wednesday, it’s time to pay her landlord: $900 for her Midtown studio apartment.

“I have rent due on the first like everybody else,” Tufekcic said. “And I need to be saving my little bit of savings for buying food, survival things.”

She has a plan.

“What I'm going to do,” she said, “is I'm going to not pay my rent.”

She and other tenants are calling this decision a “rent strike,” something residents across the country are considering as the rent comes due in this coronavirus era. 

KQED - April 1 is the day rent is due for many around the Bay Area, but in the midst of a statewide shelter-in-place order, many are hard pressed to pay. Instead of suffering silently, however, some Bay Area tenants are launching a campaign to withhold rent.

A group of at least 20 calling themselves rent strikers are issuing Gov. Gavin Newsom their own 30-day notice to cancel all rent and mortgage payments during the current public health crisis. If he fails to act, renters across the state are planning to withhold rent payments beginning on May 1.

DEMOCRACY NOW! - We look at the crisis of homelessness during the coronavirus pandemic in California, where the number of cases has passed 6,000 with 132 deaths. The entire state has been ordered to shelter in place, leaving the state’s massive unhoused population extremely vulnerable. As the state braces for a surge in cases, tens of thousands of people are living on the streets. A recent study estimates that nearly 2,600 unhoused people will need to be hospitalized for the virus in Los Angeles alone — and nearly 1,000 will need intensive care. We speak with Martha Escudero, a member of a group of unhoused mothers, elders and families who have moved into vacant houses, and Carroll Fife, director of the Oakland office for Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE).

Interest in tenant activism has surged in the face of the coronavirus. Organizers are trying to seize the moment and build a movement.

THE NEW REPUBLIC - Last week, the head of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, James Bullard, predicted that in the second quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy could see a 30 percent unemployment rate and a 50 percent drop in gross domestic product. Both of these numbers far surpass their respective equivalencies during the Great Depression, with the slash in GDP dwarfing the downturn of the 2008 crash by factors of 10. “This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter,” Bullard said during the press call, voice quiet and flat. “It is a huge shock, and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”

As most workers in this country live paycheck to paycheck—some surveys place that number at half of the workforce, others reach closer to 80 percent—Bullard’s predictions point to an economic disaster that will likely hit people hardest in the area that consumes the majority of their paychecks: housing. Millions of new unemployment filings have surfaced in the last week, with several states’ unemployment and Medicare websites crashing due to the rise in applicants. Even with some supports from the stimulus bill, renters are still scrambling to come up with rent money on April 1. A $1,200 government check doesn’t mean much when it barely covers a month’s rent in many cities.

Across the country, rents have soared as real wages remain stagnant. Nearly half of New York City households are considered rent-burdened, which means they pay more than 30 percent of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. In Oakland, California, where rents have skyrocketed in recent years, a group of lifelong residents moved into a long-vacant house in protest of the lack of affordable housing. In the wake of the pandemic in Los Angeles, where minimum-wage workers need to pull nearly 80-hour shifts just to reach the “rent-burdened” threshold, unhoused families reclaimed 13 vacant homes, both as protest and a means of survival. As The New Republic reported last summer, even in America’s most affluent cities, low-income families fall through the cracks in a system so broken that it fails to even document the rapid spread of housing insecurity.

In response to a crisis further inflamed by the coronavirus, existing housing rights organizations have been struggling to meet new calls for organizing and resources, many of which have coalesced around a radical demand: A nationwide rent strike.

THE NEW YORKER - California has the worst housing crisis in the country—so bad that, when Governor Gavin Newsom took office, in 2019, he used his inaugural address to call for a “Marshall Plan for affordable housing,” entailing the construction of 3.5 million housing units by 2025. This month, with an uptick in covid-19 cases in Los Angeles, and orders from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti directing city residents to stay home at all costs, activists have turned their attention to hundreds of empty, publicly owned houses. There are thirty-six thousand homeless people in Los Angeles and countless others living in crowded, inadequate, and unstable situations. Wouldn’t they, too, be safer in a home? The acute crisis of the coronavirus, and the paradox of stay-at-home orders for a homeless population, might offer activists a chance to force decisive change.

In mid-March, a group of homeless and housing-insecure people calling themselves the Reclaimers took possession of eleven vacant houses in a quiet working-class neighborhood called El Sereno, east of downtown. The houses are among hundreds that Caltrans, the state’s transportation authority, bought last century, with the goal of demolishing them to make way for an expansion of the 710 Freeway. They were vacant—many of them unoccupied for years. According to Roberto Flores, a tenants-rights activist, after buying the houses, Caltrans rented them out, sometimes to their previous owners, then raised rents precipitously, forcing many of them out. (That’s what happened to him.) Recently, after decades of protest from environmentalists, preservationists, and social-justice activists in El Sereno, South Pasadena, and Pasadena, the freeway project was finally spiked, leaving the real estate in limbo—conspicuous waste amid a catastrophic housing shortage.

The Reclaimers, a Los Angeles group, are taking back government-owned properties to give the homeless a chance to stay healthy

The Guardian - Several Los Angeles families who have been forced to live in cars, shelters and other unsafe situations have seized control of 13 vacant homes owned by the government, with the goal of staying indefinitely – and staying alive.

The takeover comes as California’s homelessness crisis and the escalating coronavirus outbreak have collided to create a catastrophe threatening thousands of lives.

“To me, this is life or death,” said Benito Flores, 64, who has been living out of his van for years and moved into a vacant two-bedroom house on Wednesday. Wearing a face mask and standing inside the dusty home as volunteers cleaned, Flores explained that he is diabetic and at risk of serious illness or worse if he catches Covid-19. “By doing this, I’m giving myself a chance at living and surviving this crisis.”

The homeless residents and their supporters, who have called themselves the Reclaimers, were inspired by Moms 4 Housing, a group of houseless mothers in Oakland who publicly occupied a corporate-owned vacant home for two months. That protest sparked international attention and support from some California lawmakers, and ultimately, the mothers were able to purchase the home.