”People Out Here Have Your Back”

The Louisville Tenant Union’s Multiracial Campaign Shows the Power of the Growing Tenant Movement

Photo: Anatheium Photography/Emmett Valentin

History tells us that winning social movements are led by those directly impacted. An ongoing, lifesaving example that I have had the privilege to witness is the movement by persons living with diabetes, under the banner of T1International, to make insulin affordable and available for all.

So I have appreciated the chance to spend time with the members of the Louisville Tenants Union, who are fighting for housing justice—and winning. They are advocating both locally and nationally, the latter along with other tenant leaders as part of People’s Action’s national Homes Guarantee campaign.

My article about these tenants’ history-making movement was published last week in the important publication Waging Nonviolence. If you have not checked out WNV, please consider doing so. It is a nonprofit media organization dedicated to original reporting and expert analysis of social movements around the world. It publishes all of its content free of charge, without any kind of paywall and with allowances for republishing. 

So I hope you read the full article on Waging Nonviolence’s site . But here are a few excerpts:  

The March 2020 killing of medical worker Breonna Taylor in her apartment by Louisville police led to months of demonstrations, along with renewed charges that the area’s police violence and the raid on Taylor’s apartment were fueled in part by government-funded gentrification and displacement in Louisville’s historically Black neighborhoods. The response to Taylor’s killing also brought together a group of advocates who found that they shared deep and personal interests in the rights of tenants.

Jasmine Harris and her children had been struggling to get their landlord to respond to unsafe conditions. Shemaeka Shaw had been assaulted by law enforcement during an eviction. Josh Poe from rural Kentucky and Jessica Bellamy from Louisville’s Smoketown neighborhood had endured their own housing insecurity and were already organizing Black and white tenants. They and several others had been pushing for housing rights on their own or in smaller groups. In early 2022, they came together to form the Louisville Tenants Union.

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“I’ve learned to redirect my trauma into fire,” Shemaeka Shaw said. “I would have had different outcomes if I had the tenant union behind me. The powers that be told me I was crazy, but that’s harder to say when I am standing next to 100 other people who have gone through the same thing.”    

So Shaw and other LTU members kept up the pressure on CT Group and the Louisville Metro Housing Authority. When they made a presentation to the Louisville Metro Council about the crisis, they gained the attention of Metro Councilor Jecorey Arthur. Arthur ended up joining LTU members at an August press conference to announce he was filing a resolution calling for LMHA to terminate its contract with the CT Group.

“The LTU is showing tenants they have power,” Arthur said. “I’ve seen tenants who were hopeless about change get motivated by the union. Even if they haven’t joined it yet, they are seeing a group of people who live where they live and go through what they go through get wins.”

On Oct. 19, the Metro Council unanimously passed Arthur’s resolution. Less than a week later, CT Group announced it was walking away from its contract with LMHA. The city’s top newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, made it clear that the decision was due to “consistent pressure from members of the Louisville Tenants Union.”

Arthur agrees. “The LTU made an example out of the CT Group,” he said. “The example was that tenants will no longer be silent about housing injustice. They believed in a better future, organized for it and won.”

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The LTU stands on the shoulders of several generations of tenant activists. The 20th-century tenant rights movement in New York City was arguably the most consistent and insistent such movement in the U.S., using tactics from rent strikes to lobbying to win multiple individual struggles with landlords on issues of rent increases and poor conditions, as well as the enactment of broader rent regulation and tenant control of housing. After the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Poor People’s Campaign both featured demands for housing rights, the St. Louis Rent Strike of 1969 helped create changes in federal housing law that reduced public housing rents. Then, successful rent strikes and other actions across the country in the 1970s led to the forming of the National Tenants’ Union.

Now, a current wave of campaigns, including those led by LTU’s partners at KC Tenants in Kansas City, are winning rent control measures, affordable housing fund commitments, and tenants’ bill of rights. They have a model to follow beyond our borders: Activism by tenant and labor unions have helped cause housing rights to be far more developed internationally than in the U.S., with nations like France, Germany and South Africa all enforcing a human right to affordable housing.

LTU is affiliated with the People’s Action Home Guarantee campaign, which mobilizes tenants across the country under the “Rent is Too Damn High” banner to demand a tenants’ bill of rights. LTU members including Shemaeka Shaw traveled to the White House with People’s Action to demand that President Biden issue an executive order on rent control and other tenant relief measures. Biden responded with a “Blueprint for a Renter’s Bill of Rights” that was short on tangible guarantees but a statement of federal commitment to protecting tenants that organizers believe can serve as a foundation for continued pressure.  

Tara Raghuveer, the leader of the national Homes Guarantee campaign and of KC Tenants, says that LTU is at the core of the national movement, proving that tenants can have success even in the challenging political geography of a southern city. “The Louisville Tenant Union represents a new edge to the tenant movement, with deepening roots throughout the South and the Midwest,” she said. “They are building durable infrastructure that is already transforming political terrain in Louisville and will continue to set the pace for tenants across the country.”