03/28/2020
Cliff Gray for Eugene City Council, Ward 7
Recap of my speech at my Kickoff, February 24, 2020, at Oregon wine lab (1732 words)
Let me introduce myself. I am Cliff Gray, and I am running for Eugene City Council, Ward 7.
Explaining the suit. This suit, which most of you have never seen me wear, was what I wore as a lobbyist in Salem. I lobbied for the chance to have local rent control. In 2016, HB 2004 would have ended the prohibition Oregon had in place for 32 years. Having come from San Francisco. living under the protections of which, I immediately noticed rents here were absurdly high. So, both in 2016 and 2019, I tried to get it done right. My approach was to be the “myth breaker” concerning rent control that pervaded the thinking of so many. I worked with 14 representatives and senators regularly to get it to pass, but, as Tina Kotek told me, too many were landlords. HB 2004 failed to even come to a vote before the Senate, held back by a landlord.
Let me tell you a story with a few lessons on my approach about education, confrontation and persistence. Back in 1999, while President of ATU Local 1225, I negotiated my final contract with Monterey-Salinas Transit. Before the negotiation began, I had approached the area’s equivalent of the Eugene Weekly (The Coast Weekly) to tell them of ongoing abuses of working conditions there. They made a story of it about public safety concerns. Drivers were forced to work seven day a week. It didn’t go over so well with MST’s general manager, but it served its purpose, to end the abuse. After nine months and two rejections, we were ready to go on strike, and so the International ATU officers went back to Washington, DC, ATU to report that.
Then came my first encounter with elected officials. There was one last act to play. The council of local Mayors and city managers, that oversaw MST, were meeting in a couple of days to hear the bad news. I presented them a chart to show how badly Wages have dropped since 1975 to 1998. First, I made a “break-even line”. That line showed the early wage they had, adjusted for inflation over the years. It was displayed as a horizontal line. Below that was the line that followed actual wages negotiated over those years. The result was what they were making, in terms of purchasing power today, was 20% less than they did in 1975.
The reception was that they were very excited about knowing the wage losses. They asked me for extra copies, for I only had a few. Then they turned around and told the MST general manager to get back into negotiations. The result, we won a 16.2% wage increase (over 3 years) and put an end to forced work.
My tools were education, learning the facts of history, and perseverance.
I predicted the horrible rent increases and evictions that would result from the latest state rent control bill. I was part and member of CAT, who at the time, formulated and supported it. I could not, and had to break away. I lobbied a different way, speaking before the committee.
Education was the key. Breaking myths back then to empower workers to believe in and own their work. I said, you are the only people the public sees. They have no idea what the general manager looks like, or any of the massive staff in the administration. I’ve been told that most there were ex-Army and were used to taking orders. Speech after speech at our union meetings, they started to learn their own value in the scheme of things. So, even after I left the office, they did it again 3 years later—with another 16.2% raise. Those events raised them over that break-even line losses.
There is another break-even line, when it comes to rents. I show you the list of allowable rent increases according to the SF Rent Board. This year, 1.8%, year before 2.6%, 1.6%, 2.2% and so on, holding up the document, going back to 1982. Quite a difference from what Oregon has seen. Over the years SF’s calibration took into full account naturally occurring increases in landlords’ expenses, while still keeping it inside wage increases. It works, and has been in place since 1978 without alteration. It can work here too.
Imagine a “break-even line” created from this list since 1982, HERE! As you can see, a new picture would emerge, a kind of wake-up call for all of us to learn just how much renters have been exploited, over all these years.
Rents here have risen so far ahead of wages. For instance, last April, Eugene went up 11.76%, Springfield, 12.99%, largely a result of Oregon’s rent control bill. Even before that Oregon’s rents rose far too high. The only conclusion that can be drawn is renting as unsustainable.
So, what has been done about that? Every project, approved by the city to provide more housing have been rentals. And not inexpensive/affordable rentals at that. Workforce housing was the catchphrase to affordability, but with our average income at $45,500, who of us can qualify. Old figures of how many pay 50% or more of their income to rent from 2017 census figures. Imagine what it is now after these last increases.
The city of Eugene does not know. They keep no track of what its own citizens go through—how often they move, why they move, where they move, or if they move out of the city, evictions—no-cause, with-cause, or the lessor acknowledged de-facto evictions.
De-facto Evictions: What history tells us that a landlord’s desire to rid themselves of a tenant is too often satisfied by simply asking them to leave. They say, look, I’d like you to leave this apartment, or I will institute a formal eviction. Fearing such on their record, tenants just leave. In the alternate, they leave when faced with a catastrophic rent increase. The 10% that IS allowed is catastrophic enough. Protesting only ruins your chances to get another place.
More and more, tenants do protest because they find no other place to go. The average search takes 6 months to find another place (reported four years ago). Not to mention the moving cost factor. The very poor often abandon what they can’t carry.
So, we have a Nomadic kind of movement of our neighbors from one part of town to another. Communities have been torn apart. People come to me saying they may have been lucky to have bought a home, but they’re losing all their friends and neighbors to gentrification, changing the very character that attracted them here.
Then, they become homeless. Sure, many have families that take them in, or they find a garage or an RV, that is, if they can find a safe place to park. Many just live in their cars, these homeless are impossible to count and do not want their condition known, for it might threaten their employment status.
Finally, they become tent-campers, sidewalk sleepers, criminalized and scattered all over the city. PIT manages to count them. However, as you can see, their numbers are much higher. They are demonized, treated like enemies to be rid of, for their visual blight.
Stakeholders: In comes the scariest term invented by man, “Stakeholders.” I was shocked by the blatancy ingrained by this—corporations, developers, banks in the benefit of each other. Remembering the last Housing Tools and Strategies meetings was an assembly of, none other than stakeholders. Excluded were the people who want home, any home. Their needs and desires were neither heard or considered. After the stakeholders divvied up costs and expenses of building more housing, that person or family that wants a home became reduced to a final 13th party beneficiary, unnamed. But had no presence in the chain of decisions. The question never asked, “Who is going to live there?” But that is immaterial, the goal is to build more housing, not to fill the real needs of people. Each stakeholder “takes” a piece of the action, before the first nail gets hit.
One statistic I heard of was that 80% of those who want a home, desire single-family housing. 10% wanted condos, and a smaller number wanted apartments. Knowing that, or better, if those people ran the committee, you can see how different the result would be. This was not a survey of actual hope. Hope is something that left behind when they were foreclosed upon and heavily taxed by rents. They couldn’t buy their way out if they wanted to. Actually, they want stability. So, what do we do? We build more high-priced rental traps. Traps because eventually they will have to leave them due to all the reasons previously stated. Not my definition of stability. That is how gentrification works.
According to Jane Jacobs: “No logic that can be imposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” Thus, is my intention, to serve people most in need. The private/public partnership needs to know constraints, otherwise it becomes privatization of public city space for profit, and nothing more.
There is a crisis of—to be specific—affordable housing which the vast majority of us are pushed into competition for. We need to unite and force city and state governments to grant something to the ordinary workers who vote for them—and decommodify housing for the thousands living at or below the poverty line. With no hope of being able to compete for housing at the ridiculous “market rate.”
So, first, make the city aware of these delicate relationships, and take responsibility for them. The ones who light the match cannot excuse themselves by proclaiming, “we put out the fires.” Second, take affirmative action to decommodify housing and return them to those most in need. Let’s take away those matches.
Of course, there are many other issues we, as a city must face. Climate change, poverty, transportation and our children’s hopes are all at stake. All of which compromised by ongoing gentrification and resulting poverty.
I believe I can make a difference, by making Eugene aware of what it is doing to its people. And I have plans, not unprecedented, that can help.
Please support my campaign for Eugene City Council.
