‘Profit over people’: Delaware tenants are pushing for rent control

‘Gentrification is real and it is happening’

Based on the report, the percentage of low-income renter households in the state decreased from 37% to 28% between 2010 and 2020. This decline may be due to low-income renters leaving Delaware, sharing housing to afford rent or earning higher incomes.

“There is displacement happening. In other words, gentrification is real and it is happening,” she said. “They’re prioritizing profit over people at the end of the day.”

Among the problems, Miller said, is that the housing market is too expensive, and there are too few homes being built for residents earning less money. She said there’s also been ineffective use of abandoned properties.

“Housing production is not keeping up. Trends indicate that the composition of the state housing stock is unlikely to change. Why? Because we’re starting to see that people are more likely to build single-family homes, which are the most expensive type of housing,” she said, adding, “58% of the housing stock is single-family homes.”

“There’s four times the number of vacant units for recreational purposes — we [are] talking about, what, beach houses — than there are for both rent and sale combined? Meaning that there are more empty beach houses than there are places that we can purchase,” she added.

Once a renter, Tish Coleman is a lifelong Wilmington resident and single mother of three who’s been homeless for almost a year. Throughout her 50 years in Wilmington, she has frequently moved due to rental issues, ranging from problems with previous tenants to unaffordable rent prices.

“I had a landlord who had been a landlord for 30 years, he had a ponzi scheme and the state finally caught up with him and put him in jail at 70 years old and did not go back and correct the judgments that he put out there,” she said. “This landlord, my property where I lived that I moved in, it was $950. Two years later, it was $1,250.”

Coleman attended the HOMES Campaign event and talked of other issues rising from landlords not keeping up with maintenance of their homes. She said that creates problems for both current and future tenants.

“I moved into this new house that I was living in, and the reason I had to move is because that landlord had a $16,000 water bill. The city came out and turned my water off,” she said. “It should have then been the responsibility of the landlord to figure out how to get the water on. But, no, the responsibility was pushed off on me.”

Eventually, due to the ongoing issues with her rental home, she made the difficult decision to leave, which ultimately left her homeless.

“Parents like myself, we don’t have the force to fight these landlords. We are vulnerable women who are out here by ourselves raising our children,” she said. “These ones get away with these things because they prey on the vulnerabilities of women and children.”