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Happy New Year! We want to thank you for your support over the past year. Together we made significant strides towards making sure that everyone has safe, decent and accessible housing that is affordable. Together we can build on the successes of 2013 to make 2014 an even better year. Our number one success in 2013 was the day in and day out work MTO did to help more than 10,000 renters. Our hotline answered over 9,300 calls! As a result, tenants were able to get heat restored, leaks fixed, evictions stopped, security deposits returned and more.

One example of the effectiveness of our work is demonstrated when two tenants separately called the hotline one afternoon after receiving notices telling them to be out the next day. Staff went immediately into action, meeting with the tenants, contacting an attorney and sending out a press release. While the police were trying to evict the 15 households in front of television cameras, two renters and an attorney were in court successfully suing to stop the vacate orders. All 15 families received an additional 2 weeks to move plus $1200 per family moving expenses. This is what MTO is about!

Our 2013 successes include:

• Our Tenants Rights Hotline answered over 9,300 calls.
• Passage of the Source of Income amendment to the Cook County Human Rights Ordinance, which makes it illegal to discriminate against Section 8 voucher holders;
• The development of new renter mobile phone app, www.SquaredAwayChicago.com;
• For the first time in our 28 year history, MTO raised more than $1,000,000 to improve the lives of renters.
• MTO trained 150 volunteers to answer the hotline, meet with elected officials, facilitate meetings, etc
• Organizers worked with renters to form 50 tenants associations.  The associations won real victories including relocation assistance, a new playfield at Parkway Gardens, stopped illegal evictions, etc
• MTO nearly doubled our social media presence.  We now have 620 Twitter followers and 192,000 annual visits to our website.
• The agency started a new project focusing on renters in foreclosure.
• We joined in citywide advocacy campaigns such as Keep Chicago Renting and Take Back Chicago
• Our annual HUD Town Hall attracted over 100 subsidized renters.

Debra and Jimi Miller are tenant leaders with MTO. The Millers have been active at MTO over the past year and got involved when they received a housing choice voucher. Prior to receiving the voucher, the Millers had been homeless. Both were able to obtain shelter in transitional programs; however they were staying across the City from one another. Chicago boasts many shelters and transitional programs; but the majority of these programs serve either men or women – not families and not couples. The Miller’s struggled to be together during this period. Due to Debra’s health problems, the responsibility fell to Jimi to commute north everyday for visits. And in the evening, they would watch television programs together over the phone. Needless to say, the arrival of housing choice voucher was celebrated as the first step toward living together again.

That excitement was quickly diminished when the couple realized that their long fight to be reunited had just begun. Despite the fact that it is against the law in Chicago for landlords to refuse to rent to someone based upon their source of income, this practice still takes place. Jimi and Debra had three months to find a place to live before they lost their voucher. Two months into their search, they finally found a place. The discrimination and desperation of their search left them with a desire to work for change.

Debra had been an activist protesting the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. According to Jimi, a veteran, “She’s the resident militant.” When Debra found that she and Jimi were facing homelessness, she was again thrust into activism through 100K. The 100K program was an effort undertaken in cities across the country to get an accurate count of homeless families and individuals living on the streets. Here she met Leah Levinger and got involved with the Chicago Housing Initiative. When she and Jimi received their voucher and were no longer facing homelessness, she began looking for a new social justice focus to lend her support. Levinger pointed her toward the Source of Income Campaign at MTO. MTO was part of a coalition working to get the same type of protections for renters in suburban Cook County which exists in the City of Chicago for voucher holders. Having experienced some of this discrimination first hand, the Millers were eager to get on board. When asked about their motivation to become involved in the Source of Income Campaign, Debra states, “We had to be a part of it!” At the same time Jimi says, “We had to do it.” “It was still personal to us,” explained Debra. They hit the ground running by participating in a rally and demonstration in Oak Park targeting a landlord who advertised “No 8s,” meaning he would not rent to any Section 8 voucher holders.

MTO intentionally incorporates tenant leaders in planning and strategizing campaigns. The Millers enjoyed the experience of being at the table and helping to make decisions around how the work would move forward. After the successful passage of the Source of Income Ordinance in suburban Cook County, they continue to participate with MTO as active tenant leaders. Currently they serve on MTO’s Tenant Congress HUD Subcommittee. The Miller’s reside in Rogers Park and are happy to finally be able to come home… together.

View the original post by Chicago Equal Voice here:  http://on.fb.me/Ih4I83

Mary Ellen Podmolik

The Homefront

October 18, 2013

Renters most often seek help from the Metropolitan Tenants Organization when they have problems with a landlord. Now, the longtime Chicago nonprofit is taking to technology in an effort to improve the communication between landlords and tenants while also providing a little protection to both parties.

Squared Away Chicago, a Web-based mobile phone app that the organization is preparing to launch, is designed to help renters and landlords stay in touch, document problems within apartments and create a virtual paper trail if a complaint goes unresolved and an outside party needs to step in to resolve the dispute.

The idea for the app followed a discussion that John Bartlett, the organization’s executive director, had with a friend in social media 1½ years ago. While there’s a wealth of information on the group’s website — it gets more than 10,000 unique visitors a month — Bartlett wondered if there was an easier way to help renters and landlords with the basic issues they face.

Creating such a tool would help not only consumers and landlords, but also the organization. Annually, the group’s two dozen employees and its volunteers help 15,000 renters, and the call center handles more than 10,000 phone calls.

The Web app’s development, funded with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, allows a tenant with a smartphone to take a time-stamped photo of a problem inside an apartment and send it, along with a form letter explaining the problem, to a landlord. It could be anything from mold growing along a baseboard to a leaking ceiling or even the serial number of a broken appliance. Tenants can rate how severe the problem is and can spell out on the form when the landlord can enter the unit to correct the issue.

For their part, landlords could use the system to track complaints and document what steps they’ve taken to correct them. They also could enter all their tenants into the system so they could notify tenants simultaneously of coming building inspections.

“One of the goals with the app is to create a better relationship between landlords and tenants, or at least make that a possibility,” Bartlett said. “This makes communication easy and easily documented. When you’re on the phone, it’s so easy to forget. There are a lot of ‘he said, she said.’ (This) is a little more formal.”

The app was designed because of the prevalence of smartphones. If low-income renters have access to the Web, it’s most often through their phones, Bartlett said. Among households with income of less than $30,000 annually, 43 percent own a smartphone, according to a study this year on smartphone ownership by The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

“Smartphones are now becoming the norm,” said Mark Swartz, legal director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing, who called the app’s development “incredibly clever.” It could lead to more issues being resolved outside the courtroom, he added.

“The problem we usually see is that tenants only document problems when things get really awful,” Swartz said. “To be able to document complaints early will protect tenants if there’s an attempt to terminate their lease or otherwise retaliate against them.”

Still affordable. Home prices have been rising as consumer demand outstrips the supply of available homes, but the Chicago area remains one of the more affordable housing markets for the middle class, according to real estate Web company Trulia. In the Chicago area, where the median household income is $58,911, a middle-class family could afford homes under $254,000, assuming that no more than 31 percent of income went to home expenses. Almost 75 percent of homes recently listed locally were priced below that level, it said.

However, that same family in Chicago would have a tougher time buying a house elsewhere because the definition of middle-class can vary when it comes to home affordability. For instance, the median household income in the Los Angeles area is about $53,000, not too far off from Chicago’s, but only 24 percent of its “middle-class” families can afford a home with a median price of $271,000.

Click HERE to read the article at chicagotribune.com

mepodmolik@tribune.com

Twitter @mepodmolik

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