What is a Tenants Union?
Tenant unions are building, neighborhood or city-based organizations made up of and led by renters themselves to fight for our collective interests and rights.
Building-based tenants' unions are generally made up of tenants who live in the same building and/or have the same landlord. Neighborhood and city-based tenant unions are networks of tenants who often have similar issues and stand in solidarity with each other but may live in different buildings or have different landlords.
Why Join a Tenants Union?
There is power in numbers!
Everyone is talking about passing rent control and eviction protections, but where do you start? How do we build enough power to stay in our homes and communities and thrive?! We do this by organizing. We must organize because overcoming fear and isolation is impossible to do alone. We organize because we seek to transform people's fear and isolation into dignity and solidarity in your home, community, and state. Organizing isn’t just sending out an email or creating a social media page, although those will likely be steps that you take. Organizing is building real face-to-face relationships between you and your neighbors over time. The organization of tenant unions is the building block to our translocal, statewide, and international movement.
Besides preventing evictions, increasing solidarity between tenants, and holding landlords accountable, tenants' unions have successfully fought for and won relocation assistance, bans on one-way leases for month-to-month tenants, a formerly “non-negotiable” lease, and carrying out a rent strike. This list is not exhaustive and only outlines the world of possibilities once you and your fellow tenants decide enough is enough.
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We can not sit idly by while people are pushed out of their homes with no direction. People have suffered too long with unsafe housing conditions, bad-faith landlords, infestations, black mold, and increasingly expensive rents. The power of a tenants' union proves that, even when the cards are stacked against us, it only takes a little momentum to topple over the whole deck. Unifying under a common goal inevitably tips the scales of power. It all starts with a knock on your neighbor’s door.
