Housing Prices Lead to National Tenant Organizing

Five local tenant unions around the country are joining forces to share strategies for local fights with landlords and city leaders and build momentum for changes to national housing policy.

The Tenant Union Federation, launched last week, is a coalition of local tenant groups in Kansas City, Mo., Louisville, Chicago, Connecticut, and Bozeman, Mont. Each group has organized a base of renters in its own city or state, giving tenants a platform to negotiate with landlords and push for local housing investments and changes to public policy.

Housing costs are high and growing, with average rents increasing nearly 20 percent nationwide since 2019. And organizers say tenants are increasingly subject to the interests of corporate landlords with large housing portfolios in multiple states — a change that reduces the efficacy of local advocacy, they say.

The federation, which grew partly out of national progressive campaigns for social housing and tenants’ rights over the last half-decade, envisions housing as a guaranteed public good. Now it has to figure out how to make that happen. “The tenant union is the vehicle for power,” says Tara Raghuveer, the founder and director of the Tenant Union Federation.

Growing Housing Crisis

The Tenant Union Federation has grown out of a housing crisis that’s been ballooning for more than a decade. The cost of building is higher than it’s ever been, high-quality housing is in short supply, landlords increased rent prices sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, and homelessness is at record levels across the U.S. Evictions have also been rising in the last few years.

Moreover, tenants say, landlords are increasingly multijurisdictional investors, rather than local residents who own a few buildings. “Tenants are not just up against old school landlords,” John Washington, a tenant organizer in Buffalo, said during a public Zoom call announcing the launch of the Tenant Union Federation last week. “We’re facing a class of investors who turned our rent and the buildings we live in into a casino where they bet on our lives.”
Cities and states have responded to the crisis with an array of policies, many aimed at changing zoning laws to promote new housing construction. YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) advocates have pushed for a rollback of exclusionary zoning policies nationwide, arguing that increasing the housing supply will lead to greater competition and lower housing prices. Those efforts have paid off in some places. California, for example, has seen a huge influx of accessory dwelling units in the years since lawmakers made it easier to build them. But the state still has an affordability crisis, and studies have suggested that zoning reforms have yet to have a significant impact on housing supply and affordability.

Moreover, tenant groups say that renters can’t afford to wait for zoning reforms to work. They have pushed for policies that they say would protect renters in the short term, including rent control, rules requiring landlords to show good cause for eviction filings and legal assistance for tenants in eviction court. Some cities and states have adopted versions of those policies — notably Oregon and California, which both passed laws capping annual rent increases for many apartments in 2019.

Tenant unions and YIMBYs are both responding to a shortage of quality affordable housing, but they often come from different political orientations. Tenant groups are often allied with an array of left-wing causes and hostile to private developers, while YIMBYs, though typically aligned with liberal Democrats, see new, for-profit, market-rate housing as the primary solution to the housing crisis. The groups have found themselves in uneasy partnerships in some places, like Austin, and open conflict in others, like San Francisco. From a policy standpoint, they’re complementary movements, says Laura Foote, the executive director of YIMBY Action, a national advocacy network.

“If you only have tenant rights, that means you only have the apartment you’re in,” Foote says. “You need both parts. You need to be able to find another apartment in the same neighborhood and have that not be a crisis.”

Linking Local Efforts

The Tenant Union Federation, meanwhile, is working to build power for “tenants as a class,” partly by linking together local advocacy efforts. It is partly an outgrowth of the Homes Guarantee Campaign, which Raghuveer helped lead while working with the national progressive group People’s Action. It’s meant to be a “union of unions,” and the founding organizations claim a variety of wins.

Kansas City Tenants, the oldest of the groups, was founded in 2019 by Raghuveer, who returned to her hometown to organize tenants after researching evictions while studying at Harvard University. The group has steadily gained influence in Kansas City politics. It pushed for a tenants’ bill of rights that was eventually adopted by the City Council, and later helped win a $50 million contribution to the city’s housing trust fund. The group has helped elect some of its own leaders to the City Council. Earlier this year it played a role in successfully organizing against a vote to expand a sales tax for the city’s two sports stadiums. “We believe that using power builds power,” Raghuveer says.
The Tenant Union Federation is planning to hold training sessions for tenant organizers in different cities. It’s working with 10 tenant groups to assess their readiness to organize property-level rent strikes. The groups are planning to experiment with different models for paying dues. That’s a practice that’s been more “loosey-goosey” in the setting of a tenants’ union than a labor union, Raghuveer says, because members are often poor. But building more formal structures and independent financing for tenant organizing is part of the goal.

Bozeman Tenants United, founded in 2022, successfully pushed for a citywide ban on short-term rentals in second homes, an attempt to prevent investors from buying up the city’s housing stock and using it for profit on services like Airbnb. One of the group’s leaders, Joey Morrison, was recently elected mayor. Another leader, Ozaa EchoMaker, was appointed to an affordable-housing advisory committee for the Federal Housing Finance Agency earlier this year.

Calling for Rent Caps

The group is also pushing for nationwide policy changes. It is pushing for a cap on rent increases from corporate landlords, focusing especially on properties with federally backed mortgages.

“There’s real limitations on what we can win at the local level, and many of us are in states where almost nothing is winnable at the state level,” says Raghuveer. “We need federal action to regulate this market and create alternatives to it.”

Biden and Harris both recently said they support a plan to cap annual rent increases for large landlords. But the plan would require congressional approval, which is unlikely in the near term.

Rent control remains very unpopular among economists, and real estate groups often lobby against it at the state and local level. Economists say that price caps like rent control reduce incentives to build new housing, which ultimately leads to a shortage of supply and higher prices in the long term.

The policy is “universally and, to my mind, correctly derided,” says Judge Glock, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute. Longstanding zoning regulations have helped drive up housing costs, Glock says, along with the post-2008 housing market crash, a surge in demand for housing when interest rates were low during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a slowdown in building as interest rates have risen again. Those factors have created a political environment that’s more favorable to rent control than any time in recent decades, Glock says.

“Everyone should be concerned that these rent control movements are gaining more attention and having more success,” he says. “It is not a positive policy that anyone should be pursuing, even if the goals of these movements are to reduce the cost of housing.”

Landlord groups have responded with alarm to the Biden administration’s professed support for rent caps as well, even as they’ve welcomed efforts to invest in affordable-housing construction and reduce barriers to development.

“Policies that work against the development of more housing ultimately hurt renters, housing providers and local communities,” a spokesperson for the National Apartment Association said in response to questions from Governing. “Decades of academic research and real-life case studies consistently show that rent control — while often well-intentioned — devastates housing supply and exacerbates affordability.”

The Tenant Union Federation says it’s trying to be clear-eyed about the political difficulties of making radical policy shifts. So while it’s calling on national leaders to take progressive steps to help renters, it’s also working to build the infrastructure of a bigger, more powerful tenant movement.

“We want alternatives to this market,” Raghuveer says. “The horizon is not rent caps. Rent caps are a step toward a horizon that is a different system entirely.”