This May Day, Montana Trailer Park Tenants Are Going on Rent Strike

That news set off panic in the community, given the nationwide trend of deep-pocketed investment firms snapping up parks and dramatically hiking rents. At an emergency meeting a few days later, Rooks met organizers from the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, who outlined how tenants could form their own union across King Arthur and Mountain Meadows Parks, which currently have the same owner and went up for sale as a unit. 

For Rooks, already a believer in the power of workers’ collective action, the meeting was what she calls a ​“V8 moment” — a reference to the kind of sudden realization of an obvious solution depicted in the beverage company’s well-known advertising campaign. 

“Well, that makes way too much sense,” Rooks says she thought to herself when presented with the possibility of forming a union with her neighbors. ​“Once it was mentioned, it took off like wildfire through the parks,” she adds. ​“We were able to unionize in 12 days.”

But rather than meet with residents about the pending sale, according to Bozeman Tenants United, current owner Gary Oakland has attempted to wring extra cash out of them through an 11% rent increase. By coincidence, the rent hike will start on May 1, or May Day, when working class solidarity is celebrated around the world. Rooks and the rest of the union have opted to respond in defiant May Day fashion — by collectively withholding their rent payments.

By going on rent strike, Rooks hopes to win improved living conditions and a guarantee of reasonable rents at the park, allowing her and her husband to stay in the park long-term. But she’s also thinking about neighbors for whom the rent increase will spell immediate economic calamity. ​“They need me to have their back,” she says.

The protest could also have larger reverberations in a nationwide tenant union movement seeking to flex its economic muscles, particularly in areas where workers are largely unorganized. ​“It’s exactly in places like Bozeman that we need to be exercising economic power,” says Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenant Union Federation, a national organization with which Bozeman Tenants United is affiliated.

While it’s just one action in one city for now, a May Day rent strike ​“demonstrates the potential of the tenant movement in alignment with labor,” Raghuveer says. ​“Together, I think there’s a lot of potential to become an even more disruptive economic force.” 

“You’re Buying a Tenant Union”

A popular gateway for visitors to Yellowstone National Park, Bozeman’s surging housing prices have made it an epicenter of a new wave of gentrification in the West that’s displacing the very workers who keep the tourism economy running. But Bozeman is also the bastion of a rising tenants movement that’s elected one of its own as the city’s mayor and won new restrictions on short-term vacation rentals.

After unionizing last July, residents of King Arthur and Mountain Meadows Parks first tried to buy the parks themselves with backing from community groups and local elected officials.

Working with a local affiliate of ROC USA, a national group that helps mobile home residents buy and run their parks cooperatively, the group put in a bid — one of the largest ROC had ever put together, according to Emily LaShelle, organizing director of Bozeman Tenants United. But, ultimately, the bid ranked 15^th out of 20 from prospective buyers.

“That is just a testament to how expensive land is in Bozeman now,” LaShelle says.

The union had no information about who submitted the winning bid, but they had a list of likely suspects, given the small number of firms purchasing large numbers of parks nationwide. So they made a video chronicling the infrastructure problems they say went unaddressed under Oakland — sagging sewer lines, poor water quality and frequent outages, and rotting electrical poles — and sent it to all the potential buyers they could identify. 

“We basically let them know, ​‘You’re buying a tenant union,’” explains LaShelle. ​“We’re gonna hold you accountable for these things.” 

The gambit worked. The union soon heard from Cabrillo Management, a California-based property management group representing the park’s buyers. Representatives from Cabrillo toured the park in February and ultimately required Oakland to earmark the $500,000 in earnest money paid by the buyer for infrastructure repairs. The exact timeline and details of the sale, as well as the buyer’s identity, remain hidden. 

(Neither Cabrillo Management nor Gary Oakland responded to requests for comment from In These Times.)

The union celebrated the money for infrastructure repairs as a small win. But in March, Oakland made an apparent move to pass on some of the costs to tenants in the form of an 11% increase to the monthly fees they pay for the land underneath their homes, which, like most mobile home residents, they don’t own. Because mobile homes are often expensive or impossible to move, acquiring parks and jacking up so-called ​“lot rents” is a tried-and-true strategy for investors, one of whom infamously compared the venture to running a Waffle House ​“where everyone is chained to the booths.” 

Starting in May, the new lot rent at King Arthur and Mountain Meadows would amount to $947 a month, on top of the loan and insurance costs residents pay for the actual homes they own — about $900 a month, for Rooks and her husband. While cheaper to buy, mobile homes often come with more limited and expensive financing options than traditional mortgages.

Over the last month, union members have gone door-to-door, asking neighbors, ​“If they pay this rent increase, what are they going to give up?” Rooks explains. The answers ranged from car insurance to prescription refills to a LifeAlert response hotline that costs one resident $97, the exact amount of the rent increase.

Two weeks ago, union members held an open meeting to discuss the possibility of a rent strike, drawing in neighbors who hadn’t previously joined the union effort – including Ben Moore, 35, who moved into Mountain Meadows Park with his father when he was a sophomore in high school. 

Moore had previously supported some of Bozeman Tenants United’s legislative campaigns for tenant rights, but found the hostile political terrain facing tenants too frustrating to continue. But he was just as frustrated by years of water and power outages at the park, ignored maintenance requests, punitive eviction threats and unreasonable late fees, including one he was forced to pay just a week after his father’s death, when his final check bounced.

As Moore joined the efforts to go door-to-door and heard the stories of neighbors in even more dire straits, he decided, ​“Hey, this is a fight for me,’” he says. ​“This is a fight for my neighbors that’s worth getting into.”

By rent striking collectively, the Montana tenants are seeking to negotiate a new lease with a defined timeline for major infrastructure repairs, protections against punitive eviction, and a right of first refusal to buy their park, should it come up for sale again. Residents also want a clear right to sell their homes to buyers of their choosing, a process currently controlled by park management. 

It wouldn’t be the first time that trailer park tenants in the United States, or even in Montana, have won such a victory. Mobile homes were once a hotspot of tenant organizing, and tenants at a Bozeman park won what they called the state’s first landlord-tenant collective bargaining agreement in 1978, a year when the radicalism of the state’s once-mighty mining unions still lived in recent memory.

Bozeman Tenants United’s LaShelle didn’t know about this history until recently — a lacuna that she believes speaks to how much of the state’s radical history has been suppressed, as well as how much there is to build on today. 

“Montana used to have much greater union power, but it was strategically dissolved,” she says. ​“It’s hopeful to stand on those shoulders and build something that is able to last and create a lot more power for tenants in the state in the future.”