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Tenant Unions

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.

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

January 12, 2025 Roshan Abraham, Next City. , , , , ,
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. , , , , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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.