Striking Tenants Withhold Rent for 247 Days and Win

The new one-year agreement with Dynasty Properties, which purchased the building through a court-brokered process in April, holds rents steady this year and offers lease renewals that keep increases under 5%. It also includes a grace period for late rent payments and a ban on junk fees. And it formally recognizes the tenants union, which will renegotiate the terms next year. Tenants will not be required to pay back rent from their eight months on strike, and all current tenants’ leases will be renewed. 

The deal was reached on Tuesday, and on Wednesday tenants union members formally voted to approve the contract.

For years, tenants at Independence Towers say they dealt with pests, broken heating and cooling systems and other dangerous conditions. But even then, the high-rise provided a rare source of affordable housing in an area with rapidly rising rents.

“People would look at our building and ask, ​‘Why don’t you just move?’” says Anna Heetmann, a resident who spent years trying to get a gaping hole in her ceiling repaired. ​“I’ve always just felt like that’s just not the answer. We wanted to try to change Independence Towers and make it a place where people actually want to live.”

The tenants first formed their union last March after they went without hot water for more than two weeks. Around the same time, federal mortgage giant Fannie Mae sued the owner for violating the maintenance and financial terms of his federally backed loan, and in May, the new tenants union celebrated when a county judge appointed new temporary management. But by July, tenants say they were still calling on the new building manager to make repairs, including to the broken central air conditioning system. As the high-rise brick building baked during an extreme heat warning last summer, calamity struck — a three-year-old boy fell eight stories to his death from an open window with a damaged screen. His parents, who later filed a wrongful death lawsuit, say they had requested repairs to the window to no avail.

With the situation more urgent than ever, the tenants union began preparing late last summer for a possible rent strike. Heetmann served as part of a team of union ​“floor captains” who knocked doors near-daily, asking neighbors to sign cards committing to withhold their rent and bargain collectively. Some residents had already stopped paying rent due to the building’s dismal conditions, organizers learned. 

On October 1, with a majority of residents on board and pledges of support from elected officials, the tenants union launched a rent strike. Their demands included repairs, collectively bargained leases, a halt to evictions and new conditions attached to the federal housing financing that had helped a previous owner flip the building at a profit. 

Donald Trump’s victory last November effectively dashed hopes for federal action, but the strike wore on. Alongside public actions, tenants attempted to intervene as a party in the court case between Fannie Mae and the previous landlord, aiming to represent their interests. When the judge denied the motion, they found another way. As the building moved through receivership — the legal process through which a court-appointed third party manages the improvement and potential sale of a distressed building — the union began submitting regular ​“tenant living condition reports,” mimicking the official receiver reports filed with the court, which focused primarily on the building’s financial performance. Several times, after the tenants union submitted photos of needed repairs in reports emailed to the judges and attorney, those repairs suddenly got underway, according to Stein.

Trigild, the company acting as a court-appointed receiver, did not respond to a request for comment. 

When the judge overseeing the case approved the building’s sale, tenants made one last appeal, asking him to require the new owner to negotiate with tenants as a condition of the transaction. They were rebuffed again, but continued to strike and demand a meeting with the new owner — and finally, last month, a representative of Dynasty Properties agreed.

The lesson? ​“There are multiple points of leverage that are all worth exploring,” says Stein. But ultimately, he notes, ​“it was the organizing that resulted in an agreement,” not the legal process.

When it came time for the meeting itself, tenants approached the process like a labor union negotiation, preparing a list of demands, deciding on their hard lines and discussing where to meet. Ultimately, they chose Independence Towers, with one tenant’s apartment serving as the bargaining room and another available for caucusing and printing new proposals. The team went in with a term sheet, and walked out with a near-final agreement two hours later. The remaining details were hashed out by the end of the day. With an agreement reached, tenants will pay June rent, celebrate the win and continue organizing with their neighbors. 

Vijai Ponnezhan, the Dynasty Properties representative who negotiated the agreement, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Independence Towers’ tenants initially launched their rent strike last October alongside tenants at Quality Hill Towers, a massive Kansas City apartment complex with an abysmal safety record. Tenants there say they won some concrete improvements — including new water heaters and boilers. But they paused their strike after two months as the landlord, the New York-based Sentinel Real Estate, began non-renewing leases and filing evictions. 

Tenants at Independence Towers, meanwhile, never faced eviction — even though, before the strike, Trigild wrote in a receiver’s report that it planned to begin evicting non-paying tenants in the fall.

There’s plenty to digest from the differences in those two outcomes, but the win at Independence Towers gives national tenant organizers hope that ​“we are onto something” with the push to build majority membership, rent strike-ready unions nationwide, says Tara Raghuveer, the director of the Tenant Union Federation, a national organization that launched last year with Kansas City Tenants as a founding member.

Next, they’ll turn to enforcing the agreement at Independence Towers. ​“Now that we’ve built a strike-ready union,” says Raghuveer, ​“we have a credible threat of strike at any point.”