Why Tenant Unions Are Spreading Across College Campuses

“We deserve better than that,” Yanowitz says. ​“It’s worth fighting to get better than that.” 

Like many universities, UVM is exempt from municipal requirements for housing inspections. Instead, the school is supposed to inspect its own dorms and self-certify that it is meeting minimum habitability standards. But the university has failed to supply the city with evidence that it is doing either, according to a 2025 resolution sponsored by Burlington City Council member Marek Broderick, who recently graduated from UVM.

Last October, the Burlington City Council held the first of several hearings where dozens of students read testimony about poor conditions in UVM dorms. In November, the council passed a resolution, sponsored by Broderick, directing the council’s Ordinances Committee to evaluate whether existing regulations were sufficient to ensure that student dormitories were ​“healthy and safe places to reside.” 

Meetings are ongoing between students, legislators and administrators at UVM, which did not respond to a request for comment from In These Times. 

But UVM is far from the only campus where tenant organizers say that the basic descriptors of ​“healthy and safe” don’t apply to the dorms and apartments where students are spending their formative years. On campus, students typically lack formal tenant protections; off campus, they’re often subject to predatory leasing practices and fees by landlords eager to take advantage of their inexperience — including private equity groups, which have rapidly expanded their footprint in the student housing sector in recent years.

But energized and informed by the crescendo of tenant unions across the country, students are organizing. Some are building upon the skills and relationships formed during the student Palestine solidarity movement. Others have partnered with labor unions representing campus workers to take on private student housing companies pushing universities to maintain lax occupancy standards, or formed chapters of statewide tenant unions.

Increasingly, many students are asking the question that Riley Sandhop, a recent graduate in Texas, recalls thinking upon moving into her eight-person, 900-square foot freshman dorm unit: ​“How can they get away with this?”

The agreement between a university and a student living in a dorm is generally considered a license, not a lease—meaning schools aren’t subject to most laws governing evictions, rent increases or other landlord-tenant regulations.

“Students establish a tenant-to-landlord relationship when they sign up for university housing, but they’re not afforded any tenant protections,” says Emma Rehac, the director of New York City – based Youth Alliance for Housing, which aims to build tenant power among young people.

Even in the most landlord-friendly states, for example, tenants have the right to a court process before they can be evicted. But students in dorms aren’t viewed as tenants, nor are their universities legally considered landlords — so that basic protection generally doesn’t apply to them.

That can create incredible precarity, as it did for at least 53 Barnard College students in 2024, when the university suspended them for their pro-Palestine protests, shutting off their access to campus dining facilities and giving them just 15 minutes to gather their belongings from their dorms, according to a report in the Columbia Daily Spectator.

(In an email to In These Times, a Barnard spokesperson denied that students were restricted to 15 minutes to collect their belongings, writing: ​“If a student needed more time, we would have accommodated that.”)

Michael Gross, who leads the Columbia University Tenants’ Union, calls these ​“15-minute evictions” a major motivator behind the group’s founding in 2025, along with the March 2025 abduction of Mahmoud Khalil from a university-owned apartment. (DHS has since detained at least one other student, Ellie Aghayeva, from Columbia dorms.)

“Students and non-students… depend so much on Columbia for their housing, for their jobs, and for their ability to stay in this country, in some cases,” Gross says. ​“When Columbia has that much power over you, you definitely want folks to be organized.”

The tenants union aims to address the concerns of both students and non-students impacted by New York City’s largest private landowner, which some Columbia professors have dubbed a ​“real-estate [empire] with a side-hustle in education.”

The union scored a concrete win this March, when Columbia agreed to delay a planned 20% rent increase for law students remaining in university housing between graduation and sitting for the bar exam. They’ve also successfully pushed Columbia to make several rent-regulated, university-owned units available, by random lottery, to community members not formally affiliated with the institution.

But the Columbia University Tenant’s Union has had less luck at 542 W. 112^th St, a building housing dozens of graduate students, many with families. This spring, the university announced that it would rapidly convert the building into undergraduate dormitories. Current residents must find new housing starting in the fall, with no guarantees that Columbia will provide comparable arrangements. This behavior would likely be considered illegal under New York’s Good Cause Eviction law were universities dorms not explicitly exempt from the policy. (Columbia did not respond to a request for comment from In These Times.)

The tenants union has written letters to the Columbia administration asking for more information on housing for non-student and student tenants alike, to little avail. They’ve also been unsuccessful in pushing the school to offer a rent abatement to students at Barnard College dorm that has been without cooking gas since May of 2025.

Not only can universities get away with failing to maintain student residences: some residences are constructed in ways that would never meet building codes off-campus. Take the phenomenon of windowless bedrooms, which are banned in New York on health and safety grounds, but which pervade student housing in many other states — including Texas, where the University Tenants Union at University of Texas at Austin helped pass a citywide ban on new construction of windowless bedrooms in 2023. Still, thousands of existing units remain on the market.

In 2023, the University of California, Santa Barbara scrapped plans to house 4,500 students in new, mostly windowless accommodations. Dubbed ​“Dormzilla” by critics, the project instead incorporated screens simulating natural light. UCSB eventually cancelled the project after an independent panel found the idea ​“unwise” and unsafe.

But Charles Munger, the donor behind the ​“Dormzilla” plans, had designed a similar project a decade earlier: Munger Graduate Residences at the University of Michigan, where hundreds of students pay about $1500 a month for windowless apartments shared with six or seven other people.

In the fall of 2024, a year after re-launching following a nearly two-decade period of dormancy, the Ann Arbor Tenants Union attempted to organize the residents of Munger. But according to member Nathan Kim, the transience of student residents made organizing a tough sell.

During the same period, the group also tried to organize at Northwood apartments, where graduate students have faced heating, cooling and WiFi issues alongside steep annual rent increases ​“three or four times the pace of inflation,” according to Kim. But they once again ran into obstacles, including a ​“greater degree of fear” at a complex where the majority of residents are international students, Kim says, and especially vulnerable to the university’s disciplinary powers.

The University of Michigan did not respond to a request for comment.

The Youth Alliance for Housing’s Rehac sees it as a fundamental problem that universities exert control over so many elements of students’ lives, including their access to housing, food, healthcare, employment, immigration status, and of course, their diplomas. It can amount to ​“another money grab,” Rehac says, when colleges ​“drain your pockets and make you really, really dependent on one institution for all parts of your life.”

In addition to partnering with university tenant unions like Columbia’s on housing battles specific to their institution, Rehac’s group advocates for legislation that would require universities to enter traditional lease agreements with students, thereby decoupling housing from other university processes — and allowing student tenant unions to bargain with their universities over lease provisions covering rent, repairs, and retaliation for organizing.

Rehac also emphasizes that universities should take responsibility for ensuring that their students are safely housed — and for halting the waves of gentrification and displacement of which elite institutions of higher education have long been culprits.

While universities can make for especially negligent landlords, there’s no guarantee that students living off-campus — about 52% of undergraduate students at public four-year universities and 44% of undergraduates at private ones— will fare any better.

As state support for higher education has plummeted in recent decades, many universities have scrambled to boost enrollment — even as they lack the resources needed to house larger classes.

Between 1999 and 2010, the ratio of dorms to students declined in states across the country, with the typical university able to house just over one-fifth of its enrolled students by 2019. Those remaining are often left to navigate a private market increasingly dominated by actors poised to exploit young people’s inexperience with tenancy — including private equity firms.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, some of the same Wall Street landlords that began gobbling up foreclosed homes and multi-family apartment buildings also set their sights on student housing. In 2022, the private equity giant Blackstone purchased the real estate firm American Campus Communities (ACC), whose portfolio includes more than 140,000 beds. By 2024, Blackstone had become the single largest owner of student housing in the United States.

ACC owns more than a dozen properties near the University of Texas at Austin, where more than three quarters of students live off-campus. The University Tenants’ Union has mobilized against alleged neglect by corporate landlords, including a March 2025 incident in which students were forced to move out of an ACC-owned complex due to potentially hazardous structural issues — initially without the option to break their leases, according to the union. Students are especially rankled by the fact that the university system’s endowment is invested in Blackstone funds to the tune of some $150 million.

“Private equity funds like Blackstone often increase their returns by cutting operating costs, including maintenance and staffing,” wrote UT Austin student Tia Chatterjee in The Daily Texan in June. ​“In other words, when our buildings leak, the University gets dividends.”

In an email to In These Times, an ACC spokesperson wrote that ​“resident safety and security is always our top priority” and that the company ​“worked closely with affected residents to accommodate their needs,” including by releasing students from current and renewed leases. UT Austin’s investment company did not respond to a request for comment.

Another pressing concern for UT students is the pervasive practice of ​“pre-leasing,” through which landlords can exploit students’ inexperience as renters and anxieties about scarce housing to pressure them into signing leases as much as a year in advance. In extreme cases, this can mean starting the school year from a hotel room, as hundreds of UT students were forced to do in 2014 when the units they signed for remained under construction past their scheduled move-in date.

Then, once students have started living in their apartments, landlords sometimes wait just weeks before they ask tenants to re-sign for the following year. Riley Sandhop, policy co-director of the university’s tenants’ union, says she’s been asked to re-sign for the following year after just two weeks. The process risks trapping students for months or years in unlivable situations.

Sandhop’s group is lobbying the city government to pass a law prohibiting landlords from leasing their units more than six months before the previous lease has expired.

In 2021, the Ann Arbor Tenants Union helped to pass a municipal ordinance preventing landlords from asking tenants to re-sign leases less than 150 days before their expiration.

Ann Arbor’s law proved difficult to enforce at first. A 2023 report by a subgroup of the Ann Arbor Renters Commission, a city body, concluded that many landlords had responded to the law by offering financial incentives for early renewal, even if they didn’t technically require it. Others asked tenants to re-sign before the 150-day mark but waited to countersign until the legal limit had passed.

Other landlords took an even more profitable tack, charging students for spots on a ​“waitlist” for in-demand units well before the 150-day threshold. These sums ranged from $150 to $10,000, according to the report. And the sums were refundable only if the landlord was not able to provide the students with a unit. If students themselves chose to withdraw from the waitlist, they were not owed the money back. Even when landlords said that their waitlist fees were refundable, some students never recovered what they had paid.

Other landlords would charge smaller, but still substantial, waitlist fees that were nonrefundable entirely — like Landmark Properties, a luxury rental agency that reportedly collected a $375 fee. In an email sent to the Commission and included in its report, one angry parent did the math. Landmark was renting 608 units in Ann Arbor at the time, so the agency would pocket $228,000, even if each unit received just one application.

In early 2024, the Ann Arbor Tenants Union (whose membership overlaps with the Renters’ Commission, which authored the 2023 report) launched the ​“Trash the Junk Fees” campaign, aiming to ban non-refundable pre-tenancy fees. After months of door-knocking, tabling and testifying at public hearings, the union succeeded in pushing the city government to pass a near-complete ban in January of 2025. (The law carves out an exception for application fees up to $50.)

In February of this year, the city expanded the prohibition to include all non-optional fees in leases, which landlords can use to artificially lower the sticker price on an apartment. The new law took effect on August 1.

“We consider this a win in transparency for renters,” the tenant union wrote at the time of the first law’s passage. But the union is still pushing for statewide rent stabilization and strengthened protections for tenant organizing, to ensure that no first-time renter or student has to face a predatory landlord alone.

“Our goal is to create a culture… where we [tenants] fight for ourselves,” Kim says. ​“Where we know that we’re the ones who have our best interests in mind.”

According to Rehac, students who learn to recognize the power that comes with their positions as tenants — whether in university housing or in the private market — will be well-positioned to join one of the most exciting popular movements in decades.

While students have been ​“conditioned to imagine ourselves as having no agency over our housing,” she says, tenant organizing is a powerful answer to precarity — and a powerful path to solidarity with non-student renters vulnerable to university-led gentrification and displacement.

“These are our homes,” Rehac says. ​“This is how we protect each other and keep each other safe.”