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Tenant Rights

Tenants On The March: An Interview With Cea Weaver

March 28, 2025 Andrew Elrod, Dissent Magazine. , , , ,
In many parts of the country, rising rents have hit a political limit, as politicians, unions, and community organizations increasingly recognize the centrality of housing to the cost-of-living crisis. New York State’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, San Francisco’s 2022 collective bargaining ordinance for tenants, and Los Angeles’s 2022 “mansion tax” represent new forces in local politics—and alternative bases for the struggle over power within our society. These initiatives use the state to reshape the business models and ownership patterns pushing workers and their families further away from their jobs, into smaller, more expensive living situations.

Landlords Fined $80K For Threatening To Call ICE On Chicago Tenants

March 8, 2025 Zane McNeill, Truthout. , , , , , ,
An Illinois circuit court judge has ordered Chicago landlords to pay former tenants $80,000 after they threatened to report the tenants to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in June 2020. The decision is the first under the state’s 2019 Immigrant Tenant Protection Act (ITPA), which prohibits landlords from using a tenant’s immigration status to harass or intimidate them. “This decision provides a measure of justice to a family facing a landlord willing to threaten to call federal immigration authorities in the belief that it would scare tenants,” Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel, said in a statement.

The Big Idea: Social Housing

February 20, 2025 J. Patrick Patterson, In These Times. , , ,
Affordable housing — which typically involves giving tax breaks to real estate developers — isn’t working so well. The open secret is that, all too often, it isn’t actually ​“affordable.” Nearly 40% of tenants using the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, for example — the largest federal program subsidizing affordable housing — are still rent-burdened, and the subsidy doesn’t require homes to be permanently ​“affordable,” leaving renters vulnerable to eviction. As Peter Dreier explains in The American Prospect: ​“The quest to provide what has come to be called ​‘affordable housing’ in America is hobbled by one fundamental reality.

Abolish Rent, Yes, For Real

January 28, 2025 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
The largest tenant union in the country is responding quickly and passionately to the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. The LA Tenants Union is demanding not just enforcement of existing California protections against price gouging of rental homes, but a moratorium on evictions and a rent freeze, all while tenants are coming together with heroic levels of mutual aid. But these steps will only mitigate a perpetual struggle, as union co-founders Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis write in their new book “Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.” “Why do tenants wake up every month and have to pay rent?” they ask.

Negligent Landlords Strike Again In The Bronx

January 11, 2025 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , ,
A massive, five-alarm fire broke out in the Bronx on Friday morning, displacing over 200 people out in the below freezing temperatures, and injuring seven people. At the time of publication, New York City firefighters are still battling the massive blaze that engulfed the top floor of a six-story residential building. Over 81 displaced families are sheltering in a nearby school, and all the apartments on the top floor have been destroyed.  For the short term, displaced residents will be placed in hotels, then will meet with caseworkers who will help move them into one of the city’s shelters.

Justice Department Sues Six Of The Nation’s Largest Landlords

January 9, 2025 Heather Vogell, ProPublica. , , , ,
The Department of Justice on Tuesday sued six of the nation’s largest landlords, accusing them of using a pricing algorithm to improperly work together to raise rents across the country. The lawsuit expands an antitrust complaint the department filed in August that accused property management software-maker RealPage of engaging in illegal price-fixing to reduce competition among landlords so prices — and profits — would soar. Officials conducted a two-year investigation into the scheme following a 2022 ProPublica story that showed how RealPage was helping landlords set rents across the country in a way that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior.

As Corporate Landlords Spread, A Mold Epidemic Takes Root

October 23, 2024 Thomas Birmingham, In These Times. , , , , , ,
Gabriel Caban has had three constant companions in the nine short months he’s been alive. There’s Beatriz Caban, his 27-year-old mom. There’s the black-and-white blanket he refuses to sleep without. And there’s the mold that grows in the floorboards and walls of his apartment — the mold that has sent him three times to the emergency room, the mold he’s been breathing in his entire life. On Nov. 17, 2023, an eight-months-pregnant Beatriz Caban moved into Sunset Ridge Apartments, a 312-unit low-income complex nestled in the northeast corner of New Haven, Conn. She found mold for the first time that day, along with a bucket in the laundry room next door, filled to the brim with water dripping from the ceiling.

A Bold Vision On Housing Is Needed To Win Big Change

August 1, 2024 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
The law school clinic that I direct at Indiana University represents tenants in local eviction courts. Our client Tanya needed pay-up-front emergency dental surgery, so she did not have enough money left for her rent. James’ family has endured feces-filled water backing up in their laundry room, mold on the walls and a caved-in ceiling, while their corporate landlord has ignored their maintenance calls. Beatrice’s family wants to keep her daughter in the school district they like, but the landlord who just bought her building has announced a $300 per month rent hike. All of these households, and virtually all of the people we see in eviction court, qualify for federally-subsidized housing.

In Colorado, Renters Earn Cash Back For Paying Rent

June 22, 2024 Roshan Abraham, Next City. , , , , ,
Danielle Rickards is a 30-year-old single mother and a full-time caretaker to her 5-year-old daughter, who has a rare heart condition. For many Americans in similar circumstances, the pressures of affording rent and daily expenses are a constant and crushing burden. But she counts herself lucky: She found an affordable two-bedroom apartment in Grand Junction, Colorado, where rent is subsidized by the local housing authority. On top of that, she also receives a rare financial bonus, part of an experimental program to build equity for affordable housing tenants in Colorado. On the 18th of every month, Rickards receives a small cash stipend – $21.62 – in exchange for paying her rent on time.

The National Fight For Rent Control

February 26, 2024 Oksana Mironova, Protean Magazine. , , ,
In April 2015, the Pacific Standard (RIP to yet another quality outlet shuttered) published a defense of rent control—with an opening salvo declaring it dead. New York tenant organizers would go on to win small, highly technical improvements to their rent regulation system a little later that year, but in the broad strokes, the Standard’s appraisal at the time wasn’t wrong. Localized systems in New York, California, and New Jersey were riddled with pro-landlord loopholes, while 31 states had instituted outright rent control bans, most at the behest of a shadowy neo-con organization.

UFCW Local Leads Fight To Win Strongest Tenant Protections

February 13, 2024 Ty Moore, Labor Notes. , , , ,
Grocery and retail workers helped win the strongest tenant protections in Washington state last November for the 100,000 renters in the city of Tacoma. First we had to beat the mayor’s and city council’s attempt to bring a competing watered-down ballot measure. And then we had to overcome a vicious and deceptive landlord opposition that smashed all previous political spending records in Tacoma. “We’ve created incredible goodwill in the community just as we gear up for a tough contract fight,” said Michael Whalen, who helped initiate the campaign as a dairy clerk and shop steward at Fred Meyer.

Tenants Are Teaming Up To Target Voucher-Snubbing Landlords

October 21, 2023 Sam Rabiyah, Next City. , , , ,
Elizabeth Byrd is a single mother of six and grandmother of four who spent 18 years in and out of the Brooklyn homeless shelter system. She is also now working with other tenants to take action against law-breaking landlords and real estate brokers who refuse to accept tenants who use government housing vouchers to pay rent. “The discrimination they’re doing is illegal, and we can do something about it,” said Byrd, who is 50. “We are too determined to give up.” Byrd pays 80% of her current rent with a FHEPS voucher, administered by the city’s public assistance agency for families with a history of eviction or domestic violence.

Tenant Organizing In Unexpected Places

August 7, 2023 Shelterforce, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
Spurred in part by COVID and by a growing housing affordability crisis, tenant organizing is picking up, not just in expected places like New York, but in mid-sized cities like Austin and Baltimore, and even smaller cities like Louisville, Kentucky, and Portland, Maine. Increasingly, tenant organizers are not just winning battles against landlords, but changing public policy. For instance, rent control was passed in Portland, Maine, last November. In this webinar cosponsored by NPQ and Shelterforce on July 12, moderated by Steve Dubb, NPQ economic justice senior editor, and Miriam Axel-Lute, Shelterforce’s editor in chief, four tenant activists shared their stories of direct tenant organizing and policy advocacy.

Tenants Push Biden For Rent Control On All Government-Backed Housing

July 25, 2023 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
In the corner of a Dollar General parking lot on the southwest side of Louisville, across the street from the Nottingham Plaza Drive-Thru Liquor Barrel and an abandoned coin laundry, the Louisville Tenant Union convened for Sunday afternoon canvassing. It was nearly 90 degrees with the June sun beating down from the midday sky, so organizer Josh Poe invited the red-shirted union members to gather beneath the spotty shade provided by a small tree at the corner of the parking lot. Most have canvassed before, but Poe still walked everyone through the process. Today’s goals: have residents of Newberry Parc apartments submit comments online to the Federal Housing Finance Agency about rent hikes and poor housing conditions, and also to invite them to the next tenant union meeting.

LA Failed To Stop Landlords From Turning Low-Cost Housing Into Hotels

July 10, 2023 Robin Urevich and Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica. , , , ,
By law, the American Hotel in downtown Los Angeles is supposed to be reserved for residents who can’t afford to live anywhere else. For decades, the building was a haven in the city’s sky-high housing market, where artists, musicians and people down on their luck could rent rooms for about $500 a month. At the end of the day, longtime tenants would hang out at Al’s Bar, a legendary punk and alternative rock venue on the ground floor where bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers played long before they sold out stadiums. But amid the largest homelessness crisis in the nation, the American’s owner has turned the building into a boutique hotel where tourists can book rooms for as much as $209 a night.
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