The COVID-19 crisis has heightened many tensions that were already in place—among them, left vs. right and big city vs. low-density rural areas. Add to that list the tension between Chicago housing activists and landlord or real estate groups, which have squared off during the crisis over how to protect the housing of the vast number of people who’ve been laid off or taken severe pay cuts.

In February, state Rep. Delia Ramirez was backing proposals to lift the Illinois ban on rent control, to use funds from the city’s real estate transfer tax to combat homelessness, and other legislative efforts to "try and solve this housing crisis we had," she says.

In March and subsequent months, "this pandemic took us to another level of housing crisis," says Ramirez, whose Chicago district stretches northwest from Noble Square to Hermosa and is either gentrified or gentrifying. "There are things we need to do right now on housing security."

As of May 13, local landlords had collected 91 percent of their May rent, versus 93.2 percent for the same period a year earlier and 87 percent in the first 12 days of April, according to RealPage, whose research primarily captures big corporate landlords and may not fully represent the status of tenants of two-flats and other individually owned small buildings.

Ramirez sponsored a bill that would cancel the rent and any penalties for tenants for six months if they "experienced a COVID-19-related hardship."

For the landlords of those tenants whose rent was canceled, the bill would have required the Illinois Housing Development Agency to provide funds to fill the gap if the landlord could demonstrate a financial hardship or if the property is in an area with a high concentration of poverty.

The Chicago Association of Realtors opposed the bill, in part because it would, "in effect, have the government take over all rent and mortgage payments," the association said in a message to its members on May 6.

"If you cancel debt, you take the flow of funds out of the spinning wheel of the economy," says Jeff Baker, CEO of Illinois Realtors, which coordinated the real estate industry’s opposition to the bill. "You don’t want that spinning wheel to stop. We’re already in an economic crisis."

The real estate groups supported a bill sponsored by downstate Rep. Tim Burton that would have the IHDA directly pay landlords up to 80 percent of the rent that COVID-impacted tenants couldn’t pay. Unlike Ramirez’s bill, it didn’t require landlords to demonstrate hardship or to have properties in poor neighborhoods.

Neither bill passed in the legislative session that ended May 23, but the state will allocate $396 million to a landlord and tenant relief fund designed to help people who have household incomes below 50 percent of the local median.

Housing activists denounced real estate interests over the failure. Jake Marshall, an organizer with the Autonomous Tenants Union, says that "like the rent control fight, this is essentially a fight between people who consider housing to be a commodity to be traded on for profit and those who consider housing a human right, that housing should be universally accessible. The (real estate groups) have that tone of, ‘How do we make sure we keep getting our money throughout this?’ "

MOM-AND-POPS

Baker counters that, particularly during Chicago’s rent control discussions of the past three years, "it’s unfortunate that there’s been this big campaign to convince people that your landlord is a big corporation that’s only interested in profit. The majority of landlords in Chicago are mom-and-pops that own a few units and have small margins. When their renters lose their jobs, those landlords are in just as much of a crunch as the tenants are."

One Chicago landlord says his experience is that most renters understand the landlord’s situation. In ordinary times, there are usually one or two renters in Mike Glasser’s portfolio of 240 units who unexpectedly can’t pay their rent. But these aren’t ordinary times. Since the stay-home orders set off a tidal wave of layoffs and reduced incomes, he’s now dealing with 15.

"I do it case by case," says Glasser, whose Rogers Park-based firm, Magellen Properties, has units in Rogers Park and DuPage County.

Glasser asks how much the troubled tenants can pay, when they think they’ll be able to catch up and other questions, trying to find a balance, he says. With a statewide eviction moratorium in place since April 23, that option is off the table, though Glasser says he always tries to avoid eviction anyway, because of the time and court costs they entail.

"My big concern is September, when unemployment benefits are scheduled to terminate," Glasser says. "We may be past the health crisis then, but we won’t be past the economic crisis. People aren’t going to have money, and that’s going to hit me."

Ramirez agrees. "When we come down on the other side of this crisis," she says, "Chicago will have a bigger housing crisis than it did in January." If dealing with high levels of displacement, homelessness and eviction was hard during a hot economy, "it’s going to be a lot worse" after the immense job losses of recent months.