Activist Tara Raghuveer Fights Supreme Court’s Blocking of CDC’s Eviction Moratorium in Kansas City
- Founding director of KC Tenants, the 31-year-old has been fighting to advance the housing justice agenda in her hometown and build sustainable political power with people affected by housing injustice.
As the founding director of KC Tenants, an organization fighting for tenants’ rights in Kansas City, Missouri, Tara Raghuveer has been fighting to advance the housing justice agenda in her hometown and build sustainable political power with people affected by housing injustice. The Australia-born Raghuveer immigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1995 and grew up in Kansas City.
Found in February 2019, KC Tenants is “a multiracial, anti-racist, multigenerational group” which has has “built a base of more than 250 tenants who have held landlords accountable, made housing a central issue in municipal politics, and written and passed a municipal Tenants Bill of Rights,” according to its website.
Last week, when the Supreme Court blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from enforcing the federal moratorium on evicting renters during the coronavirus pandemic, the 31-year-old Indian American has been vocal about the effects of the ruling will have on millions of working-class people. The Aug. 26 decision overrides the current moratorium issued by the Biden administration in early August, which was due to expire in early October. It was challenged by a group of landlords “who argued that the CDC had no authority to impose such a restriction on its own,” per an NBC report. The Biden administration announced the partial moratorium on evictions early this month following a five-day protest outside the U.S. Capitol by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.).
On Aug. 27, Raghuveer joined MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart to discuss the impact of the court’s ruling and the “systemic fix” needed to address this issue. “I wasn’t surprised,” she said of the ruling. “I’m a tenant organizer, and we have known since March of 2020 that an eviction moratorium was going to be temporary and it wasn’t going to save us. We knew that the courts were going to challenge the Biden administration on the reinstatement of this moratorium.”
Adding that the court “made a decision along partisan lines,” she told Capehart that “the implications are going to be devastating for tenants. Tenants were already in a bad position to begin with.” Raghuveer is herself a tenant in Missouri, “one of the most tenant-unfriendly states in the country.”
Despite each state having its own rules for the tenants, Raghuveer noted that “the power dynamic makes it such that a tenant has to deal with conditions that no person should ever have to deal with to keep a roof over their head.” And the solution to this, according to her is the national tenants’ bill of rights which would “address this by banning source of income discrimination, making it so that landlords don’t get to discriminate against voucher holders. It would put controls on rent so that rents aren’t hiked to unbelievable rates year after year after year. It would make it so that landlords can’t evict for no reason.”
Raghuveer is in the process right now of talking to millions of tenants across the country about what they want and need out of this national tenants bill of rights. “It is only through this type of systemic fix that anything about the problems that we`re facing now will ever be truly addressed.”
And for that Raghuveer is in the process right now of talking to millions of tenants across the country about what they want and need out of this national tenants bill of rights. “It is only through this type of systemic fix that anything about the problems that we`re facing now will ever be truly addressed,” she told Capehart.
Before the Aug. 26 Supreme Court ruling, Raghuveer had called the CDC moratorium on evictions “a band-aid over a bullet wound,” noting that” millions of people in the U.S. are still at risk of losing their homes as landlords in some states fight back against the measure.”
On Aug. 3, she tweeted: “Every eviction is an act of violence. Not just now. Not just till October or another arbitrary date. Not just rent-related evictions during a pandemic. Every eviction is an act of violence.”
In addition to her role at KC Tenants, Raghuveer is also the director of the campaign for a national Homes Guarantee, based at People’s Action, a national network of grassroots organizations committed to economic and racial justice. For seven years, she has spearheaded eviction research in Kansas City through the Kansas City Eviction Project, a collaborative of data scientists, community leaders, academics, and lawyers.
The Kansas City Eviction Project was born out of Raguveer’s senior thesis at Harvard, where she “conducted ethnographic interviews with tenants and landlords, and analyzed almost two decades’ worth of eviction records from Jackson County, Missouri,” according to a profile on her in Next City. “The wealth of data helped Raghuveer attract partners to the project, including data analysts, lawyers, planners, economists and scholars,” the prose said. She told Next City that the research “politicized” her “and that it got into her gut.” Additionally, it was covered extensively by local and national news and was cited in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” by Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University.
At the time Raghuveer, “who grew up in a well-off neighborhood on the Kansas side of Kansas City,” was living in Chicago, New City said. There she was working on housing rights campaigns for People’s Action, a network of grassroots advocacy groups. However, she was traveling back to Kansas City “all the time to present the research and speak on panels.” She told New City that she felt “irresponsible about running around presenting the data without committing to real work on the issue locally.” She realized that it is a priority to organize “directly with tenants than gathering and analyzing another decade of eviction data.” So in February 2019, she moved back to Kansas City and launched KC Tenants. “I can describe it as coming home in a certain sense,” she told New City “but also returning to a place that wasn’t anything like where I had grown up.”
In an interview with a Real Nice Lady, a magazine highlighting ladies and lady-identifying people in their personal and professional endeavors, Raghuveer said she created KC Tenants after “studying eviction in Kansas City for several years.” It was then that it was clear to her that “nothing was ever going to change, nothing was ever going to get better, just because I was running around town with some interesting data and a well-designed PowerPoint deck.” She told the magazine that she knew that “the only way things were going to change was if the people who are the most impacted by the problems — eviction, poor housing conditions, landlord harassment, etc.— were organized to the table, to flip the table over, to determine their own liberation.”
It was in 2013-2014, that Raghuveer “became obsessed with housing,” she told a Real Nice Lady. “I started thinking seriously about WHO (not WHAT) I wanted to be when I grew up,” she said. “I got clear on what kind of risks I wanted to take, I was rapidly politicized by my eviction research in Kansas City, I moved to Chicago to become a community organizer.”
Calling KC Tenants “a complicated but beautiful project,” Raghuveer told a Real Nice Lady that she is hopeful that if they “fulfill” their charge, they will win a Kansas City “where everyone has a safe, accessible, truly and permanently affordable home.. She hopes that the organization “continues to flex the power of everyday people to confront the systems that oppress and divide us — until we win.”
Top photo, Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants and the director of the campaign for a national Homes Guarantee. (Photo by Jeremy Ruzich, courtesy of Tara Raghuveer)