A National Tenants Union Has Arrived

Goldsmith moved to a senior-living community in Louisville looking for a fresh start after the murder of her daughter and two grandchildren more than a decade ago. When her apartment began flooding regularly, she connected with the Louisville Tenants Union. At first she was skeptical, but through building an ongoing campaign for better conditions, ​“I found other people like me,” she said. ​“Now all I think about is the tenant union.” 

Billing itself as a ​“union of unions,” the federation is seeding a movement that hopes to turn tenants into a political force that can’t be ignored.

At the local level, the group’s five founding unions have already racked up an impressive streak of wins spanning a wide range of organizing tactics.

In the last year, the Louisville Tenants Union passed far-reaching restrictions on public funding contributing to gentrification in Louisville; KC Tenants defeated a billionaire-backed stadium tax in Kansas City; Bozeman Tenants United banned new short-term rentals and elected one of their own as mayor in the Montana tourism hotspot; the Connecticut Tenants Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement with one of New Haven’s largest landlords and Chicago’s Not Me We won ballot referenda backing a landmark anti-displacement ordinance covering the area surrounding the new Obama Presidential Center.

But in an era of growing housing consolidation, those groups say that organizing within city limits can only take them so far when their landlords’ power — and portfolios — span much further. 

The new federation plans to provide training and support to other fledgling renter organizations, test out dues-based membership models, build connections with organized labor and assess members’ readiness to take coordinated actions like rent strikes. 

Fresh off a major messaging victory, when President Joe Biden announced a plan to curb rent increases, the tenants’ movement is also pressing on with a campaign to attach robust tenant protections to federal housing financing. Last week, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris echoed Biden’s endorsement of rent caps at her first major campaign rally in Atlanta. A new poll of battleground state likely voters, commissioned by Bernie Sanders, finds that 63% of voters would be more likely to back a candidate who supports such a policy. 

It’s not the first time that tenants have tried to build a national movement — but it’s the first big swing at such an effort in nearly four decades.

In 1979, as an earlier era of runaway inflation roiled the housing market, 50 tenant organizations convened in Newark, N.J. to chart a campaign for renters’ rights. An In These Times article that year noted that the groups shared common municipal policy goals like capping rents and enforcing building codes — and a common enemy in the form of a newly launched national landlord lobbying group. 

What would soon become the National Tenants Union successfully fended off real-estate industry attempts to pass legislation cutting off federal housing subsidies to cities that enacted rent control. But tenants struggled to find a counterweight to the landlord lobby in the form of their own national campaign, recalls Woody Widrow, an organizer for the group in the 1980s. 

“We couldn’t get a national focus,” says Widrow, who went on to direct the nonprofit Raise Texas. While the national tenants’ union acted as a clearinghouse for local efforts, most of the successes came in the form of new state and local rent-control legislation. Real-estate forces regrouped and, in the 1980s, began to pass a wave of state preemption laws that blunted the movement’s momentum. The National Tenants Union fizzled out within a few years — but Widrow says he’s heartened to see a new generation taking up the mantle and setting its sights on shared targets. 

It’s ​“not a given” that tenants will prevail, says Tara Raghuveer, the tenant federation’s director and the founder and director of KC Tenants. ​“But tenants are transforming rent hikes, moldy bathrooms and eviction nightmares into power, and tenants are starting to win.”