Tenant Unions

Tenants Confront Landlord Disruption

December 2, 2025 Peter Fousek and Cameron Harrison, People's World. Resist! Housing, Landlords, Tenant Unions, union busting

The struggle over who controls the roof over a worker’s head erupted into open confrontation on the steps of New Haven City Hall last Thursday, as a newly formed public tenants union at Sunset Ridge Apartments faced down a landlord-backed “counter-demonstration.” The response by the landlord, Capital Reality, which included counter-protestors, police presence, and a union-busting law firm, highlights the growing battle between private equity and working-class renters in a national tenant organizing drive.

Have Private Equity Landlords Met Their Match?

September 10, 2025 Thomas Birmingham, In These Times. Strategize! Housing, Landlords, Tenant Unions, Unions

The most Gerene Freeman saw of her landlord on August 6 were several pairs of eyes peeking out between the blinds of a dark office building. That Wednesday was the day Freeman, a 76-year-old retired creative writing teacher, and her neighbors — all tenants of a New Haven, Conn. apartment complex for elderly and disabled residents called Park Ridge — had formally launched a tenants’ union. They had driven more than two hours to their landlord’s office in Rockland County, N.Y., to deliver a letter announcing the creation of the Park Ridge Tenant Union and demanding to negotiate for better conditions. But they found themselves completely stonewalled: first misdirected to a seemingly vacant building in New Jersey, and then returned to find people clearly visible inside the New York office who would not open the door to receive their letter.

Striking Tenants Withhold Rent For 247 Days And Win

June 6, 2025 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. Strategize! Kansas City, Missouri, Strikes, Tenant Unions, Tenants, Victory

Tenants in Kansas City are declaring victory after eight months on rent strike—the longest such action in the city’s history. Residents of Independence Towers, an 11-story building with a troubled history, won a contract with their landlord that stabilizes rents and imposes deadlines to complete plumbing and other major repairs. To reach the deal, tenants formed a union, waged a months-long pressure campaign and, ultimately, negotiated through an elected bargaining committee — an outcome that lends momentum to efforts to adapt labor union strategies for housing fights.

Home Is Where The Union Is

May 7, 2025 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. Strategize! Connecticut, Housing, Tenant Unions, Unions

Hartford, CT — Three years ago, Dave Richardson was spending half of his monthly income on an apartment with rats, roaches and a broken elevator. A stroke had made climbing the stairs difficult, forcing him to limit trips outside of his third-floor home. Other wheelchair-bound tenants had to be physically carried up and down. The landlord was ignoring phone calls, Richardson says, but one day in 2022, a group of organizers came to his door with a pitch to build a tenants union. It didn’t take much to convince Richardson. Before his stroke, he had spent nearly two decades as a member and elected officer of the carpenters’ union. The prospect of mobilizing neighbors to demand a working elevator, for starters, made intuitive sense.

Labor Union Lessons In Solidarity Are Fueling Tenant Organizing

April 20, 2025 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Housing, Solidarity, Tenant Unions, Unions

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.

Abolish Rent, Yes, For Real

January 28, 2025 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Housing, Los Angeles, Rent, Tenant Rights, Tenant Unions

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.

Kansas City’s Striking Tenants Want Biden To Act Fast On Rent Cap

January 12, 2025 Roshan Abraham, Next City. Organize! Biden administration, Housing, Kansas City, Rent Strike, Tenant Unions, Unions

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.

Los Angeles Tenant Union Founders’ Call To Action

October 14, 2024 Roshan Abraham, Next City. Organize! Book Review, California, Housing, Housing Crisis, Los Angeles, renter's rights, Tenant Unions

Tracy Rosenthal and Leo Vilchis first met in 2012 through an activist art project in Los Angeles called the School of Echoes. The project took Vilchis, Rosenthal and others to six different L.A. communities on listening tours to hear residents’ concerns. The concerns they encountered were largely about displacement, gentrification and the feeling that people were being pushed from their communities. Their attempt to address these problems led to the creation of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has a membership of 3000 due-paying households. And over the past 9 years, the pair has worked alongside some of the union’s local chapters to coordinate some of the most public, and often successful, organizing fights on behalf of tenants in the country.

A National Tenants Union Has Arrived

August 7, 2024 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. Organize! Affordable Housing, Housing, Tenant Unions, Unions

Five tenants unions from around the country convened Tuesday to announce the launch of a new national organization to take on the power of multistate real-estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation marks the first major national effort at tenant organizing in 40 years. “Every tenant deserves a union — everyone deserves to move with the kind of power I found here,” said Donna Goldsmith, an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union (one of the federation’s founding members) to a virtual audience of renters from around the country. Goldsmith moved to a senior-living community in Louisville looking for a fresh start after the murder of her daughter and two grandchildren more than a decade ago.

The Future Of Housing Organizing: Tenant Unions

July 25, 2024 Rose Lenehan, In These Times. Organize! Affordable Housing, Housing, Tenant Unions, Unions

Daniel Tyson had 15 days to find a place he could afford. For several years, Tyson lived at a hotel in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he paid $125 weekly. His rent would have been slightly less if he paid monthly, but the full-time warehouse shipping clerk couldn’t save enough. Then, developers decided to kick everyone out to demolish the building and expand a luxury hotel. It was October, and the snowbirds were beginning their trips south, a migration that makes the rental market even tighter. Daniel had nowhere to go. Celia Williams had lived in her building in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago for a little under a year when she began to see bed bugs.

Combatting The Housing Crisis With The Crown Heights Tenants Union

February 26, 2024 Mel Buer, The Real News Network. Organize! Housing, Renter Rights, Tenant Unions, Unions

Some 34% of available housing stock in the US is rented by tenants, who number over 114 million people. Among tenants, more than 40% pay over 35% of their monthly income towards rent alone. As wages stagnate and rents rise, the fight against landlords, evictions, and developers becomes more urgent to the class struggle day by day. The Real News speaks with Esteban Girón from the Crown Heights Tenants Union on the housing crisis roiling America and how tenants can fight back.

New York’s Tenant Unions Are Playing The Long Game

February 1, 2024 Teddy Ostrow, The Real News Network. Strategize! Housing, New York City (NYC), Rent control, Tenant Unions

In the summer of 2022, a few months before her rental lease was set to expire, Lucy Rinzler-Day saw a provocative poster hanging in her apartment building’s elevator. The poster—which, she would later learn, was made by her neighbor—warned tenants of the 32-unit building in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to be on the lookout for illegal rent increases on their lease renewals. Their apartment building is rent stabilized, a form of housing regulation that protects tenants from exorbitant rent hikes and gives them the right to renew their leases. Any rent hike over 3.2% that year, as established by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, would be illegal.

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