Above photo: Members of the Morehead State University chapter of Kentucky Tenants bond at a dorm party. Madi Reffitt.
At one Kentucky university, dorm residents are organizing like renters.
Part of a broader push to bring tenant rights onto campus.
For Morehead State University students Allison ‘Al’ Belter and Madi Reffitt, residents of the university dorms aren’t just students: As people who pay a property owner to inhabit a residence, they’re tenants, too.
With tenant unionization picking up steam in Kentucky and around the country, students organizing through Kentucky Tenants’ MSU chapter are calling on the university to provide better living conditions for their tenants.
The student organization is bringing its demands to Morehead State’s Board of Regents this summer, after months of preparing their campaign. They’re specifically asking for the administration to hire more maintenance workers, in an effort to address what MSU Kentucky Tenants describe as “persistent mold growth,” rodent and insect sightings, and inadequate sanitation.
“Our goal is to bring students together and use the fact that there are several thousand of us on campus, and only a couple hundred administration people throughout, including all of the faculty,” says Belter, the former MSU Kentucky Tenants president. The university’s dorms house more than 2,700 students residing on campus across 15 buildings, per MSU data.
“We have a lot of power, and we want to remind other students that we can use that. We don’t have to just suck it up for two to four years in bad housing conditions.”
Their campaign illustrates the growth of tenant organizing in Appalachia and across America’s rural regions, as well as of student tenant unionization across the country.
Organizing in the Bluegrass State
The Commonwealth of Kentucky has a long history of labor unions, largely in response to poor working conditions on coal mining sites.
Tenants’ unions, a more recent development in Kentucky, build upon the labor movement’s legacy. Instead of wage theft or dangerous working conditions, a tenant union uses collective bargaining power to pressure property owners into addressing mold, infestations, rent hikes, illegal evictions, and other concerns.
“You’ve got a workers’ union, a bunch of people who work in the same place and work together to use their collective power against their employer,” Belter explains. “The tenants’ union would be a bunch of people who have the same landlord, who are working together to make asks of that landlord to improve their housing situation.”
MSU Kentucky Tenants is one of three Kentucky Tenants chapters, including a separate one for Morehead-area renters who do not live in campus dorms. Neither chapter has formed a building- or landlord-specific union, but they engage in housing advocacy across the small town of about 7,000 permanent residents in the Appalachian foothills.
Lexington’s chapter, meanwhile, successfully created the city’s first recognized majority tenant’s union last year. In 2024, the group also advocated for Lexington’s city-county government to successfully pass an ordinance banning income or waiver-based discrimination by landlords. Their victory was short-lived, however, as state legislators passed a bill nullifying these measures just a month later.
Kentucky’s largest city, Louisville, is also home to a separate organization called the Kentucky Tenant Union (formerly Louisville Tenant Union). Organizers have secured big wins in their home city and across the state, effectively organizing and retaliating against individual landlords, including one who owns Kentucky property but lives in New York. Kentucky Tenant Union has even expanded rurally, empowering residents of Meade County and Flemingsburg last summer to organize tenant-majority unions.
The City of Morehead chapter of Kentucky Tenants first launched in early 2023, and the MSU chapter was created in early 2024, reflecting a recent rise in tenants unionization across rural areas.
As a regional university, MSU enrolls thousands of students from even more rural areas. According to the university’s institutional data, as of last year, about 85% of their Kentuckian alumni were from outside of Lexington or Louisville.
“You have to be really in tune with what it’s like to live in a rural area in order to understand the way that we choose to organize. It’s different than a lot of people in bigger areas work with one another,” says Madi Reffitt, who recently took the mantle as MSU Kentucky Tenant’s president. She is a graduating senior from the even smaller Kentucky town of Stanton. Now having lived both on- and off-campus, she knows the ins and outs of Morehead.
“A big inspiration for me was how much I do love it here, and seeing how much housing has been a determinant of whether or not people choose to stay. It’s kind of disheartening because we’re so much more and we’re so much bigger than that,” Reffitt says.
“Rural voices have always kind of been stomped on – but on the flip side of that, we are in a really open-minded little mountain town.”
The growth of student tenants unions
The precise definition of a “tenant” is debatable, but Kasey McNaughton with the New York City-based Youth Alliance for Housing argues that it’s not just someone renting an apartment from a landlord.
“We believe that a tenant is anyone who does not have complete control over their own housing,” she explains. “This includes people who are couch surfing; this includes unhoused neighbors and includes mortgage holders, who are tenants of the bank.”
College students fall in that category, too. But they can face challenges in large-scale union negotiations: a housing contract isn’t quite the same as a lease.
“Universities in this country are some of the largest property owners and some of the most violent landlords that we’ve seen,” says McNaughton. “[School housing contracts] do establish a tenant-landlord relationship between students and their school, but yet they’re not, and students are not provided any type of protection.”
This means little protection from poor living conditions or even from being kicked out of their dorms for participating in political protests, she notes. McNaughton says they’ve witnessed many of these “evictions” in their organizing work at the Youth Alliance for Housing.
“We’ve seen students from many universities across the country be indicted for their work on asking for their universities to divest from stock markets, divest from weapons manufacturing,” McNaughton says. “And we’ve seen students who are thrown out onto the street from universities. They claim that they are not responsible for housing you, yet they offer housing on campus.”
The student union movement was first created to fight for political and social change. One example is the University of Washington’s Black Student Union, formed in the late ‘60s to improve conditions for Black and other minority students.
“Student unions [were] popping up across the country to address tensions with the university, address tensions with classes in which racism [occurred], with the interconnectedness of the two for decades,” McNaughton explains. “It’s not that all of them are refusing to talk about tenant issues; a lot of them are talking about the issues that are very prevalent to them right now.”
Tenant unions began to spring up around the same time, even on the national level. But student tenant unions are much newer.
Many student tenant unions — like the Georgetown Student Tenant Association, founded in 2013 in Washington, D.C. – specifically target students who rent from private landlords off-campus. Dorm residents at the University of Missouri Kansas City released wide-ranging demands in 2022 to improve on-campus housing, including pressure to “provide a formal lease agreement for all on-campus students living in UMKC student housing that defines on-campus students as tenants.” (No updates have been made public since the initial demands in 2022.)
Students at the University of Texas at Austin launched their own student tenant union on their West Campus, which contains both dormitories and non-university apartments. They successfully advocated for the Austin City Council to pass a resolution banning windowless student housing units in 2023.
Students have also organized against university housing conditions without formally unionizing. Howard University students raised alarms for mold and rat infestations in the dorms back in 2021, occupying the student center, creating an encampment, and publicly documenting conditions.
Last year, in the rural Appalachian town of Sewanee, Tennessee, current and former students filed a $35 million lawsuit against the University of the South, alleging that administration had ignored complaints that toxic black mold in a freshman dorm had made them sick.
Belter says MSU Kentucky Tenants is not formally a union. Technically, it’s a registered on-campus club/organization. “We’re not isolated to a specific building or specific landlord,” Belter says. “We’re people from all different areas.”
McNaughton notes that the distinction between a tenants organization and tenant union can be a soft one. “Whatever terminology allows you to stay fully committed to the work, whether it’s calling yourselves an organization, university tenants, or a tenant union,” she says.
In the Youth Alliance for Housing’s own student tenants rights campaign, encompassing students across New York City, these groups are often called communions. All these groups push for the same goal: better living conditions and representation for students in vulnerable housing conditions.
They also share the difficulties inherent in organizing students, including in keeping members engaged and developing leadership skills despite rapid turnover.
“You don’t get anybody for more than three or four years because even a lot of our seniors … are preparing to go to grad school or just really overwhelmed by other things, so they can’t be as active,” says Belter, who joined the organization soon after it launched in early 2024.
“So we’ve got to be very efficient in [recruiting] new people and growing them as leaders, getting them comfortable with different roles and responsibilities so that we can keep being active.”
Last year, the group worked with the student alumni association to collect food and hygiene products. They’ve hosted an event to make blankets for Morehead’s homeless community and others who needs it
But perhaps their most important work has been in making sure students have an outlet to express their concerns about their living conditions.
“For a lot of people, this is their first time being heard by somebody else,” Belter explains. “When we’re tabling [at events], we often get people who we ask, ‘have you had any housing issues?’ They just go on big, long stories, and we’re like, ‘alright, so that’s a new one.’ And we write it down.”
What Morehead students want
Without a clear template to follow, MSU Kentucky Tenants leaders have tried to be thoughtful about defining the organization’s scope. This month, after more than two years of building its foundations, the group took its first actionable step toward improving housing conditions for dorm residents by issuing a proposal and petition to the Board of Regents and.
When MSU Kentucky Tenants formed, its first platform was mold removal, a longstanding issue at the university and a recurring talking point among members. It’s an issue that has plagued several Kentucky universities for years; in 2018, hundreds of Western Kentucky University students were relocated from their dorm due to mold, and multiple students at different institutions reported becoming sick from mold.
But MSUI organizers soon learned mold removal is much easier said than done. “[Mold] is something we hear a lot of, but we realized that’s something that’s really difficult to fix,” Belter says. “We need a little bit more focus than that, so we’ve been doing research.”
By nature of their mission, the Kentucky Tenants officers hear a lot of anecdotes. They say they were able to corroborate at least some reports, including broken washers and dryers, inaccessible handicap entrances, and dorm floods, by inspecting the site themselves.
“A couple of our members live in Andrews, the newest dorm building.” Belter says. A room in Andrews Hall costs between $3,430-$3,690 per semester, making it the most expensive non-apartment dorm.
“[Water] kept leaking into their room onto their floor, pouring this whole puddle that then molded over. It took weeks of them asking, ‘we need to get this fixed,’ for it to get fixed. And even then, housing still tried to charge them for damage.”
The university and Board of Regents did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Members ultimately decided to ask for more maintenance staff to ensure timely repairs. It’s a compromise to deal with any future mold issues alongside other maintenance issues reported by students.
Reffitt says the school is moving in the right direction by constructing new residence halls but that new construction is not the final answer.
“If you build new housing and then don’t have the proper guard rails to make sure that housing doesn’t slowly deteriorate as it has been in the past, we’re just going to end up right back at square one and then tear another one down and build another one again.”
Disclosure: The reporter is a graduate of Morehead State University and a part-time employee at Morehead State Public Radio, which is governed by the Board of Regents at Morehead State University. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect her own.
