By Susan Stevens
Last July, my now-20-year-old child and I had been renting our home in the Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas from my brother for five years. My brother and I were getting ready to draw up an owner-financing agreement, and when he didn’t show up for an appointment we had and also didn’t answer his phone for the next several hours, I asked my niece who lives near him to check in on him. She found him at home – he’d tragically already passed away more than a day before. He died without a will, so his entire estate went into probate. His daughter, being the eldest child, was appointed as executor, and she let me know that she and her brother had zero interest in owner-financing. This was understandable, with her living on the West Coast and him living on the East.
She asked me to see if I could get pre-approved for a loan to be ready to move quickly at whatever point they had permission to do a quick sale of the house. I applied and was preapproved for a loan with my credit union. In January, she informed me that they’d been given a short window of time to make a quick sale before the estate was through probate, after which point there would have to be a lengthier process of valuing the house, and the price would most likely be a lot higher. They’d already had an as-is cash offer for $7,000 more than the maximum loan that I could qualify for. My loan officer was working to put everything in place and was also asking me some detailed questions about the condition of the house. Were there visible cracks? Did water leak into the basement when it rained? Yes, and yes. She explained that the loan was contingent on the house being insured, something my brother had not been able to make happen due to the house’s condition; my brother had been hesitant to put any more money into the house than he absolutely had to. I’d known there were expensive foundation repairs needed, as well as the roof and some windows needing replaced, but had been hopeful that once I was the owner, I could start applying for help from the government as a low-income homeowner and start fixing everything little by little.
I didn’t have the money to make the house insurable myself, so I was hoping to find an insurer that could provide me with at least enough coverage to satisfy my lender — coverage that could be improved as the repairs got done. A developer who can pay 100% upfront isn’t bound by the same constrictions: thus, the haves can easily accumulate more. By early February, my brother’s eldest let me know that if they did not have a contract in hand by February 15, they’d have to proceed with their other offers, and she said I should be advised that for a month-to-month lease in Kansas, the length of time before you need to vacate is 30 days. I soon had to accept that I could not get an insurance policy that I could afford along with making hefty house payments for the next 30 years till I was 90, and that we needed to be out by the weekend of March 15.
The first thing that hit me was how irresponsible I’d been in providing a home to stray neighborhood cats, based on the assumption that we were in our forever home. In the summer of 2023, I’d begun volunteering with Heart of America Humane Society’s TNR program; the letters stand for trap, neuter, return. We had so many stray cats in our neighborhood having litter after litter of kittens, and my brother was supportive of this work as he loved cats so much. Seven of these cats grew to love us and became indoor-outdoor cats at our house. We fell in love with them, too, and I felt happier than I’d ever imagined I’d feel, waking up during the night with a cat or cats purring on my chest. I realized that I was now about to jerk the rug out from under these dear souls, because whatever apartment we ended up moving to would have a two-pet limit, and we’d had our original kitty and Chihuahua for years before even moving to Argentine. I couldn’t bear to leave with these seven cats all gathered around our front porch just watching and waiting for us to come back, so I started posting pictures online, and was thrilled when one friend adopted two of them.
However, I was not getting adoption offers for the other five and time was slipping away fast. When a local no-kill shelter with a good reputation for finding a home for every cat found spaces for three, and then a week later for the remaining two, I knew I needed to take this offer rather than run the risk of our time being up and them having no place but the streets. It was heart-wrenching, but we recently got the closure of learning that none of their pictures are posted on the shelter’s website, meaning they must have all been adopted by good and stable people whom the shelter approved.
Throughout this time, of course, we were also apartment hunting. Places with rents I could afford were few and far between. Early on, I realized that the most affordable options were across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri — and this was also where the most reliable bus service was. I work from home and mainly just use the bus for trips to the grocery store and (back then) the laundromat — but my child had decided at Christmas that they were not interested in returning to community college and just wanted to work for the time being.
Being in a neighborhood where the bus does not run past about six or seven in the evenings, runs less frequently on Saturdays, and does not run at all on Sundays, is severely limiting for a young person or any person seeking an entry level job, most of which require you to work nights and weekends. In Argentine, my child was stuck hoping to hear back from the couple of stores in walking distance that they’d applied to, who seemed in no rush to fill the positions they’d advertised for. Getting as close as we could to downtown Kansas City, Missouri was clearly our best option for expanding my child’s career horizons. Not surprisingly, lots of other people are also attracted to downtown; I discovered that most downtown rents were at least a few hundred more per month than I could afford.
One particular complex, however, offered some lower-priced apartments. It was one that I’d read horror stories about online, regarding buildings in poor repair and awful pest infestations — but also one with an active tenant union, part of the citywide union KC Tenants, that had recently forced management to start working on the issues. We went for a tour and I loved the apartment we saw; I also loved the historic neighborhood the complex was situated in. I rushed to complete our applications and hit a glitch: this complex requires applicants to be approved by facial recognition technology. You take a picture of your ID, front and back, and then take a selfie and wait for AI to do its analysis and certify that the person in the selfie is, indeed, the same person as the one in the ID. It took me three tries to pass muster, but with my child, try as we might, we could not get the approval. We’d keep trying till we got locked out of the system for 24 hours. The kind leasing agents in the office also tried to help on two occasions, to no avail. They said this was the first time they’d encountered this situation, they had no authority to override the system and approve my child, and they were also not allowed to let us pay anything to have them hold the apartment for us. At one agent’s suggestion, I’d remove my child from the application when we got locked out and then re-add them with a different email — at one point, my child created a new email address of “iamverytired” — so that we could keep trying multiple times rather than waiting 24 hours for the account to be unlocked. I started feeling like a horrible parent for pushing my stressed and exhausted child — for not having the luxury of saying, “Screw them, we don’t need them,” and just wiping the dust from our feet and moving on — but I was hard-put to find a place for us to move on to. The leasing agents were trying to reach someone higher up with the authority to do a human analysis, leaving messages and not hearing back, till one day we were told that the affordable apartments had all been rented out.
I finally decided to have my child renew their Kansas ID, so that just in case another apartment came available at the complex downtown, we might have a chance of getting in. When their official ID arrived in the mail a few days later on Monday, February 24, there were indeed more openings, so I started applying again, and this time my child’s ID verification worked! We completed our applications, and lo and behold, I got an email from the complex the very next day saying, “Welcome to… For your records, your new address will be….” I got busy updating my renter’s insurance as my child’s name needed to be on this policy, and created the required account with Evergy (our local electric company) that I would need to provide proof of before moving in. I was about to choose between the two available Internet providers as my Google Fiber wasn’t an option there, when I got a call from one of the leasing agents saying that she had some questions about my application. I told her I’d just gotten the approval letter, and she explained that it wasn’t an approval letter because it didn’t have the word “approved” in it; this was just the same letter they sent out to everyone who applied. I suggested they might want to change that as it could be misleading to people stressed over needing to find a place quickly and thinking they’d finally found one. She seemed sympathetic but said it wasn’t possible for them to change the letter. I gave her the information she needed to complete the application, and she said it would take a few more business days. I started to worry that it probably wasn’t a great choice for me to swear at her when I first learned that we hadn’t been approved yet, or to lecture her about how they should word the initial welcome letter they sent out to every applicant. I apologized about a day later. Then on March 4, I got the letter with the word “approved” — just under two weeks before we had to be out of the house! I was inexpressibly relieved to be approved without needing a cosigner. My other child, my 24-year-old daughter, had felt sure that she’d have to step up for this parental-type role because I had no rental history. My mind is now set on establishing a perfect rental history and saving a ton of money, having learned how expensive application fees and move-in costs are, plus how selective landlords can afford to be when there are so many more people needing a place to live than there are available apartments.
Since moving in and meeting members of our tenants’ union, I’ve learned that a key organizer was forced out of their apartment here at the end of December when the complex decided not to renew their lease. They’ve been couch-surfing and saving up for a new apartment, and they’re not the only organizer who has been or expects to be forced out. This made me wonder if I could afford to be involved in the union. After all, couch-surfing is one thing when it’s just you — and another thing entirely if you’re a family of two people and two animals! However, an equally scary thing I’ve learned is that the majority of our Kansas City Council members have given in to pressure from developers and relaxed their definition of the affordable housing in that they require residential developers here to devote 20% of their units to qualify for tax incentives. They’ve relaxed it to the point where an affordable rent for a one-bedroom apartment is set at nearly $500 a month more than the rent I’m currently paying for my child’s and my one-bedroom apartment!
I could keep my head down and be a good little tenant who doesn’t make any waves — but STILL be unable to renew my lease if my rent keeps rising till I get priced out. Caught between fear and fear — the fear of us losing our home if management finds me a nuisance, vs. the fear of us losing our home if the rent exceeds our means — I realized my fear was only alleviated by the thought of uniting in solidarity with others in the same situation. My mission now is to push for legislation protecting all tenants from the risk of landlords deciding, for no good reason, not to renew their leases. Owners of large apartment complexes are not comparable to individual homeowners who may want to share their home with a boarder and naturally select one whose personality meshes well with their family and naturally want the freedom to end the arrangement when situations change. Owners of large complexes literally control the housing options for millions of Americans. The fact that individual tenants can decide whether to renew their leases is not an apples-to-apples comparison given the high demand-to-supply ratio in today’s housing market.
As a social democrat who now fully embraces my identity as one of Emma Lazarus’ “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” I assert that government of, by and for the people entails no more locks on the resources we need to live full and healthy lives. Safe and affordable housing in areas where we can access public transit and economic opportunities is one such resource.
Striking Kansas City Tenants Want the Government to Act — Shelterforce Shelterforce
Susan Stevens is a SDUSA At-Large Representative from Kansas City, Missouri.