7d ago

Tenant Unions Are Coming. Landlords Aren't Ready.

www.hamiltonnolan.com

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

69 comments

What does a strike look like? Everyone moves out? It’s not so easy to just stop renting.
- If you stop paying, it's your problem, if everyone stops paying, it's the landlords problem
  
  It depends. I don't know how many rentals are mortgaged vs owned. I suspect they can evict you faster than they run out of cash.
  
  I suppose you could have a landlord-specific-union. If I own and rent out 3 houses then I’d just evict all 3. If I owned 50 houses, I could just obfuscate true ownership through various LLCs. If you didn’t know all my properties, you couldn’t form any meaningful union against me. Apartment complex would be fucked though.
- If enough people stop paying rent, then they have to negotiate with them as a group. They can't evict everyone.
  
  Uhmm ... yea, you CAN evict everyone. It's called an eviction. Don't pay rent, get evicted. Don't move out when evicted, get trespassed and thrown out by the Sheriff. A renters union won't do shit. Laws need to be changed to scale property tax so the more properties you own the more taxes you pay.
- I think an all out strike as in, not paying rent, is a very serious and aggressive option that you'd only exercise in extreme circumstances.
  Unionising provides a lot of power to tenants long before going that far.
  For example, as a group you can afford legal representation.
- Rent strikes exist and have worked. The realities of evicting everyone is slow and costly legal process that can be disrupted in various ways. The point is to make it so costly that ceding to the tenant union's demands become the better choice. There is a book Abolish Rent that goes into some tenet union victories and lessons can be learned from them.
- Pay rent into a communal escrow.
- Besides what other people already answered here: Solidarity will also go a long way. Workers in the old days faced the same dilemma: When they go on strike, will they lose their job? A lot of them did. Solidarity saved them and made the movement work.
  In the context of housing, solidarity can take the form of organized people in a town agreeing upfront: "If folks from one house get evicted, they can move in with us." Of course this requires a lot of trust—just like the person in the article says. And whenever it should come to this, it will be costly and inconvenient, even burdensome, for everyone involved. Just like filling a strike fund from already low wages was. In the end it worked.
  Without solidarity, we are defenseless.
- Stop paying, same as any other boycott? I've done this thought experiment before, and while I think tenant unions are possible (and very much needed), they definitely aren't as simple to implement as labor unions.
  To start, people would need to live more minimalistically so that "just moving out" can at least be a (last resort) tool in the union's toolbox. This makes tenant unions antithetical to consumerism, a quality not shared by labor unions.
  To really thrive, tenant unions would also require people to actively know and interact a lot more with their neighbors, again fighting the trend of increasing social isolation and complacency caused largely by corporate (read: for-profit) social media.
  Personally, I want to see a sharp increase in co-living (a.k.a communal living). That would greatly lower the buy-in threshold for tenant unions to really take off, not to mention all the other mental, social, financial, and environmental benefits.
  
  100 people can pool their money together and hire a really good lawyer. 1,000 people could destroy a property management company. $20/month per household would add up fast.
- Why is it called a strike? Why do we call it that and band together? If you know, you'll know what all unions should be doing in this Age of Terror

My last landlord didnt fix a water leak for 9 months. The only reason they came to fix it is because i withheld rent and threatened to call the city after our bathroom closet was infested with black mold and my roommates wall on the other side slid off onto the floor.
Oh and btw they still had the balls to send someone to serve me with a warning to evict if i didnt pay in full within 3 days lmfao
- Where I live it takes like...30-60 days to actually evict someone by following proper protocol. And that's if they don't fight it in court and whatnot.
  What'd you do with the served papers? I hope wiped with them.
  
  I paid them, didnt have the time or money to fight them. I just moved out asap. There was a lot of other stuff going on at the time and i'm sure they knew i didnt have the resources to dispute it

I fantasized about forming a tenant's union when I was still renting but the people I talked to about it were completely unfamiliar with the concept and thought it was stupid so I gave up. Now the company I used to rent from has bought up pretty much all the apartment complexes in the area and people who rent from them are complaining about immoral and illegal stuff they're doing but won't consider actually doing anything about it. Anti union sentiment is deep in America and I don't have any hope for the American public to do anything to help themselves.

Welcome to the 20th century Americans, almost there!

Very bold of them to assume that corporations won't immediately use force to bust these unions and make any participants homeless and unrentable as an example.
- Yes that is always a risk. That's why you need MORE unionization.