Rent before renters: Idaho ends section 8 voucher program

Hello readers, I am writing again about the housing struggle in Boise. As each successive generation becomes more unlikely to ever afford a house, let alone rent an apartment, I find it eternally pressing.

Recently, our state passed HB 545 ending section 8 housing regulations which mandated an amount of housing go to vouchers in the low income program. In addition, the bill also ends the $30 cap on application fees, which means landlords are more capable of accepting applications from people they have little intention of taking as tenants in order to make a quick buck. Meanwhile, I myself have known several people who have had to accept rent assistance from the state. To clarify, all landlords are no longer mandated to comply with any programs regulating how they price their rental properties, there will be no application fee caps, and rental properties that are condemned will no longer require the landlord to return the deposit to tenants.

It is worth noting that there is a sizable population in this state which can hardly afford rentals. The burden continues to get placed on everyone who pays taxes, although our tax rate is flat. This is patently bourgeois in every conceivable manner. First, the flat tax disproportionately affects the poorest earners, where 30% of 1,000 dollars may be less than 30% of 100,000 dollars, but the net is that one person has 700 dollars after taxes and the other 70,000. Second, the bill’s language explicitly states that this deregulation applies to “residential property” owners. Who are those people, exactly?

From the “mom and pop landlord” (and why should we care if the landlords are big or small, self-made or not?) to the massive complexes such as mine, we have a broad class of landlords who control an ever-increasing amount of the available housing in Boise. Now, with section 8 vouchers effectively optional, landlords can choose their profit margins over actually housing people, further proving that they do not provide anything of value so much as control it, and leverage it against everybody else. Why would a landlord choose section 8 housing besides maybe the opportunistic landlord looking to get “the rest of potential renters?” Given the cost of living in Boise being 5% higher than the national average, with groceries being more expensive than average and houses running for half a million, this legislation is sure to cause a spike in homelessness and also of people leaving the state. Further complicating things is the opportunism of real estate companies and landlords in a time when the housing supply needs to add ~2800 houses in order to meet the demand, and 2000 of those need to be affordable for people who can’t pay more than $600 for rent. Forget “political refugees” (i.e. affluent out-of-staters coming in to save money and finally start their own businesses,) we’re going to have “economic refugees.”

Why does it seem like our legislators are better at passing bills depriving people of housing, stripping trans people of basic dignities, or general culture wars/identity politics, than they are at fixing all the roads, ending the grocery tax, or simply incentivizing working people to even stay here? I predict Idaho becoming a state with one of the lowest working class populations over the next few decades, and what reason do I have not to? Just two years ago I got a job that started me at 8 dollars an hour. With my first promotion, it only went up by two dollars. When rent is around 1000 dollars a month around the valley? I can’t be expected to want to remain in this state — and there are thousands like me.

It’s ironic that people don’t want Idaho to become “another California,” while our legislators actively try to turn this state into a city like Anaheim, which should be known not just for attractions like Disneyland, but also a white, upper class commune resulting from mid-to-late 20th century white flights out of the Deep South.

But I do not mean to instill feelings of hopelessness in the readers, so much as just anger. Thankfully, there are plenty of things we working Idahoans can do collectively — but nothing is ever as easy as just doing it. To this point, might I recommend not merely “voting correctly,” but actually taking matters into our own hands through initiatives like a tenants’ union.

The purpose of the tenants’ union is to take a medium-to-large scale rental property and organize the majority of tenants to demand improved amenities and resist rent increases, which consistently reduces costs of rent. Naturally, the landlords would oppose this wholesale. Why provide things like actually good Internet (or Internet at all,) gas and electric, or even affordable housing when they can keep twisting the knife so they can afford all their pleasures you should be able to afford, all while giving you a shabby box with few amenities to live in? Anyone (and I mean possibly even Joe Normal next door) with a good credit score can take out a loan to acquire a small property and take advantage of tenants, and some even make enough money from this that they can become larger scale landlords. They feed on your labor, and the biggest benefit they can sell you is not having a mortgage, because if you can’t afford the housing, you are simply evicted with haste.

In this capitalist world, the landlord brings less value to the table than even the employer who squanders the workplace. Collectively, as all employers own the workplaces, so too do the landlords have a monopoly on rentals. Publicly-owned housing would solve so many problems and yet we do not have it, because the [establishment] politicians are not our friends and would rather stack a bunch of boulders at the Rhodes Skate Park overpass than house the increasing homeless population.

When the politicians says “property owners” or even something as clear as “landlords,” you should take what they says seriously, because they are not talking about your friend, but the tick that sucks off some of your life force in exchange for you not freezing during the winter. Some consolation prize that is!

Evict the landlords, consider getting into touch with myself or others actively trying to organize tenant unions at their apartment complexes, and may the fight for the world that we built end with it actually belonging to us.