The good guys won last week.
They won in Alabama, where the U.S. Supreme Court protected Black voters.
And they won in New York, where a legislative impasse protected Black wealth.
The Alabama victory was sort of a surprise, given the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the court’s liberals to affirm a lower-court ruling that a new congressional redistricting map likely violated the Voting Rights Act, the landmark measure that outlawed discriminatory voting practices.
One in four residents in Alabama is Black. Yet, Republicans there drew a congressional map that carved out only one majority Black seat out of seven districts.
The state now will have to draw a new map for next year’s elections.
“We are grateful that the Supreme Court upheld what we knew to be true: that everyone deserves to have their vote matter and their voice heard,” Evan Milligan, a Black voter and the lead plaintiff in the case, said after the ruling. “Today is a win for democracy and freedom not just in Alabama but across the United States.”
In New York, small landlords — particularly immigrants and people of color — were facing a threat to their livelihood and their financial legacy in the form of a poorly named state policy proposal called “Good Faith Eviction.”
The measure — backed by left-leaning Democrats — would have unfairly and unnecessarily pitted tenants against landlords by imposing arbitrary caps on rent increases and raising the standards by which small property owners could evict tenants.
Gov. Kathy Hochul refused to sign off on the measure, and support for the bill collapsed along with the rest of an affordable housing package before New York’s Legislature ended its session on Friday.
The bill could have sent landlords — already reeling from missed payments throughout the pandemic — deeper in the hole. That would have crushed their dreams of using their modest properties to build generational wealth for their families.
“It’s my right as a property owner to decide if I give somebody a lease or not,” said Lincoln Eccles, a small property owner in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who fell behind on his water bill and property taxes after tenants who owed him thousands of dollars in rent were given eviction protection.
“I’m dependent on my rent, and only my rent. If I don’t get rent, I don’t get income.”
Bankrupting small landlords would only make the housing crisis worse.
Eccles is a member of the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents 25,000 landlords across New York City.
The rent cap bill that died in the Legislature last week was only one facet of the small landlords’ fight for survival.
Another is a court challenge against the poorly named Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which severely curbed their rights to raise rents in order to pay for repairs.
That left many apartments unfit to live in — and vacant — making the housing crisis even worse.
Eccles sees a connection between voting rights in Alabama and rent stability in New York. The common denominator, he said, is disenfranchisement.
The Alabama ruling also gives him some hope.
The Rent Stabilization Association and the Community Housing Improvement Program, a trade association for owners of rent-stabilized rental properties, have joined forces to battle the 2019 law.
The suit alleges that the law deprives owners of the use of their properties while also failing to address New York’s affordable housing shortage.
So far, every court that has heard the case has ruled against the landlords. The groups appealed last month to the highest court in the land, and Eccles hopes the Supreme Court has another surprise up its sleeve.
The New York Daily News