12
“No Housing, No Peace”
Louisville tenants are not alone. The organization Action NC coordinated “Cancel Rent” protests at the Charlotte, North Carolina, courthouse in the early days of the COVID pandemic, led tenants in chants of “Housing is a human right!” at various government meetings, and organized canvassing and phone banks to pull together tenants to advocate for their rights.1 A focus is calling out corporate landlords, like one in Charlotte who was repeatedly cited by government inspectors for refusing to address rampant mold, vermin, and dangerous wiring.2 A similar campaign is targeting a corporate landlord in Philadelphia that receives generous government subsidies but has tenants living with roach infestation, leaks and mold, and buildings that are inaccessible to renters in wheelchairs.3
A few summers ago, Action NC organizer Apryl Lewis and other tenants joined with other organizations affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy to make an uninvited appearance at the Washington, DC, meeting of the National Multifamily Housing Council, the trade association of corporate landlords. Dozens of tenants took over a conference room, poured themselves glasses of the fancy lemon- and orange-infused water, and chanted, “Corporate landlords you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side!”
“We go everywhere,” Lewis said in her interview with me. “We not only go door to door, we do banner drops and disrupt official meetings—just be there and be loud so they can’t ignore what is happening to these tenants.”4
Lewis has fought for her own housing, too, juggling multiple jobs as a single mom and barely avoiding eviction multiple times. “The rent kept going up, so I had to be pretty crafty just so I could keep my daughter housed,” she said. When Lewis later began working with youth and families as a counselor, the challenges shared with her kept coming back to housing, by far the top expense in most US households.5
Apryl Lewis and her fellow activists have the public’s attention. Polls show both a great deal of contemporary concern about housing and a commitment to remedying the problem. Two-thirds of Americans in growing metropolitan areas are “extremely/very concerned” about homelessness and the high cost of housing, ranking it as their top priority.6 “Housing is the most critical component for a successful community,” Lewis said. “A lot of issues we are struggling with, like crime, are connected to people not being able to stay housed.”
At a more individual level, as we discussed back in chapter 1, housing insecurity is associated with all manner of health crises, from asthma and heart disease to violence and suicide. “If you are not secure in your housing, your mental health is in jeopardy. You are always stressing, you are always at level 10 because you are fighting for housing,” Lewis said. “I can tell you myself that me sitting here in a comfortable position in my housing, my thought patterns are way better than when I was struggling to stay housed.”
So it should be no surprise that polls also show that three-quarters of Americans agree with the tenants’ chants in Charlotte, Louisville, Philadelphia, and around the nation: safe, secure housing should be considered a human right. Those Americans are not content for that right to be an abstraction: Nearly all the people expressing support of housing as a human right also support expanded government programs to make that right a reality.7
That support is beginning to show at the ballot box, too. Across the country, the biggest winner of the 2022 midterm elections was not the Republicans who regained the US House, nor the Democrats who held on to the Senate. The biggest winner was affordable housing. From Kansas City to Portland, Maine, to the entire state of Colorado, ballot measures mandating and funding more affordable housing won, often by comfortable margins.8
Kansas City voters voted to invest $50 million in affordable housing for low-income residents. Boosted by the grassroots campaigning of KC Tenants, the largest affordable housing investment in Kansas City history was approved by an overwhelming 71 percent–29 percent margin.9 A Columbus, Ohio, proposal to spend $200 million for housing and support for homeless persons was pushed by a broad advocacy coalition and won nearly 70 percent of the vote.10
“Housing is a winning campaign issue. It’s one that voters show up for and it’s one that should cause policymakers at all levels to act,” Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told the Associated Press after the 2022 midterms.11 If those policymakers don’t act fast enough, voters are willing to force their hands. In Colorado, a statewide ballot measure approved a sixfold increase in the income tax dedicated to housing and homelessness initiatives.12 Long Island voters enacted a real estate transfer tax to fund affordable housing, and 70 percent of Austin, Texas, voters approved a $350 million affordable housing bond.13
Palm Beach voters endorsed an additional $200 million for new affordable housing. Action NC’s push helped lead to $50 million being approved for housing, while down the road the people of Asheville, North Carolina, said yes to $40 million.14 Portland, Maine, Richmond, California, and Orlando, Florida, voters all provided majorities to rent control proposals to cap rent increases.15
A new vacancy tax in San Francisco was approved to address the problem of corporations and wealthy individuals owning multiple vacant homes while thousands are without shelter. Despite supporters of the new law being outspent 3-to-1, the tax passed and will require owners of empty homes to be assessed as much as $20,000 per year.16 Corporate landlords’ expensive campaign ads were similarly unsuccessful in convincing Los Angeles voters to oppose the “mansion tax” levy of at least 4 percent on property sales of $5 million-plus.17 This success followed on the 2020 approval by South Side Chicago voters of a housing preservation ordinance for the Woodlawn neighborhood, which requires 25 percent of city-owned vacant land to be set aside for affordable housing, dedicates funds for helping homeowners repair their buildings, and gives renters the right of first refusal if a landlord seeks to sell their building. The Chicago campaign was led by a coalition featuring the tenant unions Not Me We and STOP, Southside Together Organizing for Power.18
And the efforts of the Louisville Tenant Union and other tenant unions to pressure President Biden and Vice President Harris to use the power of federal housing dollars to control rents led to some success. In early 2024, the Biden-Harris administration announced it would impose a cap on rent increases on Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing. The 10 percent annual increase limit is far higher than the 3 percent cap that tenant unions have been pushing for, and the limitation to the LIHTC program leaves out a great deal of other federally financed and subsidized housing. But the rule could apply to over a million households.
“It’s a huge win, and it wouldn’t have happened if not for tenant unions beating the drum for the past several years demanding that every dollar of federal financing and subsidies be conditioned on tenant protections,” Tara Raghuveer of KC Tenants and the national Tenant Union Federation told me in an interview. “The federal government is finally recognizing its responsibility to protect tenants from price gouging.” Later in 2024, after becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Vice President Harris echoed President Biden’s earlier call for a 5 percent rent cap on all rental housing that relies on federal tax breaks, a reform that would require congressional approval. Harris also proposed a $25,000 first-time homebuyer subsidy, announced plans to build more than three million housing units, and said she wanted to withdraw some of the tax breaks enjoyed by corporate landlords.19
The landlord lobby seems to agree with tenant advocates that these plans are significant. The same organizations that cheered the words-only Biden tenant rights’ blueprint of 2023 came together to bitterly criticize the new LIHTC rent cap. “You’re discouraging the creation of supply,” the CEO of the National Housing Conference complained to the Washington Post, repeating the discredited argument (see chapter 7) that rent limits decrease the supply of affordable housing.20 The National Multifamily Housing Council pronounced the Biden-Harris 5 percent rent cap proposal “misguided”; the National Apartment Association called it part of “failed policies that don’t work.”21
Raghuveer is not having it. “For many of these landlords, rent-gouging, evictions, and poor conditions are part of the business model, and what makes their business model work is the favorable terms they receive from our federal government,” she says.
The tenant movement aims to change all that. And it is finding a powerful ally in the labor movement.
Low Wages and Housing
DeJuan comes to the eviction court where we work wearing the royal-blue short-sleeve button-down shirt uniform of a fast-casual restaurant chain. His plastic assistant manager name tag is pinned above his left pocket. Another client, Regina, is anxious about how long court will take, since she had to clock out from the call center job she performs from her kitchen table.
Jorge is still limping from the fall he took through the unfinished ceiling of the construction site where he worked. His employer says Jorge is an independent contractor, so he is not eligible for workers compensation for his injuries. Aaron is off work too. His security guard job dissolved without notice when the company lost its contract for the building where he worked.
Keyanna drives for a couple of different ride-hailing apps, picking up riders whenever she can get child care. April is a home health care worker. So are two other people we represent the same day as April. There are so many home health care workers in eviction court.
I have represented DeJuan, Regina, Jorge, Aaron, Keyanna, and April for years. Well, not them personally. But I have represented hundreds of others who are in the same situation. They work hard at physically and emotionally demanding jobs, but they don’t make enough in wages to keep themselves and their families safely housed.
In fact, a decade ago I wrote a book about these workers called If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement.22 The book told the stories of home care workers, food servers and dishwashers, janitors, and security guards who were trying to raise our state’s minimum wage and bargain for better wages and benefits at their workplaces.
That struggle continues. Nearly one in every three US workers makes less than $15 per hour, far below the amount necessary to pay for rent and other necessities in our city and virtually every other community across the country.23 Those wages are the lowest in the industrialized world, and in real dollars are lower than they were a half-century ago—despite massive gains in worker productivity.24
For our clients, it is rare that even these low wages are paid to them for a full forty-hour work week. Many are among the one in five US hourly workers who are not informed of their schedules until less than a week in advance.25 That means their lives are yanked around by scheduling practices that ensure their hours are far less than they need to pay rent, while also too unpredictable to secure reliable child care arrangements or add on a second job. Most of our clients, especially Jorge and Keyanna and others who are classified as independent contractors—often a self-serving misclassification by employers looking to dodge payroll taxes—get no paid time off, no sick days, and no health insurance.
The well-documented far higher eviction rates for Black-led and women-led households that we discussed in chapter 3 mirror the shameful wage gap those workers endure. The average Black worker makes 21 percent less than the average white worker; women earn an average of 28 percent less than male workers.26 Many immigrant workers like Jorge take home less than minimum wage, yet they pay on average more in taxes than they ever receive in government benefits.27
The workers profiled in If We Can Win Here did not win an increased minimum wage: in our state, it is still only $7.25 per hour. Their unionization efforts had mixed results. The limited protections for workplace organizing under US law meant that many were fired or bullied into abandoning their union campaigns. In 1960, one of every three workers belonged to a union. Only one in ten do today.28 For the workers we see lined up in eviction court, the drop in union membership tracks with the drop in their real wages.29
The Labor Movement and Housing
Yet even a diminished US labor movement carries significant influence on US politics and the economy. In the early and mid-2020s, United Auto Workers, Teamsters, Hollywood writers and actors, Amazon workers, Starbucks workers, and others won high-profile labor victories, while in 2022 unions received their highest public approval rating in Gallup polls since 1965.30 So it is good news for tenants that US unions are increasingly making housing rights a priority.31
The Chicago Teachers Union’s 2024 bargaining proposal called for the city and the Board of Education to create ten thousand affordable housing units with the priority to Chicago Public Schools students and families. The teachers also demanded that unused city and board property be identified and transformed into public housing. The contract of the Boston Teachers Union includes a similar pilot program to house homeless families of one thousand students, and Los Angeles and Oakland teachers’ unions have won commitments to identify publicly owned locations that could be developed into affordable housing.32
Multiple unions played core roles in supporting Los Angeles’s winning mansion tax ballot measure in 2022, which is expected to yield $600 million a year for affordable housing and eviction prevention.33 UAW and SEIU locals were involved in the successful 2022 campaign to win collective bargaining rights for tenants in San Francisco.34 Minnesota rent control legislation was passed with active SEIU support.35 UNITE HERE is pushing forward in the Los Angeles City Council an ordinance that would require developers to replace any housing lost to hotel development and solidify a program to provide temporary housing for unhoused people.36
United Food and Commercial Workers’ canvassing, phone-banking, and funding helped push through the winning November 2023 Tacoma, Washington, bans on cold-weather evictions and school-year evictions of households with students or teachers, a campaign that also had support from a half-dozen other unions.37 Along with the ongoing housing campaigns labor is supporting, multiple teachers’ unions are pressing their school districts to create affordable housing for teachers near the schools where they teach.38 The AFL-CIO’s Housing Investment Trust has used a union workforce to develop affordable housing across the country.39
This labor attention to housing is on the upswing, but it also has plenty of precedent. The landmark National Housing Act of 1937 was pushed by the AFL’s Labor Housing Conference.40 During the twentieth century, unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers built cooperative housing for workers.41
“There is an obvious reason why housing is part of the labor agenda,” Stephen Lerner, senior fellow at Bargaining for the Common Good, a partnership between unions and community organizations and architect of the SEIU Justice for Janitors campaign, told me in an interview. “Even if we negotiate a great wage increase for our members, they are losing ground if rent goes up by twice that amount.”
This is not an idle concern. Since 1985, rent hikes have outpaced wage increases by a whopping 325 percent.42 So it is no wonder that when unions ask their members about their priorities, housing dominates the answers. “Regardless of if you’re a janitor or a nurse or a health care worker or a home care worker, everyone overwhelmingly said the number one issue was housing affordability,” David Huerta, president of the California SEIU State Council, told Vox in 2023. “We have members sleeping in their cars, who have big families sleeping in one-bedrooms, who are traveling hours and hours to get to work because they can’t afford to live near their jobs.”43
When unions turn their attention to housing, they often find familiar names and faces on the other side of the struggle. “Increasingly, the same people who own the housing are the ones who are screwing over workers,” Lerner says. “When you look to see who is the ruling class with political and legislative influence, especially in urban cities, it is real estate.”
Lerner and others cite the example of Blackstone, the private equity firm that is the nation’s largest landlord, employs well over a half million workers, and is notorious for hiking rents and opposing rent control.44 “One lesson we have learned in the union movement is that you have to go up the financial tree to find not just the building owners, but who is funding them,” Lerner says.
Today, unions actively push to reform the tax policies we reviewed in chapter 4 that give huge breaks to the passive income that landlords collect while vigorously taxing the wages workers and renters earn by their labor.45 “The richest people in the world use real estate to avoid taxes, to hide their assets, and to add to their wealth,” Sara Myklebust, research director at Bargaining for the Common Good, told me in our interview. “A lot of those same people own companies and are large employers, too.”
It follows that unions are increasingly committed to fighting the use of workers’ pension dollars to fund the investment firms and corporations that price workers out of housing. Public employee pension funds alone hold nearly $6 trillion in assets, some of which are invested in rent-gouging companies.46 Myklebust calls this practice “assisted suicide,” and she and Bargaining for the Common Good urge that the pension funds instead be investing in affordable housing. “That is workers’ money,” she says. “Blackstone even used the money from California workers’ pensions to fund their opposition to rent control.”
Unions can demand that their employers follow their lead and divest from these bad actors as well. Public-sector workers can call for the governments they work for to stop selling off government-owned property to gentrifying private developers. Private-sector workers can bargain for their employers to stop funding anti–rent control campaigns.47 AFSCME Local 3299 has demanded that the University of California divest from the rent-gouging Blackstone. In early 2024, AFSCME members who worked for the university marched to the chancellor’s office chanting “Break up with Blackstone!” and “No housing, no peace!”48
Labor and Tenants Join Forces
Hope Vaughn was a tenant union organizer before she knew there was a tenant union.
When her New Haven, Connecticut, landlord Ocean Management refused to address the rodents and mold in her apartment, and ignored the standing, rancid water in the building basement, Vaughn’s response was obvious to her. After more than a dozen years as a long-term-care Certified Nursing Assistant member of SEIU Local 1199 NE, she knew the value of fighting back but had no intention of doing so alone. She began knocking on her neighbors’ doors and gathering signatures on a petition that demanded repairs and a cleanup.49
“My union experience taught me that it may be easy for a landlord to ignore one tenant’s complaints. But even powerful people in high places are forced to listen when a lot of us come together,” Vaughn says. “There is strength in numbers.”
One day, Vaughn overheard someone outside a neighbor’s door, asking the same questions she had been posing about the bad conditions in the building. A tenant union organizer was making the rounds. Vaughn joined on the spot, and soon became vice president of the Quinnipiac Avenue Tenant Union. She was part of the team elected by fellow tenants that in 2023 negotiated an agreement with Ocean Management to rescind eviction notices to sixteen residents and enter into Connecticut’s first-ever agreement to collectively bargain with tenants.
The public rallies in support of those tenants were bolstered by a big union presence, and every member of the tenant negotiating team had labor union experience. “Tenants and workers have one thing in common: they have a rich person who is oppressing them,” says Dave Richardson, a longtime Carpenters Union member who joined Vaughn on the tenants’ negotiating team. “The contractor and the landlord are both committed to giving as little as possible.”
Vaughn says that her labor union experience was helpful when she needed to reassure her fellow tenants. “Especially at the beginning, we got some pushback from some neighbors who were scared to make management mad,” she says. “We were able to tell them that we all have rights, and a union is how we can stand up for ourselves.”
Richardson explains it to fellow tenants this way: “Being union teaches you that you can’t win a fight that you don’t fight.”
The success won by Vaughn and Richardson and their fellow members of the Connecticut Tenants Union is one of the most promising examples of labor-tenant partnership. Rob Baril, president of SEIU Local 1199 NE, points out that the union’s long-term-care workers in Connecticut often struggle to make ends meet in a state where it can cost $90,000 a year to cover the high cost of living. “We won 33 percent raises in 2020, but that can quickly get eroded by inflation, especially the cost of housing,” he says.
So Local 1199 began collaborating with the tenants’ union, not just with organizing help and rally turnout but also with financial support. “Our members were very ready to have some of their dues money going to support tenant organizing,” Baril says. “They get it, because they are living it. Even if they individually are not getting crushed by housing costs, they know many coworkers who are.”
Hannah Srajer, president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, says the collaboration with Local 1199 has helped the tenants create a labor-inspired organizing methodology that prioritizes democratically elected committees, majority-based membership, and strike readiness. “A lot of people in labor know how to fight, they know how to win material gains for their members, and they know how to build lasting organizations,” Srajer says. “We are starting to do all that in tenant unions.”
Tara Raghuveer of KC Tenants and the Tenant Union Federation agrees. “Labor has figured out not only how to build power but to exercise power, in a way that the tenant movement is still learning how to do,” she says. “For example, the strike power is a profound one. A labor strike and a rent strike are not identical, but there are a lot of lessons to be learned from organizers who have taken shops out on strike.”
Beyond alliances with tenant unions, there is deep labor support for the groundbreaking Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would dramatically increase the stock of social housing. This support makes sense for labor on multiple levels. A massive investment in social housing would help workers meet their housing needs while at the same time creating union jobs in the building of those homes. Those social housing construction jobs can endure during the economic downturns when jobs in the for-profit construction industry traditionally dry up.
For anyone familiar with other nations’ housing success, a growing labor-tenant alliance in the US is exciting stuff. Organized labor played a big role in the creation of social housing in places like Sweden, where workers have come together to form a cooperative that builds and manages housing, while a National Tenants Union bargains for tenant rights and lower rents.50 The labor movement helped spur Vienna’s historic commitment to building and maintaining social housing.51
Labor and tenants coming together will help both movements grow, Connecticut Tenants Union’s Srajer says. “A lot of our members are working low-wage jobs where they need a workplace union,” she says. “We are all fighting against corporate greed in the end. The same guys who are buying up whole neighborhoods, jacking up rents, and no-cause evicting folks are the ones bankrolling the nursing homes that underpay and mistreat their workers.”
SEIU Local 1199NE’s Baril agrees. “We have to construct a twenty-first century, integrated movement for working-class rights. That obviously has to include the ability to have shelter fit for human beings to live in,” he says. “Tenant unions are going to be the tip of the spear for that effort, but some of the resources needed are going to have to come from labor unions.
“Us doing that is not charity. That is self-interest.”