Three Big Things: Tenant Unions Momentum Building!

Louisville Tenant Union’s Jasmine Harris (Anatheium Photography/Emmett Valentin)

Readers of this newsletter have seen our many articles profiling the power and promise of tenant unions in publications including Jacobin, Waging Nonviolence, and Common Dreams. So it is exciting to relay the news of big events this past week that indicate tenant unions are claiming their rightful place in the struggle for housing justice in the U.S.:

1.    National Tenant Union Federation Launches

I was privileged to be one of nearly 400 people from across the country on this week’s call formally launching the national Tenant Union Federation. A “union of unions,” here is the Tenant Union Federation’s bold statement of purpose, from its new website:

We organize tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, to secure alternatives to the current housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored.

Check out Rebecca Burns’ excellent In These Times article announcing this century’s first effort to form a national U.S. tenants’ organization.

The Tenant Union Federation (TUF is a great acronym!) is connected to dozens of tenant-led and tenant-supporting organizations. But its founding members are five unions that have been winning fights for tenants across the country: KC Tenants, Bozeman Tenants United, Not Me We (Chicago), the Connecticut Tenants Union, and the Louisville Tenants Union. Speaking of the latter . . .

2.    New York Times Profile Features Louisville Tenant Union

The tenant leaders and organizers of the Louisville Tenant Union have inspired me and many others over the past few years. Now they are seizing the national spotlight, thanks to a lengthy article by Tressie McMillan Cottom published this week in the New York Times: “What’s Happening in Louisville Could Solve a Housing Crisis.”

Cottom’s article sets the stage:

Midsize cities like Louisville contain many of the fault lines that created America’s housing crisis: gentrification, federal development schemes and redlining. But Louisville also has a distinctly Southern history of racist segregation, predatory investors and political divides that has made it difficult to produce the high-quality affordable housing its residents desperately need. If this country’s affordable housing crisis can be solved here, it could establish a template for helping the nation’s poor and marginalized find stability.

And after talking with tenant leaders and organizers and listing their many victories, Cottom concluded the piece with this story:

What I did have was a sit-down soul food lunch with four Louisville Tenants Union elders, two newcomers and three staff members in the final hours of my trip. The food was from (Jessica) Bellamy’s family cafe. The conversation was ribald and vulnerable. It struck me that what the members of the union have found here is a tonic to the loneliness of everything — the pandemic, the hustle economy and political disillusionment. They took turns sharing stories of police brutality, gun violence, depression and illness. For each of the people in that room, housing insecurity had been just one crisis too many. Their stories made me feel helpless. I muttered this to no one in particular.

Bellamy leaned over and said: “No, this is power. This union is an invitation to your power.”

3.    Vice President Harris Hears Tenant Union Advocacy, Endorses Federal Rent Control

President Biden’s recent conversion to the cause of rent control was a little underwhelming, given that it was being delivered as his candidacy for reelection seemed to be sinking. But Biden’s replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, quickly picked up the same pro-renter theme, telling an Atlanta rally, “On day one, I will work to take on price gouging and bring down costs. We will ban more of those hidden fees, we will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.”

The driving force behind federally-mandated rent control has been these same tenant unions that are now ascending to national prominence. Here are articles we published last July and this April explaining how the tenant unions were ratcheting up the pressure on the Biden-Harris administration. This week, Rachel Cohen wrote a very detailed article for Vox explaining (in the middle third of the piece) how the tenant unions made their rent control case.

Social movement history shows that real housing reform will not come from politicians or think tanks–or even tenant lawyers/law professors, I’m sorry to say. Guaranteeing housing as a public good, as TUF aims to do, will only be achieved by a movement led by those most affected. As Not Me We organizer Infiniti Gant puts it, “It won't take neat policy or advocacy to fix this issue. We’re not gonna win by asking nicely. It will take power. And lots of it. We know that power only comes from organized people and tenant power is only going to come from organized tenants. TUF union’s are serious about the practice of tenant organizing, and we refuse to lose.”

She is right. This growing power and organization of tenants across the country is our greatest hope for making housing a human right in the U.S. This week, they moved a little closer to making that goal a reality.