One Man's Solution is Another Man's Problem
Part 6 of the “Activist to Pastor” series
My grandmother had very little formal education. She was a seamstress by trade. She died a millionaire. Every dollar she had was in real estate. I learned to invest from watching her. And when she passed, I inherited my first house along with a perspective I had not yet earned.
But long before any of that, I was organizing tenants against slumlords. A slumlord is a specific thing. It is not simply a landlord who owns property in a struggling neighborhood. It is a property owner who lets a building deteriorate deliberately— no working elevators, no heat in November, no extermination services, no maintenance of common areas, no functional garbage disposal. The city was supposed to monitor and enforce those basic conditions. But corruption, ineptitude, and municipal budget priorities allowed these conditions to persist year after year. Tenants suffer. Nobody responds to their plight.
I knew how to fight back. The tool was the tenants association. I would organize the residents, have them document every violation in writing, and then direct them to pay their rent into an escrow account controlled by the association rather than to the landlord. When the landlord took them to court for non-payment, we would show up with bank statements and inspection reports. We were not withholding the rent. We were holding it. The judge could see that. In almost every case, we won. The escrowed funds went to fix what the landlord refused to fix— new furnaces, functioning heat, basic repairs. One case involved a six-family building in a suburban town, an otherwise decent neighborhood, where the landlord had removed every furnace from every apartment in November. We fixed it ourselves using the tenants’ own rent money.
It required total participation. The rent payments had to be current and held in a legitimate bank account. But when it worked, it worked completely. We took the power away from the landlord and handed it to the people being exploited.
I did these enough times that I became convinced rent control was the answer. These landlords had demonstrated they could not be trusted. Government had to set the limits to protect tenants and entire neighborhoods from abandonment.
Then I became a landlord myself.
A bank-owned multifamily came available— new construction, priced below market because the bank needed to move it. By that point my church had developed nearly 200 units of affordable housing, so I understood the financing mechanics. But every unit we had built used subsidies, and this property did not qualify for any of them. So I decided to run an experiment in unsubsidized affordable housing.
The idea was straightforward: purchase the building at a below-market price, finance it at a below-market interest rate, and secure an agreement with the city to freeze property taxes so that municipal increases would not get passed through to the tenants. I rented the units at 60 percent of market value. The experiment worked in every area my partners and I could control.
The city refused to grant the tax abatement. They extend that kind of agreement to major commercial developments routinely. Not to me. Every tax increase hit my operating costs directly. Insurance moved the same direction. An increase in taxes required an increase in rent to keep the apartments viable. The math was not ideological. It was arithmetic.
When I was organizing tenants, I never thought about any of that. My entire exposure was to greedy landlords who needed as much government oversight as possible. I had no framework for a landlord absorbing legitimate costs that were rising faster than the rents could reasonably follow. I had never had to run the numbers myself.
The pastoral life required me to hold both truths at once. The tenant whose furnaces were pulled out in November is not acceptable. And the landlord being squeezed by tax increases the city refuses to share is also not acceptable. These are not competing moral claims. They are two people caught inside a policy environment that is not working for either of them.
That is the thing about my activist solutions. They were usually right about who is being harmed. They were not always right about what is causing the harm, or what actually stops it. A slogan that feels righteous on the street can produce unintended consequences once it becomes law— consequences that hurt the very people it was designed to protect.
I learned that as a landlord. I carried it as a pastor.