Rising Tenant-Led Movement Aims to Bring Down Corporate Landlords

[Jilly_in_VA]

Derek Seidman

Acutting 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.”

https://truthout.org/articles/rising-tenant-led-movement-aims-to-bring-down-corporate-landlords/