Above photo: Diasha White, a resident of Independence Towers and member of the tenant union. Carly Rosin.
Try Everything, Try Anything.
The Tenant Union Federation, a coalition of tenant unions across the country, is calling on the Biden administration to cap rent hikes in its final days.
On Oct. 1, 2024, tenants at two Kansas City, Missouri, apartment complexes started a rent strike. Residents of Independence Towers and Quality Hill Towers, organized under KC Tenants and a newly formed national coalition known as the Tenant Union Federation, had been asking their landlords to fix their dilapidated buildings for two years. They demanded repairs, called for collectively bargained leases, and agitated for the federal government to force the sale of the apartment complexes to more responsible owners.
Beyond that, the strike had a long-shot goal with a closing window of opportunity: a 3% cap on rent hikes on all leases for buildings with mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government-created for-profit entity Fannie Mae is the country’s main purchaser of mortgage loans, offering better interest rates than the private market. Fannie Mae has been regulated by the Federal Housing Finance Agency since the mortgage crisis of 2008, allowing it to set rules for the entity and by extension, the larger housing market. Tenant Union Federation has argued that Fannie Mae should condition its loan terms with better tenant protections, including a rent cap. The Tenant Union Federation suggested in October that tenant unions in six other states could also join in on the strike, putting more pressure on the federal government. But as of this writing, those strikes have not happened.
The Biden administration has just a couple weeks left in office, making a national rent cap highly unlikely. Worse, organizers were unsure if such a policy could be reversed by the incoming Trump administration. Hell Woods, a former tenant at Quality Hill, says that the strike is a sign of unrest at federally-backed properties across the country.
“Tenants across the country are not taking this anymore,” Woods says. “People are pissed. They’re organizing with their neighbors. They know that things need to change.”
Woods says they foresee more rent strikes in 2025.
“We cannot keep living and dying like this,” Woods says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to talk my neighbors down from suicide when they get eviction notices on their doors, or when their rent is hiked or the conditions are just so horrific.”
The Tenant Union Federation, a coalition of tenant unions across the country, is calling on the Biden administration to take bold action for tenants, arguing that a failure to get rent under control played a role in Democrats’ election losses.
Tara Raghuveer, director of both the Tenant Union Federation and KC Tenants, says they want a rent cap “by any means necessary,” but she acknowledged that a national rent cap may not happen and could in any case be reversed by the incoming president. The federation wants the Biden administration to look at other options.
“There’s a level of realism among the tenants that we’re probably not getting a rent cap this year or through this administration,” Raghuveer says, but tenants have other demands that they are pushing for.
“Our ask of the administration right now is, try everything, try anything,” she says. “This was one of the major economic failures of the last four years, is that the American people have been in crisis around the rent.”
In a statement to Next City/Shelterforce, a spokesperson said that the Federal Housing Finance Agency “continues to do all it can within its legal authority as regulator of Fannie Mae’s activities in the secondary mortgage market to help make both residences better places to live,” but that the agency acknowledges its efforts have come up short. One such effort was $1.8 million in funding from Fannie Mae for repairs at Independence Towers, including $1.35 million after the strike began.
To Raghuveer, the strike is also a way to test the tenant federation’s muscles. “The strike is one part escalation and one part structure test,” Raghuveer said. “In order to take our own power seriously…we actually need to start developing an art and a science of exercising it through strikes.”
Confusion over rent cap demands
While President Biden mentioned the rent cap demand in an executive order last summer, after months of advocacy and organizing, he left it to a divided Congress to pass legislation.
After Democrats lost the presidential election, Raghuveer says that the Biden administration and the Federal Housing Finance Agency have not provided any kind of roadmap for how they’re going to address the tenant movement’s demands. Nor have they explained what is legally possible in the short window before Trump takes office.
In its statement to Next City/Shelterforce, FHFA said, “Under FHFA Director Sandra Thompson’s leadership, the Agency has worked tirelessly to make sure that the Enterprises also remain focused on their missions to make housing more affordable,” including a July 2024 set of tenant protections that followed an 18-month review and public input process.
The agency said that a rent cap would have to follow a similar public comment process to the one preceding July’s announcement. The only other way rent caps could occur, the agency said, would be “as the result of Congressional legislation.”
“FHFA has failed on a number of fronts, and one of them is just basic communication about what they assess as legally viable and not,” Raghuveer says. “So it’s really hard for us to understand what they feel they have the authority to do… and how Trump-proof it could be.”
Raghuveer says the tenant union’s attempts to bargain with FHFA have so far been unsuccessful. “We’ve been met mostly with hostility, which is interesting, considering they’re the regulator of these properties, and they’re objectively in horrible disrepair, and the tenants are living in squalor,” she says.
Tenant organizers have been communicating with FHFA director Thompson for two years, but tenants say they’ve yet to receive any promises or clear guidelines on rent caps. Thompson, a Biden appointee, will likely be replaced by the new administration.
FHFA says Thompson was “the first FHFA director to also tour distressed properties and meet directly with tenants across the country to demonstrate her commitment in this area.”
But Woods said merely meeting with tenants is not enough. “We’ve given her testimony after testimony after testimony, horror story after trauma story, we’ve given her tours across the country into these homes,” Woods says. “Every single time we met with her, she refused to commit to anything.” Instead, they were repeatedly told that Thompson and FHFA were in “listening mode,” Woods says.
Woods says that Thompson should be using her last few weeks in office to cement a legacy for her tenure at the agency.
“She’s got so much power that she could be wielding,” Woods says. “She knows what my neighbors are dealing with and for her to not take any action, not even forcing anybody to foreclose on them would be insane, because she still has more time.”
Conditions at Quality Hill Towers
When Hell Woods first applied for a room in Quality Hill Towers, they didn’t have high hopes; they had seen horrific reviews of the apartment complex online. The buildings are own by Sentinel Real Estate, a New York-based company that says it owns 157,000 apartment units.
Woods was approved for a unit and agreed to move in before seeing it in p erson; it was the only apartment they could afford while working full-time in the service industry. Woods says the move-in was delayed multiple times by apartment management, including a day when their friends took off work to help them move.
The evening they finally moved their boxes into the unit, “Everything was dirty,” Woods recalls. “When I say everything, I mean the walls, the ceilings, the carpets.” They note that the shower, stove windows, sink, mailbox and ceiling fan were broken, and there was a pest infestation.
“I’ve never seen this many roaches in my life,” Woods said, adding that they also saw ladybugs, spiders and stink bugs. Woods thought there must have been some mistake. They complained to the front office, but nothing changed, they said. A month later, a bedbug infestation compounded Woods’ problems.
They picked up some of the bedbugs and dead roaches, put them in a ziplock bag, and took them to the front manager’s office. The manager said they’d send an exterminator and promised a two-week treatment process for the bedbugs, Woods says, but the help never came.
When Woods went back to work, their employer told them not to come back into work until the bedbug issue was resolved, fearing that the store would be shut down if it became infested.
Woods returned to the apartment’s front office, crying, and told the office manager they wouldn’t be able to pay their rent the next month if the bedbug situation was not immediately resolved.
“I expected some ounce of compassion from this person, because she moved me into a horribly infested, broken, dirty unit,” Woods says. But the manager just told them if the rent was late, they would file an eviction notice, and Woods could then apply for financial help from a nonprofit. The manager would not give Woods the name of the nonprofit. Woods was left waiting for an eviction in the bedbug-infested apartment, at the mercy of an unnamed charity.
Sentinel Real Estate told NextCity/Shelterforce that it took the tenant association’s 2023 concerns into account as it “bolstered the depth and frequency” of its pest control, and that it has a vendor on-site weekly to handle pests. Sentinel also put the blame for pests on tenants, saying, “Unfortunately, several units have significant cleanliness concerns that have allowed infestations to grow, and these issues can and do impact neighboring units.”
Woods heard about the Kansas City Tenant Union from a friend and met with an organizer, who told Woods to start knocking on neighbors’ doors.
Woods says they knocked at all 100 units in their building and invited neighbors to the first meeting of the brand-new Quality Hill Towers Tenant Union. The union has now been together for about two years.
When the strike was in effect, there were 65 tenants total on strike, out of 150 residents that had signed union cards, according to Tenant Union Federation. Many residents chose not to go on rent strike out of fear of retaliation, Woods says, but to Woods, the strike felt like the right thing to do.
“Bringing my rent money up to them every month … I just felt sick to my stomach. I felt like I was being bullied,” Woods says. Sentinel told Next City/Shelterforce that, “the rent strike has not received widespread support among residents, and 82% of our residents are in good standing as of November 30.”
Why Quality Hill paused its rent strike
In late November, tenants at Quality Hill voted to pause their strike beginning Dec. 1 after the building owner issued lease non-renewals to 10 tenants, including Woods, and were promised more repairs by Sentinel. The residents say they will withhold rent again if conditions don’t improve. Tenants said they are demanding Sentinel rescind the 10 lease non-renewals and offer all tenants the option of a 6- or 12-month lease, pause eviction filings for tenants who withheld rent this year, drop all ongoing evictions proceedings, waive late fees, freeze rents at their current level for all of 2025, hire an in-house superintendent to provide maintenance, repair elevators in all three buildings and install a new security system.
According to Jaden Powell, an attorney working with Quality Hill Towers Tenant Union, tenants were motivated to pause the strike to reverse the non-renewals.
“Tenants saw it as a way to harness their power,” Powell says. Woods, at Quality Hill, said that tenants chose to de-escalate the strike because of the election of Donald Trump and likely replacement of Sandra Thompson, which changed the union’s strategy.
In its response to questions about allegations by tenants at Quality Hill, a public relations specialist working with Sentinel said, “We categorically disagree with the false narrative the tenant union has perpetrated about Sentinel, its commitment to Quality Hill Towers and its residents.” The spokesperson’s statement blamed the tenant association for causing disruption, claiming that other tenants, vendors and building staff felt “intimidated and harassed” by “increasingly aggressive tactics.” The company accused the tenant union of committing “vandalism” and said it was “attempting to terrorize a landlord with a proven track record in the real estate industry”
Woods says most tenants side with the union or have signed union cards. Woods and a current tenant expressed confusion about accusations of vandalism, saying, “That’s all they can do is make baseless claims and lies… they’re kind of grasping at straws.”
Sentinel said, “Ownership does not view enforcing lease agreements as an escalatory or retaliatory action against tenants, as it is the normal course response in cases where rent is not paid. This action is detailed in every lease agreement.” The company said that pausing the rent strike, “does not impact our standard operating procedure of pursuing legally allowable actions – including non-renewal and eviction – with tenants that are behind on their rent and in default of their lease agreements.”
Despite issuing non-renewal notices, Sentinel did not file to evict striking tenants on the basis of unpaid rent until late December, when it filed 16 eviction notices. Powell and tenants believed Sentinel would not file non-payment evictions because of a past court case that did not work in its favor. Last year, a judge found that Quality Hill Towers was so dilapidated that the real estate firm actually owed the tenant money. The judge ruled that the buildings were so uninhabitable, they had a rental value of zero.
“I think that Sentinel Real Estate hasn’t filed evictions on us this whole time because they’re worried that they would lose their cases,” Woods says. Most tenants now have legal representation, thanks to Kansas City’s Right To Counsel ordinance; before the ordinance, tenants were easily evicted by Sentinel’s legal team because they didn’t know how to navigate the law, Woods says.
Before the Quality Hill rent strike paused, the Tenant Union Federation says that they had tangible wins in its three apartment towers. That includes water heaters in two of the buildings, a new boiler in one building, replacement toilet flush valves for 200 units, recarpeted elevators, repairs to holes in the ceiling and dismissals of evictions that predate the strike, the federation says. Quality Hill’s owner, Sentinel Real Estate, also paid $200 gift cards to all tenants, a total of $40,000. Sentinel denied that any improvements had to do with the tenant association, saying that major repairs like boilers and water heaters were completed as part of “scheduled maintenance and replacement of building infrastructure” along with “addressing real-time issues that arise at the unit and property level.”
The remaining strike at Independence Towers
There is still one ongoing strike in Kansas City, at Independence Towers, where 57% of the residents were on rent strike as of late November according to Tenant Union Federation. Diasha White lives there with her teenage daughter, in a two-bedroom unit. She pays $740 a month for both rooms. She says the building has an “unbelievable” roach infestation.
“God forbid you start cooking…they hovering around the stove, on the walls, around the stove, crawling up on the stove, trying to get to your food,” White says. She says the building is so dilapidated it made little sense to pay rent. “The place looked like an abandoned building,” White said.
The building was put into receivership by Fannie Mae in May 2024 and is now managed by a California-based company called Trigild. But White says it’s not much better than the previous owner. Next City/Shelterforce left a voicemail at a publicly listed phone number for TriGild but has not received any response by press time.
White says she was moved to act when a tenant who complained about broken heat in early 2024 was evicted.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” White says.
She says that despite the federal funds for repairs, the air conditioning and the heating systems are still not working. She says Trigild fixed the doors to the entrance and replaced broken glass panels. But she says the smoke detectors and sprinklers still aren’t working, along with many of the appliances in the building, including washers and dryers.
White voted to start the October strike. She believes the strike is the only reason that Trigild made any repairs, began pest control and made it easier for tenants to pay rent online. “Up until then, nothing had been done,” White says.
She says she needs the strike to work out, because her daughter, who is currently in high school, relies on the apartment for stability.
“No way I can move her. She’s got to stay where she is till she graduates,” she says.
The future
Unfortunately, Woods was among the 10 tenants who received a lease non-renewal notice at the end of their lease term, and moved out of their Quality Hill apartment on Dec. 31. They also lost their job around the time that they received a lease non-renewal from Sentinel. They are now couchsurfing to save up money and after a few months will search for a new apartment.
While Sentinel told Next City/Shelterforce the pest issue was under control, Woods says that when they turned in their key at the front office on Dec. 31, they slipped it inside a sticky glue trap filled with roaches that were in their apartment. “We believe in bringing the crisis to its creators,” Woods said.
Despite leaving their apartment, Woods says they’re still going to fight for the rights of their neighbors who remain at Quality Hill.
“The moment we lose is the moment we stop organizing and we stop fighting,” Woods says. “People are going to keep organizing until we get exactly what we deserve as human beings.”
This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.