Cleveland City Council has a plan to spend up to $1 million to help renters understand their rights, organize to fight neglectful landlords and tap into services to pay rent and avoid evictions.
Council Member Kris Harsh and President Blaine Griffin introduced legislation on Nov. 4 for a three-year pilot program paid for with federal pandemic aid the city received.
If approved, the program aims to seamlessly connect renters to a handful of local groups that have helped fill the gap since the Cleveland Tenants Organization (CTO) was defunded in 2018. For more than 40 years, CTO provided education for renters and support when they had landlord troubles.
This program was designed to help tenants in a collective fashion, to address issues with the common landlord, so tenants don’t have to do it individually. They have the power of their voices together to seek the resolution that they need to be housed faithfully and stably.”
Ken Surratt, the United Way of Greater Cleveland’s chief development and investment officer, on a program to help tenants, which Cleveland City Council is considering funding.
“It provided invaluable services to tenants throughout the city, not just as a resource when something was going wrong in their unit, but also as a proactive resource to help educate people about their rights,” Harsh said.
He said an increasing number of council members have received complaints from residents about negligent landlords, many of them out-of-town owners. One thing the program could do is help build “neighborhood-based tenant unions” to directly deal with landlords in addressing concerns.
Working with the United Way of Greater Cleveland, Council determined that creating a new tenants’ group like CTO wasn’t the best way forward. Instead, they wanted existing groups assisting renters to coordinate their efforts and find a better way to link tenants to the help they needed. Groups that would be included in the pilot program include the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, which already provides free legal representation to low-income Cleveland tenants facing eviction through the Right to Counsel program,
It also would include Fifth Christian Church in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood and the Morelands Group, formed in 2021 to advocate for renters in the Shaker Square area.
United Way would administer the effort. Its 2-1-1 helpline would serve as the central point of contact and would refer renters to the right resources. Its operators, known as navigators, would receive special training about the tenant programs.
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Ken Surratt, the United Way’s chief development and investment officer helped design the program. He said it wasn’t created in a vacuum. The highly publicized case of the out-of-town owners of some Shaker Boulevard apartments helped in guiding the framework for helping renters, he said. Tenants in those buildings grew frustrated when owners repeatedly refused to make repairs. The city ended up suing the owners and managers.
While those tenants eventually got action, he said it took longer than it would have if they could have been connected to the appropriate resources through a single call.
“This program was designed to help tenants in a collective fashion, to address issues with the common landlord, so tenants don’t have to do it individually,” he said. “They have the power of their voices together to seek the resolution that they need to be housed faithfully and stably.”
Most council members seem to be on board with the proposed ordinance, Harsh said, meaning that it’s likely to pass in the coming weeks. Surratt said he would love for the program to be up and running as soon as January.
The Center for Economic Development at the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University would evaluate whether the effort is effective.
“We want to look at things like: ‘Did this prevent evictions that might have happened? and Does this improve housing quality?” Surratt said.
How Cleveland’s program to help renters will work
The program would have four key components: Intake, education and organizing, emergency housing and legal and mediation services.
Angela Shuckahosee, a former director of the Cleveland Tenants Organization, said she proposed a more streamlined model a decade ago, in which United Way 2-1-1 would have served as a central point in referring renters to resources.
At the time, she said, United Way and other funders weren’t interested. (Surratt said he wasn’t able to confirm this because he wasn’t with the organization back then.)
“I guess it’s better late than never for them to finally see the light,” she said. “This is a needed resource and component. It would have been nice if they would have done it 10 years ago.”
Shuckahosee said she likes much of what’s in council’s plan.
“Renters account for over 50% of the residential population in the city of Cleveland and they’re so often overlooked,” she said. “Any help they can get is appreciated.”
Harsh, a former community organizer, said funders are more reluctant to support organizing efforts than in the past. This is why tenant organizing has dwindled.
He said tenant organizing will allow renters to band together to find effective ways to get the often corporate, often out-of-town landlords to respond to poor building conditions and other complaints.
Harsh gave the example of a hypothetical California-based LLC refusing to make repairs at the couple of dozen houses it owns in Cleveland. Instead of tenants individually trying to deal with a bad landlord, community organizing could mean uniting all the tenants for a collective action.
“What would happen if somehow someone were able to get to the tenants of every single unit that out-of-state LLC owned and organize a rent strike?” Harsh said. “It works fast when you start talking dollars and cents to these investors, to these out-of-state people that are only in this for the money.”
Fifth Christian Church’s focus would include leading training sessions to help tenants organize. The Morelands Group’s efforts would include providing tenant workshops on housing rights and facilitating forming tenant organizations.
The program council is considering also would directly connect tenants to emergency housing services, including cash assistance, short-term housing and hotel vouchers.
A nonprofit called Smart Development would focus on connecting refugees and immigrants to assistance. The Cleveland Mediation Center would provide mediation between tenants and landlords, including addressing back rent that is owed. The organization would also connect tenants to rental assistance.
The program would also continue work to prevent evictions by supporting the efforts of the Cleveland Mediation Center and Legal Aid to provide tenants information on their legal rights and options as well as providing mediation with landlords. It would connect eligible tenants to Cleveland’s Right to Counsel Program.
In addition, Legal Aid would use tenant education and other efforts to promote use of its Tenant Information Line at (216) 861-5955.
