A cutting edge of mass organizing today lies with the tenant movement. Across the U.S., tenant unions have been exploding in growth and visibility. Thousands of tenants — from Los Angeles to Kansas City, from Chicago to Connecticut — have unionized in recent years. This is a bottom-up, multiracial, working-class movement that’s directly countering the catastrophe of the U.S. housing system and the power of landlords with the collective power of tenants.
The movement is knitting tenants together into a self-identified class across geography that is carrying out rent strikes, winning critical policy battles, and even shaping the heights of politics. It’s a radical movement: connecting the dots between the housing system and racial capitalism, framing housing struggle as a class struggle, and critiquing the “rent relation” and commodified housing altogether.
While far from a new thing, today’s tenant movement is an expanding vanguard that’s organizing to frontally challenge the nexus of financial and real estate capital at the heart of the corporate power structure. With its focus on confrontation, striking, collective self-organization, and its aim of empowering tenants to assert control over their housing and communities, the movement flouts the decorum of bourgeois and NGO politics to cultivate direct power and direct solutions for rank-and-file tenants.
In 2024, several tenant unions came together to form the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), founded with the goal of “organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, to secure alternatives to the current housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political class that cannot be ignored.”
In this roundtable interview, Truthout spoke with representatives from three TUF affiliates about the importance of collective tenant organizing, challenges they face, advice they have to share, and more. John Washington, an organizer with the TUF who is based in Buffalo, helped bring together the roundtable participants and also chimed in during the discussion.
Edain Altamirano is the organizing director of Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia (United Renters For Justice), which goes by IX, and organizes with tenants across Minneapolis. IX members took on one of the city’s most powerful landlords to buy back housing properties and form the Sky Without Limits cooperative.
Emily LaShelle is the organizing director of the Bozeman Tenants Union in Montana, which has been organizing a growing number of tenants while making headway in curbing some profiteering off of short-term rentals and fighting for a right-to-counsel program for tenants facing eviction.
Josh Poe is an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union in Kentucky, which has won anti-displacement legislation while defending tenants from landlord retaliation. Poe has written about the power of tenant organizing in the South.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Derek Seidman: This might seem like a pretty basic question, but why is it important for tenants to get together and organize collectively?
Edain Altamirano: I can speak for the Latinx community here in Minneapolis. Landlords and developers are trying to break our communities through gentrification and displacement. They see potential in these areas to build new apartments or buy housing.
Organizing is a way to reconnect the community and keep it whole. Most of the people who organize with us do so because they care about the community. They want to fight for their families and neighbors. Organizing is the only way that people can show their power and voice.
Emily LaShelle: Organizing presents people with a choice. When your life sucks, maybe you take out your anger on your neighbor who annoys you or who doesn’t speak your language. Organizing is an opportunity to say to people: Here’s who’s actually making your life suck. Here’s the person making a bunch of money every time your maintenance isn’t happening.
This clarity gives people a choice to get over the issues dividing them and fight the bigger fight that can only be won through unity with each other. That’s at the heart of why I believe in tenant unions so much. People are falling prey to the MAGA narrative. Organizing through the shared identity of being part of a tenant class gives people a choice to do something that will actually help them.
Josh Poe: Here in the South, there are literally no short-term solutions. You’re not going to get help from code inspection or local government. There’s no one coming to save you. If tenants have maintenance issues or mold in their apartment, organizing collectively and building a union is the only solution.
We’re living in fascism right now. There’s a chance that electoral politics will fail us. Tenant organizing is the only thing that will prevent the rise of fascism because of our ability to withhold rent. We can do that in a much more radical and powerful way than labor unions can, and we can also organize a much larger number of people.
How do you understand the power structure that you’re up against as tenants?
Altamirano: The housing system is super racist. That’s the biggest thing we’re fighting against. It segregates people to divide and conquer. We’re up against gentrification. The housing system is made for corporate landlords and developers, not for people. That’s the biggest challenge.
Poe: We’re obviously up against the investor class. In Kentucky, the problem isn’t MAGA. We can out-organize them. The problem is the entire liberal apparatus that’s in our way. The Kentucky Democratic Party is the greatest enemy to working-class people in Kentucky. They represent real estate interests just as much as the Kentucky GOP does, if not more so.
What about Wall Street and private equity?
LaShelle: Absolutely. We actually just trained a cohort of our leaders on how to research who’s calling the shots being behind the LLC that owns your home. Housing portfolios are becoming conglomerated now. They’re bigger and bigger. It requires far more power and organization to bend them to our demands. At its heart, we are fighting this whole apparatus. Watching the investor class acquire more and more helps tenants get real about what’s actually happening. Winning short-term fixes isn’t enough for tenants to actually be in control of our lives.
Why did you decide it was important to affiliate with a national tenant union federation?
Altamirano: Here in Minneapolis, we experiment with a cycle of organizing. People identify issues and struggle to hold the landlord accountable. Deciding to be part of the Tenant Union Federation is part of that cycle of organizing. It’s a resource for people who want to share, learn, and reproduce the same outcomes to every tenant. This struggle is going to exist for a long time. We’re building a community nationally.
LaShelle: More and more landlords and their housing portfolios are crossing state lines. If we have a country full of tenant unions, and we are organized well enough, we could bring them to their knees. I fantasize about that.
Poe: We largely didn’t know what a tenant union was when we started. Once we developed a methodology that we felt strong about, we wanted to share that with other tenants. Labor unions have a century of testing their methodology. We’ve only had a few years. If we can build a knowledge base that we can share and test together, other tenant unions can get started a lot faster. We don’t want to do this work in isolation.
LaShelle: I can’t think of a single thing that we haven’t learned from someone else. Just this week I was talking to tenants at a mobile home park that’s being sold, and they want to buy it. Someone in my union said, “I think IX has some experience with that. Let’s go talk to them.” That happens all the time. We have a deep culture where we know we’re experimenting and building this new movement ourselves. If something works, let’s share it and see how it applies to different contexts.
Altamirano: You don’t know anything until you teach someone else how to do it the same way. You have to share what you know.
What are some of the biggest challenges you face?
LaShelle: Most challenges we face are rooted in fear. Fear makes people turn on their neighbors and grab onto false solutions. Fear makes people believe they can’t win. People have to survive in the short term, and that can prevent them from taking bigger risks in order to win more.
The work we do every single day is to ask people to make a choice and to choose a path that leads to power instead of giving into fear. It’s about clearly laying out what there is to win and what it will take, and letting people know that you got their back to make that choice. People understand it better when they start to see how neighbors can support each other and win smaller things. You can build on that.
Altamirano: When you start organizing, one of the biggest challenges is political education and overcoming the landlord’s narrative and their attempts to divide tenants to prevent them from organizing. The housing system is so racist. People don’t understand how it all works. It’s a struggle to help people understand it and to just humanize people.
Poe: Tenants really have no rights. There’s no National Labor Relations Board governing us. Every protection we win comes from the power we build through organizing tenants. In Kentucky, we also face the threat of violence. Property managers feel they’re above the law. We recently had a tenant get assaulted by a property manager. The only way we can really stop the retaliation we face is through our own ability to organize.
NGOs are also a problem. They’re always ready to step in and take the power we build and confuse people. They also inhibit our ability to fundraise.
John Washington: One of the choices an organizer gives people is an opportunity to think about what they actually want and to not see their situation as natural and permanent. Tenant unions can help clarify people’s self-interest and how they want to live. That’s a big part of how we help people engage in things that normally would be fearful and show people that coming together actually mitigates things that they’re afraid of and brings them closer to the things that they want.
It’s a hard thing to do, because the culture of organizing is really about liberalism and paternalism and about wealthy and more educated people who feel guilty helping people. That doesn’t work, and it’s actually very disorganizing. Being a tenant organizer forces you to get really real about who somebody is, what their life is like, what they actually want it to be, and give them that opportunity through the tenant union.
What advice do you have for others who are starting off with tenant organizing?
Altamirano: Always trust the people. When you start organizing and have to strategize, you sometimes isolate yourself and think you have to provide solutions for people. People will tell you what to follow, so listen to them. Remember that you need to trust and listen to people.
LaShelle: So many people are fighting to be able to make choices about how they get to live their life. Don’t make choices for other people. So much of this organizing is about giving people real choices to make and clarifying what the choices actually are.
Poe: Don’t do it for people. Do it with people. That’s the most important thing. People are resilient. A lot of the people that we’re organizing have lived very difficult lives, and they are capable of amazing things if they’re given choices and are put in the position to be successful.
Amid the day-to-day challenges and setbacks, what keeps you going as an organizer in this tenant movement?
Altamirano: I always joke that I do this work because of the gossip and just talking with people about their lives. Chatting like this is actually a way to organize and keep people together. But this organizing is also about liberation for myself. As an immigrant woman of color, this is a space where I have control about what’s next for me and my family. I have two kids, and they struggle for their identity every day. They are learning that this is part of your culture, your community, your identity. This is something we need to fight for. Seeing all the risks that tenants take every day against awful landlords — it’s inspiring. I’m going to continue waking up and doing this every day because I love the community and I want changes for everyone.
LaShelle: When I’m alone and start feeling things like fear or anger, it’s almost always addressed by just doing the work alongside one of the tenant leaders. We’re more powerful doing things together, and this helps me push away the fear and avoidance that I sometimes feel in myself.
Poe: It’s a real privilege to be an organizer, and I never forget that. Most of the people in my family died before they were 50 years old. They didn’t get an opportunity to do this. I’m motivated by a lot of rage on a daily basis, and that rage is never going to burn out. At the end of the day, we’re all left with this choice: You can give into despair, or you can fight back. And if I want to fight back, I want to win. I want to be a part of the thing that’s most effective.
I stay connected with a lot of other people who are doing this organizing, so I’ve never really felt uninspired. If I do, I just look at my phone, and there are dozens of messages from tenants who are suffering under horrible abuses. And the inspiration comes right back.
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