[ROBERT REICH]

It’s no secret that rental housing costs are skyrocketing. But there’s a way for tenants to fight back: tenant unions. Tara Raghuveer, a longtime advocate for housing justice and the director of the Tenant Union Federation, is here to explain.

[TARA RAGHUVEER]

In the workplace, unions exercise power to secure a better and more affordable life for workers. So why can’t we do that to secure better and more affordable housing? 

Well, we can by forming tenant unions. The basic premise of a tenant union is that there are more of us — tenants — than there are of them — our landlords. But that only matters if we’re organized– and it’s never been more important to get organized. 

Rent is now unaffordable for nearly half of all tenants across the country. There is no place in America where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. 

I live in Missouri, where a minimum wage worker would have to work 63 hours per week — the equivalent of more than one and half full time jobs — to afford a modest two bedroom apartment. 

But it’s not just that the rent is too damn high – the rent is also the biggest bill in most working people’s budgets, determining so much about the rest of our lives. Whether we can keep our jobs, sustain our connections to our neighbors, send our kids to school consistently— all of this becomes a question of whether we can pay our rent. 

This means that in the richest country in the history of the world, over 650,000 people are experiencing homelessness — the highest number on record. And so many more are in their cars, in extended stays, in and out of shelters, and doubled up with friends, family, or acquaintances. 

Tenants’ ultimate power is our rent. Individually, our money doesn’t matter much to our landlords. But when we come together in a union, we can threaten this entire system — if we figure out how to use the power we have.

I’ve seen up close how tenants can do that. One example: the Independence Towers Tenant Union. 

Just outside of Kansas City, Independence Towers was a dump — leaks, asbestos, broken appliances — you name it. The tenants were paying higher rents than they’d ever paid for the worst conditions they’d ever endured.  And the situation turned deadly. In the summer of 2024, a child died after falling from a window that had not been properly maintained, according to wrongful death lawsuits filed against the landlord.

The Towers residents formed a tenant union. They issued demands to their landlord. No response. They escalated through rallies and press. No response. They pressured Fannie Mae, the building’s federal lender. They organized tours for their congressman. Nothing. 

So on October 1, 2024, they launched a rent strike with over 50% of the building withholding rent, together. 

The strike lasted eight months — the longest and largest in regional history. The tenants withheld nearly $300,000 in rent. In the end, the strike got them to the bargaining table with the building’s new owner. The union negotiated new leases, rent freezes, and a schedule for major repairs. Best of all: The tenants kept all the rent they had withheld through the strike. 

Tenant unions like the one at Independence Towers aren’t just critical for improving material conditions for the tenants on the property. They’re also the best chance we have to rebalance the scales of power in a market that’s now increasingly dominated by massive corporations. 

For the last decade or so, the market has been under siege by institutional investors who have been buying up single and multifamily housing. Big time investors and private equity companies now own one out of every 10 apartments nationwide. That figure is even higher in cities with tenants who are more likely to be paying 30% or more of their income on rent and utilities — like in Tampa, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and Charlotte.

What happens when your rent goes to a giant corporation? Hidden junk fees. Stolen deposits. Shoddy maintenance and repairs, plus other deadly safety violations. And through it all, the rent keeps rising — sometimes due to illegal price fixing amongst landlords. Even if your landlord isn’t one of these Wall Street players, your housing could still be affected. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve found that when corporate landlords infiltrate a housing market and hike the rent, smaller landlords do, too.

The bottom line is that the housing market is a catastrophic failure. This is the result of a relentless prioritization of profits over people and our basic needs. Rent isn’t a measure of the quality or condition of our homes — it’s whatever those who control the market will allow. 

And when we look for solutions to this crisis, we’re often told it’s simple: just build more housing. Now, we do have a housing shortage. But it’s important to be specific: we have a shortage of truly affordable housing. 

Recently we actually saw the largest boom in multifamily housing production in the last 50 years. But, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the units built were mostly in the high-end of the market.

When it comes to affordable options, we are losing housing faster than we can build because landlords are hiking the rent. 

And we can’t be agnostic about who owns and manages the housing that does get built — by prioritizing building over all else, we put all the power in the hands of the same giant corporations who care about their money over our lives.

So, yes, we need to build housing — housing that people can actually afford. But this is not just a story of underproduction; this is a story about power: who has it and who doesn’t, who calls the shots and who deals with the consequences.

If we want a world that guarantees housing as a public good — one where we (not corporations) have agency over our homes, where the public sector builds and maintains housing that’s not just for money-making, a world where we are protected by strong regulations– tenants must build robust political and economic power to contest against the profiteers who are squeezing us for every last dollar and dime. 

Tenant unions are our best chance to do that — and you could organize one where you live. 

After the union won at Independence Towers, the Tenant Union Federation started organizing with tenants in similar properties across the country — from Missoula to Memphis, Boise to Albany, and everywhere in between.

If you’re like us, sick and tired of dealing with soaring rent and crumbling buildings, and if you want to level the playing field between landlords and tenants, go to tenant federation dot org to join the movement and learn how to start your own tenant union.