These Tenants Are Going on Strike Against ‘Rent Debt’
A new kind of tenants union is ramping up the pressure on corporate landlords.
Rebecca Burns
Nine former tenants of Equity Residential, the nation’s fifth-largest apartment owner, announced this week that they’re going on a new kind of strike. According to the company, the former tenants still owe amounts ranging from $195 to more than $50,000 — but in order to spotlight what they say are predatory practices by corporate landlords, the tenants will collectively refuse to pay up.
For sisters Tay’Laur and Tai’Leah Paige, one missed rent payment triggered a chain of events that left them homeless and tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
Two years ago, when the Paige sisters came up short on rent for their North Hollywood apartment, they say Equity Residential moved rapidly to lock them out of their online payment portal and file for eviction. Even after they secured rental assistance that would’ve cleared their balance, they say the company refused to accept it, while escalating fees and back rent piled up during a months-long court battle. Soon after the sisters agreed to move out in August 2024, the company began attempting to collect nearly $50,000 in debt — and reported that debt to credit bureaus, a crushing barrier in their search for new housing. The sisters spent months living in their car in between stays at hotels and relatives’ homes.
Because their eviction record was sealed by the court, the sisters ultimately got the company to stop reporting the debt and are resuming their housing search. But this week, they announced plans to go a step further, launching a rent debt strike to protest the company’s practices. The strikers are joining a larger group of current tenants already withholding the opaque utility fees that they contend allow Equity Residential to shift its costs to renters and circumvent local rent control regulations. The strike was organized with support from the Debt Collective, the nation’s first union of debtors.
“It’s unfortunate what corporate landlords are able to do in cities like Los Angeles,” Tay’Laur says. “Just give people a little bit more freedom and space to live and thrive.”
The debt strike is starting small, but at a virtual launch event with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) on Wednesday, organizers laid out their plans to expand it. The Debt Collective has also rolled out a new rent debt reporting tool that tenants can use to identify potentially abusive or deceptive practices and dispute their debts — as well as join a larger campaign for rent debt cancellation.
“We can cancel rent debt,” Tlaib told the group, describing the issue as a growing problem in the wake of the pandemic. “Our country is unimaginably wealthy; the problem is power.”
To build that power, tenants are taking a page from a similar action organized by the Debt Collective a decade ago, when 15 former students of Corinthian Colleges went on the nation’s first-ever student loan strike, alleging they had been defrauded by their schools. Thousands more joined through a Debt Collective-designed form to apply to the Department of Education for relief — and ultimately, the campaign won cancellation of $5.8 billion of debt for more than half a million former students of the legally troubled and now-shuttered for-profit college chain.
Over the course of the Corinthian Colleges campaign, former students decried the deceptive tactics that landed them so deeply in debt in the first place. Tenants likewise plan to protest real-estate practices they say are exploitative by design. Equity Residential’s billionaire co-founder, Sam Zell, was a pioneer of the now-standard strategy of boosting revenue by charging tenants myriad fees on top of rent. Advocates warn that when tenants fall behind, these types of sometimes-hidden “junk fees” can inflate their debt, making it near-impossible to catch up. Meanwhile, large landlords like Equity Residential are increasingly seeking to collect on these debts — even after they’ve evicted tenants.
Treating rental debt as a political issue has already helped the Paiges overcome a feeling of personal failure. “We were feeling really, really down about ourselves for the entire year [the eviction] was happening,” Tai’Leah says. But after their eviction, a federal judge ruled that the late fees charged by Equity Residential violated California law. And as the sisters began hearing stories from other former tenants trapped in a cycle of fees and debts, Tai’Leah says, “We were like, ‘Oh, this is happening to everybody.’”
Equity Residential Residential did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
For the Paige sisters, the trouble dates back to the entertainment industry strikes that impacted scores of Los Angeles renters. Tai’Leah worked in media production, and her lost income during the strike left the sisters and their roommate short on rent in July 2023 — the same month a powerful studio executive said that employers would allow labor negotiations to “drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
Tai’Leah says she reached out to Equity Residential’s building manager ahead of time to inform him that she might miss her payment that month but was already interviewing for a new job. The sisters thought they would be protected as long as Tay’Laur and their third roommate paid their share, since Los Angeles prohibits landlords from filing for eviction against tenants who owe less than a month of rent. Instead, they say, the company locked all three roommates out of the online payment portal, refusing to accept partial payments. The following month, in August 2023, they received an eviction notice.
Under California law, tenants have 10 days to “answer” an eviction filing. Should they miss that deadline, they can lose their case automatically. Scrambling to navigate the process, the Paige sisters found the Tenant Power Toolkit, an online platform that helps California renters file answers and defend themselves in court. That’s how they got involved with the Debt Collective — and how the group hopes other tenants will find them, too.
Since launching in 2022, the online tool — maintained by the Debt Collective, the Los Angeles Tenants Union and UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy — has been used by thousands of tenants like the Paige sisters. In order to identify potential legal defenses, tenants who use the tool also provide information about their landlords’ practices, giving the attorneys and researchers involved a trove of eviction data to analyze.
One trend jumped out at researchers almost immediately: following the expiration of Covid-19 eviction moratoria, tenants like the Paige sisters were being evicted with “truly obscene rent arrears,” according to Alex Ferrer, a Debt Collective organizer who helped design the tool. Where an eviction record already puts tenants at risk of homelessness, piling debt on top of that “is really harming [tenants’] credit scores, further complicating any possibility of rehousing,” he says.
When Ferrer analyzed the first year of data collected from nearly 7,000 California households, it showed that Equity Residential’s tenants, in particular, were deeply in debt. Equity Residential tenants who used the tool in 2023 reported a median indebtedness of $11,500, more than twice that of tenants overall. Equity Residential also emerged as the city’s top evictor within the available data, with Black tenants evicted at disproportionate rates.
Altogether, Ferrer says, the more than 200 California Equity Residential tenants who have used the tool since its 2022 launch reported owing nearly $2.5 million in rental debt.
Large landlords like Equity Residential are increasingly sending these alleged rental debts to third-party collection agencies, according to April Kuehnhoff, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC). She was the lead author of a 2022 report surveying some of the common problems renters reported facing from debt collection, including attempts to collect old debt or inflated balances. The large corporate landlords that often use third-party debt collectors are also more likely to charge junk fees that inflate those balances.
“In some cases, we’re seeing fees that we don’t think should be charged at all, like pest control fees,” says Kuehnhoff. “Landlords have a duty to provide a pest-free environment already, so they shouldn’t be adding that to the rent.”
Landlords are also well-aware of the leverage that debt gives them over tenants. The American Apartment Owners Association (AAOA), a national trade group, advertises third-party rent collection services on its website with a description of how debt reporting can stop tenants from finding a new place to live.
“Did a tenant leave owing you rent money?” AAOA’s promotional page asks. “Put it on their credit report and they’ll have to deal with you before they can get another apartment, car loan or credit card. The next time a landlord or property manager runs a tenant background check, be sure your delinquent rent debt appears!”
Collections services focusing on rent debt are proliferating, and their practices can also run afoul of consumer protections. Fair Collections & Outsourcing, a third-party debt collector used by Equity Residential, has been sued in federal courts more than 150 times over alleged violations of consumer credit protections, according to a review by In These Times.
Former Equity Residential tenants refusing to pay their debt are organizing alongside current tenants pushing for improved conditions. By uniting both groups in Equity Residential Debtors & Tenants United, they hope to test a new strategy for the growing tenants’ movement.
Current Equity Residential tenants are currently taking on what they say is a key driver of rental debt — the utility fees the company bills to them for necessities like water and trash removal.
Beginning in the early 2000s, some landlords began charging tenants separately for water in order to cut their costs — an echo of an earlier move to “unbundle” energy costs from rent during the energy crisis of the 1970s, according to an NCLC report. Ratio utility billing systems, or RUBS, subdivide building-wide utility usage according to a formula tenants say can be virtually inscrutable — and significantly increase monthly expenses.
In 2023, when Aranza Ballesteros moved into the Equity Residential-owned Virgil Square Apartments in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, she says she was told to expect a $50 monthly RUBS bill on top of her rent and individual utility costs.
But within a few months of moving in, her monthly RUBS bills — covering water, sewer, trash and pest control services — were regularly topping $200. Meanwhile, she woke up one night to what she thought was the sound of rain.
“It was raining inside my bathroom,” Ballesteros says. “I was like, ‘Okay, my water bill is so high, and I see leaks everywhere, this has to be connected.’”
The Debt Collective and the Los Angeles Tenants Union have launched a broader campaign to ban RUBS, which the groups say disincentivizes landlords from making needed repairs to plumbing and other systems — because tenants are footing the bills.
Suha Khondker, another Virgil Square tenant, told In These Times that she’s landed in the emergency room twice this year with respiratory difficulty that she believes stemmed from mold in her apartment. The company allowed her to move into a new unit last month, but she fears problems will persist without larger repairs.
Ballesteros and Khondker are both active members of the Virgil Square Tenants Association, which gained momentum last year as tenants’ frustration with their bills mounted. In April, they sent a petition demanding transparency in their monthly utility charges, and in June, more than 40 households in the building launched a “RUBS strike,” pledging to pay only their base rent until their demands were met.
In August, the tenants association celebrated an incremental victory: Equity Residential credited back tenants’ accounts after acknowledging “larger than expected” water and sewer bills over the last year and a half. In an e-mail to tenants, shared with In These Times, the building’s management team wrote that increased water usage resulted from leaking valves that had since been repaired. The company returned a total of more than $25,000 to the tenants.
But the tenants are unconvinced that larger maintenance issues are solved, and they plan to continue pushing for transparency. Some localities have banned RUBS outright; it’s prohibited statewide in Connecticut, after the state supreme court ruled in 2024 that the system “mak[es] the tenant liable to the landlord for the costs of utilities that were not individually metered or that the tenant did not exclusively use.”
Ballesteros says they plan to keep the pressure up, stressing that Equity Residential’s practices aren’t unique. While some family members ask her why she doesn’t just move out, “It’s really hard to find an apartment that is not corporate-owned and doesn’t use RUBS,” she says. “I think there are so many things going on that are so unfair, and this is one way that I can participate and help support my neighbors.”
Rebecca Burns is In These Times’ housing editor and an award-winning investigative reporter. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, the Chicago Reader, the Intercept, ProPublica Illinois and other outlets.
