Hundreds of Kansas City Tenants Will Strike to Demand Repairs, Rent Caps
Tenants voted to withhold rent on October 1 in a rent strike that could catch fire nationwide.
Rebecca Burns
Fed up with paying escalating rents in buildings whose conditions they say range from dirty to dangerous, tenants at two Kansas City-area apartment complexes have voted to launch a rent strike on October 1 — a coordinated action that could soon spread to other cities, as a new national tenants union flexes its muscles.
Anna Heetmann, 29, says she has spent three years trying to secure a fix for the gaping hole in her living room ceiling caused by water damage in the unit above. Earlier this month, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, II, the Democrat who represents Missouri’s 5th Congressional District, toured the building and pledged to support tenants should they strike.
In the days leading up to the rent strike vote, Heetmann canvassed daily to turn out neighbors at Independence Towers, the 11-story building where she and her partner have resided for the last five years. Heetmann is part of a team of union “floor captains” who spent the summer walking the building’s halls and asking residents to sign cards committing to withhold their rent — and to bargain collectively through the union, rather than cutting deals for fixes in their own apartments. At weekly meetings, Heetmann and other captains crunched the numbers on their progress and strategized about the right time to move to a strike vote.
Heetmann had no prior experience with community organizing, but she kept her main talking point simple: “There is a strength in numbers, and that’s undeniable.” On Thursday night, after a discussion of the potential risks, a majority of tenants in the building’s 60-plus occupied units voted in favor of striking. At Quality Hill Towers, where 140 residents announced what they say is Kansas City’s largest building union earlier this month, tenants also decided to join the strike.
The meticulous and mathematical approach Heetmann and her neighbors employed to build majority support is a hallmark of a successful labor organizing drive. The Kansas City tenants plan to test whether following a union playbook while negotiating with landlords, instead of bosses, can help them win an ambitious list of demands, including repairs, collectively bargained leases, a halt to evictions and new tenant protections attached to federal housing financing.
Of course, the comparison to organized labor only extends so far: Unlike employers, most landlords have no legal obligation to bargain with tenants unions. And while many states permit tenants to legally withhold rent in some circumstances, they lack a formal right to strike. That presents both a challenge and a chance to experiment, according to Tara Raghuveer, director of the national Tenant Union Federation, which launched in August and is supporting the Kansas City tenants.
“The objective here is to as meaningfully as possible wield tenants’ ultimate power, which is our rent,” says Raghuveer. “We’re experimenting with a path to a supermajority rent strike, and those experiments have already lent a host of lessons about the possibilities and limitations of the labor comparison and some of the particular challenges of tenant organizing.”
Rent strikes are a growing tactic of a revived tenants’ movement that’s embracing collective bargaining. In 2018, after withholding rent for nearly a year, tenants in the gentrifying Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles won a landmark agreement limiting annual rent increases to 5%, after the new owner of their building had sought to hike them by as much as 80%. And in San Francisco, tenants unions have been securing rent reductions and building improvements in the wake of a 2022 municipal ordinance requiring landlords to negotiate with tenants associations.
But the Kansas City tenants aim to bring pressure to bear not only against their own landlords, but another shared target: the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).
The federal regulator oversees the agencies backing billions in loans to apartment owners each year. In many cases, tenant advocates have charged, insufficient federal oversight allows landlords to treat residents’ homes like a piggy bank, mortgaging them in order to pull out equity or acquire more buildings, rather than investing in much-needed repairs. In July, the FHFA announced a set of modest tenant protections attached to properties financed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, including a 30-day notice of rent increases. But a letter sent to the regulator by the tenants union on Monday includes a far more sweeping demand: Mandate a 3% cap on annual rent increases in all federally backed loans for apartments and mobile home parks.
In targeting the FHFA, the strike could offer a roadmap for tenants in thousands of other government-financed buildings nationwide to fight for federal rent cap action in an election year in which housing costs have emerged as a key issue.
FHFA spokesperson Nick Jacobs said in a statement that the agency is aware of ongoing issues that tenants at both Kansas City properties are experiencing with their landlords and “deeply troubled to learn about their living conditions.”
As the regulator of Fannie Mae, which helped finance both buildings, “we are committed to doing all we can to ensure the residents are able to live in safe and decent housing,” Jacobs continued in the statement. While that includes working with Fannie Mae and local leaders to find solutions, Jacobs wrote, the FHFA “cannot intervene at the state and local levels” on contract disputes between landlords and tenants. The agency did not comment on the demand for 3% rent caps.
At Independence Towers, Heetmann says she and her partner spent years trying to get the building’s management to fix the hole in her ceiling. She’d submit maintenance requests through the landlord’s online portal, she alleges, only to watch them marked “completed” without any action taken. Meanwhile, the rent for her one-bedroom apartment increased from $585 when she moved in five years ago, to $860 this year.
After joining the push to build a tenants union at the property in March, Heetmann found out that she wasn’t the only resident with a hole in their ceiling. She also learned that in 2020, the building’s previous landlord had taken out a $5.5 million loan guaranteed by Fannie Mae, shortly before selling the property to FTW Investments, a real-estate syndicator.
Real-estate syndicators raise funds from private investors to acquire apartment buildings with the promise of hefty returns. According to a May report in the Kansas City Star, FTW Investments worked with another firm to raise nearly $3 million to buy Independence Towers and another Kansas City building. The investors later learned that FTW had invested just $17,500 of its own equity, they told the Star, and many balked when the company asked them for more money to fund repairs last year, the extent of which they said had been unknown to them.
In May, a county judge appointed new temporary management for Independence Towers after Fannie Mae sued an affiliate of FTW Investments for failing to maintain the building according to the loan agreement.
But while tenants awaited repairs, including fixes to the building’s plumbing and broken central air conditioning system, tragedy struck. In July, during a week when Kansas City was under an extreme heat warning, a three-year-old boy fell to his death from an open window on the building’s eighth story. According to the tenants union, the child’s family had reported the broken window to management and requested fixes without recourse.
“Part of why that was allowed to happen is because of the neglect that’s been going on in this building,” says Heetmann. “That really lit a fire in me.”
FTW Investments did not respond by press time to a request for comment from In These Times, nor did Trigild, the court-appointed temporary property manager for Independence Towers. The management for Quality Hill Towers, which is owned by New York-based Sentinel Real Estate Corporation, said in a statement that it has spent more than $8.3 million improving the property since 2016 and “disagrees entirely” with the tenant union’s claims about negligence. “The items being complained about either have already been addressed or soon will be completed,” the statement continues, and “non-payment of rent will impede efforts to complete the work.”
When she began knocking doors, Heetmann says many tenants feared retaliation from management. But over time, she says, “I’ve seen the fear turn into anger.”
In the coming days and weeks, the Tenant Union Federation will offer trainings and support to other buildings where landlords have benefited from cheap federally backed loans, says Raghuveer. “Every first of the month is another opportunity for tenants to strike.”
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Rebecca Burns is an In These Times contributing editor and award-winning investigative reporter. Her work has appeared in Bloomberg, the Chicago Reader, ProPublica, The Intercept, and USA Today. Follow her on Twitter @rejburns.
