Items 17 and 19 are both about affordable housing, in different ways.
Item 17: Extending the Covid Disaster Declaration, and whether to keep the 3 month eviction delay ordinance.
On the Disaster Declaration: Keep it, because it makes us eligible for funding. (But also, there actually could be another Covid wave. Right now, risk is low, and we should take our masks off and enjoy normal life. But the winds could shift again, and we’d have to respond to that.)
On the Eviction Delay: currently it takes 3 months to evict someone. According to the Justices of the Peace, the eviction rate has stayed roughly steady pre-covid to covid. The issue is whether we should go back to normal. (What is normal – evictions on demand? One month grace period? I don’t actually know.)
The argument in favor is that this costs landlords the rent money that they’re entitled to, and we’re clearly back in a healthy job market, so any Covid hardship should be over. The counterargument is that the Emergency Rental Assistance program has been an absolute shitshow – thanks, Hays County! – and people need it, but haven’t been able to get it. Furthermore, evictions lead to homelessness.
This is true and well-documented. There are two main categories of homeless people – first, the visible homeless, with mental illnesses. These are sometimes called chronically homeless. This is who most of us think of when we think of homeless people. The other group is the temporarily homeless. This group is much more invisible. These are people who may have been living a fairly stable life, but they were financially precarious, and then they were hit with one or several events, and now things are in a tailspin. The eviction is an outsized, disproportionate consequence for the bumps in the road that led to it. It’s unsafe, unstable, extra-expensive, and it then takes years for people to recover some financial stability, if ever. It’s traumatic for children, and there are often children involved. (Traumatic for the adults, too.)
The problem is so much bigger than just the three month eviction delay. We need a universal standard of living. We need housing guaranteed for all.
Side note on housing: The federal government used to build a massive amount of low income housing. Somewhere I read that in some cities in the ’70s, they were building ~200-300K units of housing every year. In the ’80s, we mostly switched to Section 8 vouchers, which meant that no new housing was being built by the federal government. Production of cheap housing plummeted. People on Section 8 vouchers now have to compete with everyone else for housing. All of a sudden, affordable housing became a limited resource, and then it became scarce. The free market has not created a glut of cheap housing. The government needs to build it.
Now, there were tons of problems with the federal low income housing, largely because of racism. Buildings were not maintained and kept safe, and when you have a lot of people of color living in a rundown, dangerous area, society declares it to be a slum. But the answer is to fix federal housing and pay to do it correctly, not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So back to the 3 month eviction delay: It would not be a problem to evict someone if they could move right into a safe, free, well-maintained, basic apartment. It also would not be a problem if there was not a five year waiting list to get a Section 8 housing voucher.
Believe it or not, I am actually sympathetic to landlords on this one, as well. They’re still responsible for the mortgage every month. But the stakes are so much more dangerously high for the tenant than the landlord.
Given how disastrous evictions are for tenants, and given that there is a huge pot of money that needs to be handed out, we should keep the 3 month delay in place while we work to connect tenants to the money. This also benefits landlords! If your tenant gets rental relief, then you get paid.
(Do I need to say that these arguments were all stated most clearly by Alyssa Garza? Yes, I should give credit where credit is due. She does a great job laying out the situation. In particular, she wants the city to help residents can get through the Emergency Rental Assistance program.)
Lastly: being a landlord comes with risk. Being a business owner comes with risk. Being a bank and lending money comes with risk. In different ways, these entities make money off of other people’s labor. If you eliminate the risk, then you just want to get richer by virtue of being rich in the first place. Nice gig if you can get it, but very antithetical to this Marxist’s sense of fairness. (Of course not all landlords are rich, and not all business owners are rich. But they are better off than the people being evicted, right?)
In the end:
Keep: Alyssa Garza, Jude Prather, Max Baker, Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez
End: Shane Scott, Mark Gleason
(The four who voted to keep all want more data on evictions and have sympathy for landlords. It’s a hard issue.)
Item 19: Also a housing issue. Right now, we have a ban on more than two unrelated people living together. Should we increase that to three people? Or more?
Historically, San Marcos hates its college students. And to be fair, historically Texas State was a massive party school. So the stereotype is that your neighbor will be a rental house with 15 college students who throw keggers every weekend and puke in your bushes. The idea is to prevent these students from living together.
(I actually have a theory that Texas State is much less of a party school than it was twenty years ago. Rising admission standards, higher level of economic anxiety within the student body, and fewer slap-happy white kids, for lack of a better term. It’s been a long time since we had an incident like the drunk girl who had a DUI driving her toy Barbie Jeep around campus.)
There are SO MANY reasons that this occupancy restriction is a terrible policy.
- These bans are very classist and racist in effect, even if ostensibly the intent was anti-college students.
- You should write your policy to address the problem you want to solve. If giant parties and noise and trash are the problem, then you’ve got a code enforcement problem. No one actually cares if the people throwing the party are siblings or nephews or whatever. (Max Baker makes this point.)
We look for workarounds – like the occupancy restriction – because code enforcement is hard. Right now, we have two code enforcement problems: we need to hire more code enforcement staffing, and we need to take on landlords. Unless you can penalize landlords, they will never care that their property has become a nuisance. Until we have a well-functioning, complete rental registry, landlords can obscure their identities and avoid penalties.
3. The occupancy ban is totally unenforceable, which means that it is violated all the time, and enforced selectively. When someone has an ax to grind with their neighbor, they can get them via this statute. If a neighbor has a legit complaint, then deal with the legit complaint. This just invites capricious and biased enforcement.
4. Fundamentally, we need more housing. People need to be able to double up and triple up, without fear of the law. However, this ordinance is so broadly ignored that I doubt repealing it would actually open up much housing. So while this is the focus of the debate, it’s also sort of the least important reason.
I believe Alyssa Garza brought the item to the agenda.
There are a couple of sub-debates:
- Would raising the limit to 3 help?
- What if we required a conditional use permit? (CUP)
- What if it had to be owner-occupied? In other words, if you own the home, you can rent out a bedroom, but not if you rent?
- What if some Dallas parents buy a house for their college kids? Are the college kids considered “owner-occupied” and then allowed to have more unrelated people? I cannot believe how much traction this one gets, because college kids partying was ostensibly the whole problem.
Several times this evening, Jude Prather appears to be very responsive to the kinds of arguments that Alyssa Garza puts forth. Both of them deserve credit – Alyssa for explaining herself patiently, over and over again, and Jude for listening with an open mind, and hearing what she’s saying.
Saul Gonzalez and Mark Gleason are very opposed to any change. They both believe fervently in the destruction wrought by these massive house parties, and 8-10 cars parked all over the lawn. My dudes: we are talking about three unrelated people. Not 8-10. Three unrelated people most likely do not have a boatload of cars.
Max Baker and Jane Hughson are annoyingly cautious about this. They want it to be owner-occupied, which basically means that old folks can rent out their kids’ bedroom, once their kids are long gone, to help offset the property taxes. This is just the lamest little situation to restrict your attention to. They also want it to perhaps require a CUP.
What’s even worse is that they’d consider it “owner-occupied” if a college student is living in a house that their parent owns. This is purely symbolic, because there has never been an actual rich kid who has restrained themselves over this rule, but the idea is completely inequitable and infuriating. Weren’t these the kids that we were scared would throw the massive keggers?
Alyssa Garza points out the classism and racism inherent these proposals. Who exactly has generational wealth? Who owns homes? Who can navigate a CUP process? Whose daddy buys them a house for college?
Mayor Hughson hems and haws, and ultimately wants community feedback. Unfortunately, this is a terrible idea. You do not consult the community when racism and classism are involved, because hoards of people will happily tell you how racist and classist they are. This will invite all the NIMBY-types to come out in droves, and generate the false impression that we are being terrorized by keggers in San Marcos.
(Max Baker does point out plenty of new builds have no residency restrictions. This needs to be written carefully, lest we impose new residency restrictions where they currently don’t exist.)
The vote has several parts:
– Should we move it up to 3 unrelated people?
– Should it require a conditional-use permit (CUP)?
– Should it be limited to owner-occupied homes?
– If so, should college students in Daddy’s house count as owner-occupied?
Shane, Jude, Alyssa: Yes on 3. No restrictions.
Max: Yes on 3. In the historic district, owner-occupied with CUP.
Saul: Only owner-occupied with CUP. College kids count.
Mark: Only owner-occupied with CUP. No on college kids.
Jane: I can’t decide without talking to people in the community.
In the end, this was just a preliminary discussion. Staff will draft something raising the limit to 3 unrelated people, and bring it back.
The San Marxist 