Tenant Unions Are Coming. Landlords Aren't Ready.

An organizer speaks about collective power in the world of real estate capital.

Dec 11, 2024

Housing is most Americans’ biggest expense. If there is a cost of living crisis in America, housing is its biggest driver. Housing costs are the single most politically salient economic statistic, the one that is most keenly felt by working people, and by voters.

With affordable housing so scarce in post-pandemic America, tenant organizing is on the rise. This year, five local tenant unions launched a national Tenant Union Federation, seeking to elevate rent control and other measures as national priorities. Borrowing from the lessons and traditions of labor organizing (collectively bargained leases, anyone?), tenant unions have already had significant success in building power for low income renters. Across the country, they’ve won everything from repairs at individual buildings to citywide political battles with major real estate interests.

I spoke to Josh Poe, one of the key organizers of the Louisville Tenants Union, about housing policy, the future of tenant organizing, and some of the intriguing areas of opportunity for the labor movement and the tenant movement to work together. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

How Things Work: How did you get involved in tenant organizing?

Josh Poe: I’ve been organizing since I was a kid. I was actually a child laborer in Eastern Kentucky, working in tobacco fields. I started organizing at ten or eleven years old. We were doing piecework. The landowners tried to pay us a nickel a stick for every stick of tobacco we cut, and we actually organized and doubled our wages.

At the same time, they built a lot of prisons in Eastern Kentucky. A prison was proposed to be built next to my grandfather’s farm where I lived, and the community rallied and stopped that prison. I grew up in generational poverty in Appalachia and knew from an early age that organizing is the only solution. I think being from Eastern Kentucky gives you a really unique perspective on capitalism, because I feel like Eastern Kentucky is 20 years ahead of the rest of the country—just where the economy is headed, and the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of the Democratic Party and so forth.

It was very apparent even ten or 15 years ago that tenant organizing is the mechanism to build the largest base and build the largest amount of power. At the same time, you have this huge shift from an industrial economy to a real estate based economy. The actual power is leaving industrial capital and being transferred into real estate capital. So I got involved in tenant organizing in 2008 or 2009.

I read the piece that you wrote last year about tenant organizing as a way to organize the South. Covering labor, I know that “organize the South” is a perpetual quest that we’ve never actually achieved. Why do you think tenant unions are such a promising tool there?

Poe: There’s a very specific reason we don’t have organizing in the South on any scale. And that’s because, after the Civil War, the plantation families in the South basically cut a deal with Wall Street imperialists, and part of that deal was that plantation families get to treat workers in the South exactly how they want. We will keep wages low in the South, lower than the rest of the country. That’s a way to maintain this sort of racial capitalism and equilibrium. We’ll allow unions in the North, and every once in a while we’ll have this massive migration of workers from the South to maintain wage balance.

What we’re seeing now is late stage capitalism. In a place like Eastern Kentucky, there literally aren’t enough jobs to facilitate labor organizing at any sort of scale. At the same time, you have this mass exodus of working class people leaving the Democratic Party. So it’s very hard to run structured campaigns in a place where unemployment is that high, where literally you have surplus population, at a place where the only economy is really a prison economy and a service economy. Meanwhile, everyone is having a housing issue. Everyone is experiencing displacement. There are usually two or three corporate entities behind that. So this is a place where tenant organizing is—I’m not going to say the only option for a structured campaign, but definitely the most powerful option.

Do you see organized labor as a natural ally of what you’re doing? What has been your interaction with organized labor so far?

Poe: I’m hesitant to just use organized labor as a model. There’s organized labor that aren’t even in solidarity with one another. So it’s more nuanced. We’ve had a lot of success organizing with labor unions who really share the same base. So SEIU, the Communication Workers, the bus drivers have been very [in line] with us. The building trades, not so much.

In Louisville, we try to run a building-level campaign. We try to build majority unions in buildings to fight for collectively bargained leases. Much like a labor campaign. And what we’ve [also] had success with is trying to unionize the maintenance staff. We had a two and a half year campaign now where we actually organized the site, 400 units. Got the private landlord to pull out. The Housing Authority took over full ownership of the site, and they just got nine union maintenance workers. The SEIU was ecstatic about that, our tenants were ecstatic about that.

For most people in America, it’s a foreign idea to say that renters naturally have power. What does your organizing process look like?

Poe: We spend a lot of time going through what we call our plan to win. We want tenants to understand that they have tons of power. Oftentimes when you go to a building, tenants are sitting around thinking about “can we call the landlord,” or “can we call a lawyer? Can we call the city? Can we call some nonprofit to step in to regulate the landlord?” What we try to convey to them is, your rent actually pays that landlord’s bills every month. So we’ll go into a building, we’ll get everybody in a room, and we’ll talk about their problems. If you’ve got 30 people in a room and they’re all paying $1000 a month, in that room alone is $30,000 a month. So we really slow walk this plan to win with people, to get them to understand how much power they actually have over the landlord, and how much potential there is in their collective organizing. Their power actually resides in their neighbors.

It’s essentially like going into a workplace. It’s the same conversation, it’s the same process. The difference is that we don’t have laws that actually protect us in that type of organizing. So I think we have to be a lot more thorough. We have to take bigger risks. We have to develop deeper levels of trust. Because in some ways, it’s like where labor was 120 years ago. We don’t have a National Labor Relations Board. We don’t have the right to organize. So everything that we win is totally predicated on the amount of power we can build.

It’s very true—organized labor has this entire legal superstructure built up over a century, and you all are sort of starting from scratch. Is building that kind of legal structure around tenant unions one of your goals?

Poe: It is, but we also want to take a lot of lessons from labor. I see a danger in putting too much power in the hands of the courts and the hands of lawyers. What we really want to look for is the right to strike. We believe that any landlord that takes public subsidies should have to negotiate collectively bargained leases. Those are the types of protections we’re looking for, that put more power in the hands of tenants to negotiate their rents, and less power in the hands of a lawyer to negotiate this through the courts. The lack of legal protections—the flip side of that is we have a lot more opportunities to push a lot harder, to be a lot more bold, to run more intense direct actions. And, frankly, to be a lot more radical in our demands because we don’t have the same relationship with the Democratic Party that labor has.

When you’re organizing in that sort of old school, grassroots method, outside of the imposed legal structure that organized labor has—is the main constraint on how much you can do just a question of how many resources you have?

Poe: Exactly. We have developed a solid methodology through years of rigorous evaluation. The issues right now are deployment. We don’t have enough people trained today to deploy enough people to enough cities to do a national rent strike. However, three to five years out, that’s going to look a lot different.

When you’re organizing, what are the most common demands? What do tenants want?

Poe: Rent control is the big one. Landlords are over-leveraged and overcapitalized, and they are increasing rents at rates that people simply can’t afford. I think people want automatic lease renewals. People don’t believe that landlords should be able to raise their rents by whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like, and they believe that if they haven’t violated their lease, their lease should be automatically renewed.

What people have really bought into is this idea of collectively bargaining their leases. This is new, and we have to spend a lot of time explaining it. But once we break it down to people like, “The landlord puts this lease in front of you, and you have to sign it. You have no power to shape what’s in that lease whatsoever. Why can’t tenants bargain for those as a group? Why does it have to be individualized?” I think in their gut, working class people know that no one is gonna save them. The system has collapsed. And they have power to do something about that.

It seems like the national conversation around housing is mostly focused on supply. We have a national housing shortage, so we must increase supply to bring prices down. Do you see the supply-side people as allies in your fight?

Poe: I think it’s really important to think about where that originates from. What we find is that if tenants are in the room, we don’t have a supply side argument for housing…

So in 2022, we brought the first ever delegation of tenants to the White House. The reason we have a supply side argument is that our elected officials only talk to landlords and their lobbyists. When politicians talk to tenants, they don’t make a supply side argument. We actually pushed Biden to push for rent control before he stepped down. He kinda got our demands wrong, but he said he supported a 5% cap on rents. Harris echoed that demand, and then she made this huge pivot because she had been talking to the YIMBY bros, and went back to a supply side argument.

We want to live in this world where we think capitalism is going to fix this problem, but [we have a national housing shortage of millions of units]. That’s systemic failure. That’s a system that has not been able to produce housing, and I think there’s no way you can really analyze that system and not come away with the argument that we need a massive public investment in housing—that the market cannot produce housing at levels that people can afford, even remotely.

Isn’t there space for both? Adding more housing and what you’re doing could both exist in the same coalition.

Poe: Totally. We’re not against adding more housing. We understand that we’re undersupplied. We get that. But the question is, what housing do you build? Do you build luxury housing and hope that rents decrease somehow magically? Or do you build public housing and social housing for people at the lowest income levels that they can actually afford? It’s not about supply versus not supply. It’s about who gets the housing, who controls it, and how much does it cost.

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Is the second Trump era a concern for you? Or is your organizing grassroots enough that you’ll fly under the radar?

Poe: It’s a concern in terms of the longer arc of this country moving towards a more authoritarian, fascist economy. I think Trump represents an opportunity for working class people to organize around their own interests, and use this moment to catalyze around the fact that Democrats do not represent working class interests. I actually think the tenant movement can represent a base of people, and offer people something the Democrats can’t offer.

Republicans made housing a key issue of their campaign. They made housing costs a key issue of their campaign, but they blamed it on immigration. And that’s something that we actually hear a lot from people out in trailer parks, out in buildings. They don’t know why their rent’s gone up $400 or $500. The only thing they see change about their communities is that immigrants suddenly live there now. So they don’t have the best analysis to explain that. When Trump and JD Vance give them that explanation, the Democrats cannot actually counter that. They can’t tell people who’s actually behind the rising housing costs, because the people behind it are their base and their donors, and they represent their interests. So there’s an opportunity there for the tenant movement to give working class people a villain, and separate the Democratic Party from the base of people that they don’t actually represent—to give those people a political home that they don’t have right now.

Are there other local wins you want to highlight for people?

Poe: We built majority unions in dozens of buildings around town. For all those unions, they’re able to get their maintenance issues fixed almost as soon as they get a majority union. As soon as the landlord hears that people are organizing, they come in and fix a lot of shit.

We also passed a policy last year that prohibited developers who are creating projects that would cause displacement from getting public subsidies. That was a really hard fought battle. We’ll launch policy campaigns in 2025, but our main priority right now is organizing majority level buildings to try to win collectively bargained leases.

The other big win that we’ve had this year that we’re really proud of is that we’ve moved to an entirely democratic structure. We’re holding elections this month, adopting a constitution where we will have a president, a tenant council, and we’ll have a structure that is modeled after a labor union. For us, this is very important, because we want to completely leave this nonprofit organizing space and be very connected with labor. We want to show labor that we are as committed to democratic principles and elections as a labor union, and we would eventually like to maybe find a home with a labor union and kind of marry tenant organizing and labor under the same sort of structure and process.

Tenant Union Federation website | Louisville Tenants Union website | Read In These Times magazine’s excellent coverage of tenant unions, here, here, and here.

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