Above photo: Christina Jackson outside Denver City Councilor Flor Alvidrez’s office. Christina Jackson.
Deepening connections between U.S. labor unions and renters has helped spur the creation of tenants unions.
They are winning concessions across the country.
When Christina Jackson first started talking with her neighbors living in a Denver apartment building about their shared concerns about elevators not working, water being shut off, and roaches in their apartments, the response was guarded. “A lot of the tenants were scared to complain because they worried they would get evicted if they spoke up,” Jackson said.
The worry is not an unreasonable one. My students and I represent low-income tenants facing eviction, and most of our clients have little protection from landlord retaliation. Even if a state’s laws block the landlord from openly citing a tenant’s complaints as the grounds for eviction, landlords can and do find other pretenses for forcing tenants out before their lease expires.
And once the lease does end, only a few states and cities have “good cause” protections that require lease renewal in most situations. Without good cause/just cause requirements, a landlord who doesn’t like a tenant’s complaints can usually force them out by refusing to renew the lease.
So Christina Jackson understands when a tenant is reluctant to speak up. “I used to keep my mouth closed, too,” she said. “Landlords are not going to listen to just one person.”
When the tenants come together, though, that is a different story. Recent years have seen a surge in tenant union organizing. Unions in places like Kansas City, Louisville, Los Angeles, Bozeman, Montana, and Chicago have formed and won concessions from landlords. Last year, many of the tenant unions came together to form a national Tenant Union Federation.
No one understands the potential for collective action better than tenants who are also members of labor unions. Christina Jackson is in that category. A home healthcare worker for 40 years, Jackson is a member of SEIU Local 105 and serves on the local’s standards board for home healthcare workers. “Once I became a member of SEIU, I found my voice,” she said.
So Jackson decided to use her voice right at home in Columbine Towers, a 14-floor, 170-apartment building, where she sees the potential for powerful shared demands articulated by hundreds of residents. Jackson regularly makes the rounds logging and responding to resident complaints, and she led the outreach to the area’s city councilor, who visited the building at Jackson’s urging.
“Christina Jackson and her fellow tenants at Columbine Towers exemplify the power of community advocacy,” Denver City Council member Flor Alvidrez said. “It takes courage to speak up, especially when it comes to your own home, and I want to thank Ms. Jackson for her leadership. The conditions at Columbine Towers were unacceptable. After visiting the building myself, I saw firsthand the need for immediate attention to cleanliness, safety and repairs.”
Spurred by Jackson and her fellow tenants, Councilor Alvidrez convened multiple meetings with the building owner and tenants and city agencies, and the city has invested in extensive rehabilitation of the building. In a statement for this article, Columbine Towers owner Ulysses Group says that those renovations have caused the recent elevator outages and water shut-offs (elevator breakdowns were the subject of a lawsuit against the prior owner), and that they would never evict a tenant for making complaints.
Christina Jackson is moving forward, preparing a tenant’s bill of rights to distribute in the building and exploring joint legal actions about the conditions. “If all of us stand up and fight together, they will have no choice but to listen,” she said. “That is how you make a change.”
If that sounds like a labor union slogan, it is no coincidence. “Whether at work or at home, the union offers a fighting chance,” said Tara Raghuveer of KC Tenants and the Tenant Union Federation. “We are stronger when we organize and when we fight. When workers who have experience with labor unions bring that experience home, they can help lead their neighbors toward even more powerful structure and strategy.”
The connection between U.S. labor unions and tenant organizing has deepened in recent years. SEIU Local 1199NE and the Connecticut Tenants Union have forged a partnership where the SEIU local helps with funding, political connections and turn out at tenant actions. Many SEIU members are tenants themselves, Local 1199NE’s President Ron Baril said, so supporting the tenant union is natural. “Us doing this is not charity. It is self-interest,” he said.
The same self-interest possessed by landlords will compel them to respond to tenants, Jackson said. “After all, it’s our money they are taking every month,” she added. “They need our money like we need a place to stay. So they are either going to listen to us or move on. And they did not invest in this building to move on.”