On December 16, 2021, tenants from the Veritas Tenants Association (VTA) held a hybrid meeting in San Francisco to discuss their landlord’s response to their four-month-long debt strike. Fifty households had withheld their applications to California’s rent-relief program, using their combined rent debt as collateral, to force Veritas Investments to negotiate a debt-relief deal for tenants who had experienced financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. If the tenants didn’t apply for rent relief, Veritas would receive nothing from the state.

Many tenants had lost their job due to COVID-19, and many had borrowed money from family and friends, maxed out their credit cards, or taken out payday loans to continue paying rent — accruing a form of debt known as “shadow debt” not addressed by California’s rent-relief program. Yet in spite of the global public health crisis and the related unemployment crisis, as well as the fact that the state’s program provided only partial relief, Veritas refused to negotiate with tenants. So seeing that their corporate landlord, a $4.5 billion company, was receiving public funds — first through the Paycheck Protection Program, a program intended for small businesses and then through California’s rent-relief program — tenants grew infuriated and resolved to leverage their debt to bring Veritas to the bargaining table. Their debt strike began in September 2021, right before the statewide eviction moratorium was set to expire.

By December, Veritas had partially caved, offering to waive the scheduled annual rent increase for 2022 and forgive any residual debt held by tenants who applied for government relief by January 31, 2022 — yet still ignoring the issue of shadow debt. Having already won significant concessions, the striking tenants needed to decide how to proceed. While some of the strikers had accrued significant shadow debt, others would have their entire debt forgiven by that Veritas offer. Brad Hirn, an organizer with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco who assisted the tenants, said, “Part of what made that meeting so challenging was that people had to really listen and see other members who were dealing with something that the concessions on the table were not going to do anything about.”