“We Need Housing in This Spot, Not a Rich Kid Parking Lot!”

Private police officers guide a line of late-model SUVs through the January morning’s cold rain, waving them into a lane of Louisville’s Grinstead Avenue specially cleared all the way to the entrance of Collegiate School. As brake lights flash through the gloom, children in plaid uniforms climb out of the vehicles and head inside. Collegiate, founded by a plantation-owning Kentucky family and led by a board president who is the heir to the Brown-Forman liquor dynasty, has a tuition of $26,000 per year.

Just to the west of a new, modern Collegiate playground is the Yorktown Apartments, separated from the school grounds by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Outside one of the Yorktown buildings, where the monthly rent averages $845, two dozen people stand in the rain. Jasmine Harris, her winter coat partially open to show a crimson red Louisville Tenants Union T-shirt, steps to a microphone facing television news cameras.

“Everyone deserves a home that is safe, but too many of us are choosing between medicines and food and paying the rent,” she said. “And that ain’t right!”¹⁷

“That ain’t right!” repeat the people assembled behind Harris. Most are wearing the same red shirts.

“Landlords think they can treat us however,” Harris continued. “They keep us living in terrible conditions and evict us if we speak up!”

“That ain’t right!”

“Our landlords are nameless, faceless corporations like Collegiate School, and they want to demolish our homes to build parking lots!”

That, it turns out, is why these people have gathered this morning. A few years ago, Collegiate purchased Yorktown, which has thirty-five low-cost apartments in a community where city officials have agreed there is a need for thirty-one thousand more affordable housing units.¹⁸ But Collegiate has other priorities: it is seeking government permission to tear down the Yorktown Apartments to clear the way for a fifty-six-car parking lot.

This time, the reply chant to Harris includes a young man with a bullhorn. The message is singsong, but quite specific.

“We need housing in this spot / Not a rich kid parking lot!”

Harris introduces several of the Yorktown residents. Across the courtyard from the speakers is a ground-level apartment with a two-foot-by-three-foot hole in its front door and broken windows surrounding it. The residents have already shown the gathered media their apartments, pointing out mold, rodent tracks, and water and fire damage. They describe futile efforts to get maintenance responses from Collegiate. “Since we got the notice in October that they want to tear the buildings down, they just quit taking care of the place,” Yorktown resident Patrick McCarthy says.

Harris returns to the microphone and changes the tone from grievance to power. This press conference was scheduled to be a prelude to a local architectural review commission meeting set later that day, where Collegiate’s demolition application was on the agenda. The tenants intended to show up at the meeting and make these same points, loudly. But Collegiate pulled its demolition request the day before, the second time it has done so when word of a protest was leaked.

Harris lists the demands for Collegiate: help tenants with moving costs and the increased rents for nearby living, and stop demolition plans until all tenants are safely relocated. These demands will be met, Harris insists. Six weeks later, at a meeting attended by Yorktown residents and other Louisville Tenants Union members, the local architectural review committee voted 3–2 to deny Collegiate’s request to demolish the Yorktown buildings.¹⁹

“We are poor, we are working class, we are old, young, Black, brown, white, and everything in between. We are organizing across lines others use to divide us,” Harris said. “We know the people who run Collegiate are the descendants of wealthy plantation owners, and they are used to pushing people like us out of the way.”

“Tenants Will No Longer Be Silent”

The March 2020 killing of medical worker Breonna Taylor in her apartment by Louisville police officers led to months of demonstrations. One of the protest themes centered on the area’s police violence and the raid on Taylor’s apartment being fueled in part by government-funded gentrification and displacement in Louisville’s historically Black neighborhoods.²⁰ In response to Taylor’s killing, a group of advocates found that they shared deep and personal interests in the rights of tenants.

Harris and her children had been struggling to get their landlord to respond to unsafe conditions. Shemaeka Shaw had been assaulted by law enforcement during an eviction. Josh Poe from rural Kentucky and Jessica Bellamy from Louisville’s urban Smoketown neighborhood had endured their own housing insecurity and were already organizing Black and white tenants. In early 2022, they and other renters came together to form the Louisville Tenants Union, or LTU.

The original LTU plan was to do a policy-focused effort, likely around a tenants’ bill of rights with a right to counsel in eviction proceedings. But as they talked through these ideas, several of the LTU members reported problems they faced with the CT Group, a Maryland-based private corporation. CT Group had a contract with the Louisville Metro Housing Authority, or LMHA, to manage two of the city’s largest public housing sites. LTU members and others in CT Group–managed housing were dealing with flooding, mold, rodents, and broken lights in parking areas, with little to no response to their outreach to management.

So, the tenants’ bill of rights plans were put on hold, and the fight to improve public housing conditions began. “We organize through struggle,” Josh Poe said. “Our vision as part of the national tenants’ movement is a homes guarantee, but when we get a group of tenants together we have to deal with their immediate issues. That is how we build a powerful base—which ties into the larger goals.”

So LTU shared tenant complaints on social media, used public records requests to document the pattern of neglect at CT Group–managed housing, and staged a “walk in” to present demands at an LMHA board meeting.²¹ At a demonstration and press conference outside CT Group’s local offices, Shemaeka Shaw said, “As an impacted resident, my mission is to create housing for every tenant in Louisville that is safe, decent and permanently affordable. We believe that housing is a human right, not a commodity.”²²

Shaw’s self-description as an impacted tenant was an understatement. After growing up in Louisville, and never having been evicted or arrested before 2016, she endured a nightmarish sequence of events. First, she alleges that she was sexually assaulted by her landlord, who had a Section 8 housing contract with the LMHA. When Shaw reported the assault, the landlord retaliated by filing a court action for eviction, despite Shaw being current on her rent.

A mediation agreement with the landlord gave Shaw and her two-year-old son thirty days to move. But just ten days later, the landlord and two deputy sheriffs showed up at the home to put her out. When Shaw tried to explain the thirty-day agreement, one of the deputy sheriffs knocked her to the ground, carried her out of her home—in her nightgown and without underwear—and charged her with criminal trespassing and resisting arrest.

A jury eventually exonerated Shaw on all charges, and the sheriff deputy was later convicted of perjury and tampering with evidence on multiple cases.²³ But, by that time, Shaw had spent time in jail after her arrest and then had been hospitalized for the injuries she sustained. She lost most of her possessions in the process. Shaw and her son were homeless for eight months. “We were pillar to post, just living with what family would take us in,” she said.

Shaw’s next rental home failed four inspections for exposed wiring before catching fire in April 2018.²⁴ Again, she lost all her belongings. Remarkably, her renting troubles were still not over. Shaw and her son, along with a teenage niece, moved into yet another Section 8–subsidized home. She had neither the time nor resources to be choosy. So she did not know that her new landlord, who owned hundreds of properties, had been branded Louisville’s worst landlord by a local television station investigation a few years earlier.²⁵ Shaw filed complaints with the city about serious mold and mildew problems, the windows being nailed shut, and some of the electricity not functioning. Her landlord responded by filing a court action to evict her.

So, in mid-May 2019, Shaw was again forcibly removed from her home and the locks changed. When she and some family and friends returned shortly after to pack up some of her items that the landlord and deputies had thrown into the yard, Shaw was again arrested, this time charged with felony burglary. She spent six days in jail.

Clearly, Shaw endured an exceptionally horrible set of harms and abuses. But she and other LTU members point out a larger theme: these were acts of state-sponsored violence, visited on Shaw when she challenged real estate capital. It is a response they say is part and parcel of the structural violence routinely visited on Black people in US communities.

Shaw and her son now live on Louisville’s west side. She is convinced that tenants coming together is the best way to prevent others from enduring what she has experienced. “I’ve learned to redirect my trauma into fire,” she said. “I would have had different outcomes if I had the tenant union behind me. The powers that be told me I was crazy, but that’s harder to say when I am standing next to one hundred other people who have gone through the same thing.”

So Shaw and other LTU members kept up the pressure on CT Group and the LMHA. When they made a presentation to the Louisville Metro Council about the crisis, they gained the attention of Metro councilor Jecorey Arthur. Arthur ended up joining LTU members at a press conference to announce he was filing a resolution calling for the LMHA to terminate its contract with the CT Group.

“The LTU is showing tenants they have power,” Arthur said. “I’ve seen tenants who were hopeless about change get motivated by the union. Even if they haven’t joined it yet, they are seeing a group of people who live where they live and go through what they go through get wins.”

After weeks of tenants advocating to council members, the Metro Council unanimously passed Arthur’s resolution. Less than a week later, the CT Group announced it was walking away from its contract with the LMHA. The city’s top newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, made it clear why that happened: the decision was due to “consistent pressure from members of the Louisville Tenants Union.”²⁶

Councilor Arthur agrees. “The LTU made an example out of the CT Group,” he said. “The example was that tenants will no longer be silent about housing injustice. They believed in a better future, organized for it, and won.”

Demanding a “Fair Lease”

Jasmine Harris’s path to a microphone in front of Yorktown Apartments traveled through her own housing struggles. She and her children have endured homelessness, including a period of several nights where the only spot they could find was in the lobby of a family shelter where every bed was already full. Harris, who was eight months pregnant, huddled in a chair with her infant daughter, with Harris’s coat serving as their blanket. Finally, Harris persuaded a relative to let them sleep on her couch, then she eventually got an apartment owned by an organization called New Directions.

The apartment was better than being homeless. But, from day one, when her daughter crawled on the carpet and came up with her leggings stained black from dirt, Harris experienced problems with the home. She and other residents called for maintenance help with mold, discolored tap water, and infestations of roaches, mice, and bedbugs. The responses were slow, when they happened at all. Harris received the same reaction when she notified management about her ceiling caving in because of water leaks above. “At one point, the manager told me, ‘Ms. Harris, if you don’t like it here, you can just turn in your keys.’”

Harris had a better idea. She already had experience as a community activist in campaigns against police brutality and for healthy food options in the neighborhood. “I knew that the more people who speak up, the better,” she said. “I knew there was power in numbers.” She began reading about the history of tenant organizing, and then pulled her neighbors together to form the New Directions Tenant Union.

They began by putting together a list of demands, mostly focusing on maintenance response. Harris had learned that the landlord-tenant transaction is at its core a contractual relationship, so they decided to start changing the terms of that contract. “The landlords have tons of lawyers who write up the leases in a way that gives them all the power and nothing to the residents,” Harris said. So the tenants began organizing over the demand that the landlord sign a new, “Fair Lease.”

Variations of the Fair Lease have been included in demands in other national tenant campaigns. They take most of the tenants’ bill of rights terms, including rent control and good-cause eviction protections, and put them into the individual rental contract. The model Fair Lease limits rent increases to no more than 2 percent each year and requires fast and full response to maintenance requests. It provides tenants with automatic renewal to prevent against eviction by lease termination.

After drafting their Fair Lease, the tenant union gathered together other tenants and community supporters and held a rally. They marched to the New Directions complex office to present the Fair Lease, waving signs like “No more bugs / No more mold / Bring our buildings up to code.”²⁷ (I reached out to a New Directions spokesperson, who denied Harris’s claims that it did not respond to tenants’ complaints, and pointed out that its properties pass regular federal housing inspections.)

The Fair Lease has not yet been accepted, but the New Directions union has had other victories. It fought off the landlord’s plans to allow police unrestricted access to enter the residents’ apartments, and it helped one union member resist three separate attempts to evict her. “I have never had anyone to support me like this,” the resident told a local television station as the union members occupied the complex office until her new lease was signed. “If things aren’t right, speak up,” she said to the TV cameras. “There are people out here who have your back.”²⁸

Government-Funded Gentrification

Jessica Bellamy grew up on Lampton Street in Smoketown, a neighborhood southeast of downtown Louisville. After the Civil War, thousands of formerly enslaved Black people moved to Smoketown from rural areas. Bellamy’s mother owns Shirley Mae’s Café, a soul food restaurant on the corner of Clay and Lampton Streets, where Bellamy has worked on and off since she was twelve years old. The restaurant founded by Shirley Mae Beard, Bellamy’s grandmother, is well known for hosting during Kentucky Derby week the Salute to Black Jockeys festival, which has attracted the likes of B. B. King, Morgan Freeman, and Whoopi Goldberg. “I grew up seeing what is possible when people come together in community,” Bellamy said.

But when the notorious HUD HOPE VI program triggered the 2012 demolition of more than three hundred units of public housing in Smoketown, gentrification forces emerged.²⁹ When Bellamy began organizing community members to resist, she was surprised to learn who was bankrolling the opposition. “It turned out that the main gentrifiers are developers funded by the city,” she said. Bellamy points to multimillion-dollar projects in historically Black neighborhoods where city dollars were going to developers aiming to create market-rate housing, despite that housing being unaffordable for current residents. She cites Census figures showing that one historically Black neighborhood in Louisville, Russell, lost almost twenty-five hundred Black residents from 2010 to 2020, with a corresponding influx of white, likely wealthier, residents.³⁰

This story is not unique to Louisville. When Robert came to the Indianapolis eviction court where my students and I represent tenants, his case initially made no sense. His landlord had filed for eviction against Robert, alleging he had paid his rent late. But Robert had receipts to show differently. Lots of receipts. Robert, now in his eighties, had been living in his apartment for more than two decades.

When we confronted the landlord’s attorney with this, he shrugged. “OK, we’ll dismiss this case,” he said. “But his lease is up in three months anyway, and the new property owner is not going to renew.”

It turns out the attempt to evict Robert was one of a stack of cases filed by the investor-owned real estate company that recently purchased his building. The plan was to clear out the current tenants, most of whom were, like Robert, Black and longtime residents of the neighborhood. The next steps were to make a few cosmetic changes in the building, rename it, and start renting to the wealthier, predominately white people who had begun moving into Robert’s neighborhood.

As we saw in chapter 3, Black households in our community have been displaced for generations. When Robert was younger, the era of “urban renewal” saw the bulldozing of entire blocks of Black communities near downtown to make way for interstate highways, an urban university campus, and a medical complex.

In the surviving neighborhoods close to urban cores, a new wave of Black and working-class displacement is now occurring.³¹ There are no government-contracted bulldozers clearing out Black-owned housing, so the current displacement is often portrayed as less connected to government policies than the urban renewal era of the mid-twentieth century. But today’s gentrification is not simply the effects of shifting preferences for urban living or the so-called invisible hand of capitalism. Governments are making zoning decisions, investing in infrastructure, and handing over government land and federal development funds controlled by local governments to private capital. The displacement of Robert in Indianapolis, Jessica Bellamy’s neighbors in Louisville, and hundreds of thousands of others in urban centers across the country is the intentional, predictable result of choices made by government policymakers.³²

“Gentrification is not about a Starbucks suddenly appearing in a community,” John Washington, an organizer with the Tenant Union Federation, says. “Displacement and homelessness are actually the goals of the architects of our housing market, and they are backed by government dollars and policy.” The driving force of government handing over land, cash, and enormous tax subsidies to private developers—as we saw in chapter 4—is so undeniable that even the corporate-sponsored Center for American Progress admits that “displacement today is the result of policy choices.”³³

But not everywhere.

“Using Our Tax Dollars to Displace People Is No Longer Acceptable”

Bellamy and others’ research showed that the Louisville local government had been repurposing US Department of Housing and Urban Development funds to distribute millions of dollars to developers. The developers used those funds on projects that spiked up the cost of housing for everyone in the community.³⁴

So Bellamy and other residents worked with Councilor Arthur to draft a new antidisplacement ordinance. The terms were straightforward: if a project will result in housing costs that were unaffordable for a neighborhood’s current residents, no local government money, land, or staff support will be provided. Like Bellamy, Arthur also grew up in Louisville’s historically Black neighborhoods and had long fought against displacement—a musician and teacher, he recorded the song “Gentrification” in 2019. But he makes it clear that residents drove the ordinance campaign from day one.

“It is important for other cities that are trying to address displacement to realize that a remedy is not going to come just from electoral politics,” Arthur says. “You need to have grassroots organizing at the center of the effort. That is what gets reform passed.”

When Arthur introduced the legislation, most of the council refused to endorse it. Louisville mayor Craig Greenberg, a former developer himself, aggressively opposed it. But the Louisville Tenants Union and others canvassed door to door in support of the ordinance and held phone and text banks and public events in councilors’ districts. They collected fifteen hundred signatures on a petition and recruited fifty organizations to endorse the ordinance.

“No one can articulate the struggle better than the people going through the struggle,” Arthur says. So the residents spoke at community events and held one-on-one meetings with councilors. On the day of the November 2023 vote, the mayor sensed the momentum shifting and reached out to every councilor to lobby against the ordinance. But it was too late. The antidisplacement ordinance passed 25–0 and became law, even though the mayor refused to sign it. “The end result is that using our tax dollars to displace people is no longer acceptable to the people of Louisville,” Arthur says.

Louisville joins Boston, which in 2020 adopted a similar requirement that developers seeking zoning approvals first meet antidisplacement guidelines.³⁵ Housing researchers at the RVA Eviction Lab say the Louisville ordinance is changing the narrative and stopping government complicity in Black displacement. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights says the Louisville example will inspire other communities to follow suit.

John Washington agrees, saying the national tenant union movement is looking to build on the Louisville victory. “This ordinance is so valuable because governments have for too long been deflecting their responsibility for gentrification,” he says. “People living in these neighborhoods have pointed the finger right back at government, demanding it stop displacing entire communities.”

Jessica Bellamy has advice for other communities struggling with displacement. “You got to be all the way done with waiting for someone else to do something,” she says. “Anyone can do this—and should do this, all over the damn country.”

“Shared Self-Interest” from Appalachia to Louisville

Josh Poe’s mother was just fifteen years old when he was born. Raised mostly by his grandparents, Poe grew up in the Appalachian region of northeastern Kentucky in a home without an indoor bathroom. He started working in the tobacco fields at age seven. None of that prevented his family and community from providing him a model of advocacy and solidarity. Tobacco farming, Poe points out, was essentially a socialist enterprise, with price supports and quotas that benefited smaller farmers. “That did not come from any big farmer’s benevolence, it came about because farmers organized. And that shaped my understanding of political power,” he said.

Like many people in his rural community, Poe became addicted to opioids as a young man. After his addiction spread to heroin, Poe was homeless for a time. He was incarcerated for a while, too. Others in his family died as a result of addiction, but Poe eventually made it into recovery.³⁶ After organizing housing and labor campaigns in Seattle, he returned to Kentucky. There he met Bellamy, and they bonded over how their seemingly dissimilar backgrounds were actually not so different. “I learned the geography of Smoketown and Appalachia have a lot of material commonalities,” Poe said. “It just showed how much shared self-interest poor white people have with Black people.”

Although many of LTU’s current campaigns revolve around historically Black communities, it has several white members and has helped organize mostly white trailer park residents on Louisville’s south side and elsewhere in Kentucky. Like Poe, LTU member Steph Smith grew up poor in Appalachian eastern Kentucky. Her family was often forced to move from dilapidated trailers when lot rental fees spiked, or mold or other conditions got too bad. They slept in other family members’ living rooms or in an old church.

“I come from ‘Trump country,’ and I know some people hear my accent and wonder if I am racist,” she said. “But it became clear to me that poor white people in Appalachia being taught to hate Black people was a way to make it easier for the capitalist ruling class to exploit all of us generation after generation.”

The LTU meetings feature testimonials where Black and white tenants get the chance to see their own experiences reflected in other people’s stories, including people they have been taught to see as their enemy. LTU members say their experiences give lie to any narrative that Black people and whites cannot be organized together in a tenant movement. “That is why the LTU and tenant organizing in general is so dangerous,” Smith said. “I’ve never been a part of something that gives me so much optimism and keeps racking up tangible, material wins.”

Under the banner of an organization they call Root Cause Research Center, Bellamy and Poe have gathered a wealth of data and analysis on Kentucky poverty and injustice. But they say this LTU multiracial organizing, not statistics or rhetoric, is the real key to reform. “There is not a report that Josh and I have written that brought material change,” Bellamy said. “It is going to take people standing up as their own political class to get these wins.”

“We Are the Ones to Keep Us Safe”

In collaboration with the People’s Action Homes Guarantee campaign, which mobilizes tenants across the country, LTU members including Shemaeka Shaw traveled to the White House to demand that President Biden issue an executive order on rent control and other tenant relief measures.³⁷ Biden responded with a “Blueprint for a Renter’s Bill of Rights.” It was short on tangible guarantees, but it did include a statement of federal commitment to protecting tenants. Organizers decided to use that statement as a foundation for continued pressure.³⁸

Tara Raghuveer, the leader of the Tenant Union Federation and of KC Tenants, says that LTU is at the core of the national movement, proving that tenants can have success even in the challenging political geography of a southern city. “The Louisville Tenants Union represents a new edge to the tenant movement, with deepening roots throughout the South and the Midwest,” she said in an interview with me. “They are building durable infrastructure that is already transforming political terrain in Louisville and will continue to set the pace for tenants across the country.”³⁹

So, even as it was winning the CT Group campaign and other interim victories for local tenants, the LTU has kept one eye on its broader goals. Along with its national work, the LTU pushes for statewide laws instituting rent control, good-cause requirements for evictions, and a “clean hands” requirement that would block landlords with pending code violations from evicting tenants.⁴⁰ It aims to transform the community’s landlord-tenant dynamic so that tenants can start dictating the terms of the relationship, especially through the Fair Lease terms.

Almost every LTU leader has experienced homelessness and retaliation for speaking up for tenant rights. They have too many battle scars to harbor any illusion that the process will be easy. In a conversation among LTU leaders, Shaw swept her hand toward the entire group: “We are all traumatized,” she said. The others nod in agreement. But their response is to tangibly embrace the power of a union. “We are the ones to keep us safe,” she added.

Back at the Yorktown Apartments, Harris describes to the crowd how LTU members went to Washington multiple times to pressure the Biden administration. “If we can take on the White House, we are not afraid to take on wealthy Louisville elites,” Harris said into the microphone. “We are here to promise that if Collegiate does not meet the tenants’ demands, the next time we will be back with hundreds of our neighbors from across the city.

“That’s right: We are here now, and we will keep coming back until we win!”

AHA: Anger, Hope, Action

The promise to return was not an idle one. Five months later, in the corner of a Dollar General parking lot on the southwest side of Louisville, across the street from the Nottingham Plaza Drive-Thru Liquor Barrel and an abandoned coin laundry—502-933-WASH—the Louisville Tenants Union convenes for Sunday afternoon canvassing.

It is nearly ninety degrees, with no clouds to block the sun beating down from the midday sky. Poe invites the red-shirted union members to gather beneath the spotty shade provided by a small tree at the corner of the parking lot. Most have canvassed before, but Poe still delivers a pep talk. “The person at the door is trying to assess whether we’re a Jehovah’s Witness. a cop, or some kind of a scam,” he says. “But we don’t apologize for bothering someone at their home because we aren’t sorry that we’re doing this. We’re confident, and we’re bold.”

Poe distributes the flyers they will be using, and the canvassers pair off and mock out a doorway conversation. “Remember, we are looking for the ‘AHA’ moment: Anger, Hope, Action,” Poe says. After twenty minutes of practice and then the distribution of sign-up clipboards, the pairs head off to the six different buildings of the Newberry Parc Apartments.

Newberry Parc has been in the local news lately after a massive water leak in one building led to a total shutdown of water to residents for more than three days.⁴¹ But LTU is here because of a less-publicized fact about the complex: its owners have benefited greatly from US government assistance, with seemingly none of those benefits being felt by the tenants.

In 2019, those owners, Durham Hill Properties LLC, received an $8.2 million loan backed by government-sponsored entity Fannie Mae—backing that typically leads to lower financing costs.⁴² The Federal Housing Finance Agency manages both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which play a big role in the multifamily housing market. The Newberry Parc arrangement is quite common. In 2022, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchased a combined $142 billion in multifamily housing loans.⁴³

The problem, LTU members and a nationwide network of tenant organizations say, is that our tax dollars provide these huge benefits to landlords without requiring those landlords to protect the rights of tenants. So LTU and other tenant unions insist that the federal government should require these federally backed landlords to limit their rent hikes, keep the housing in good condition, and agree not to evict or not renew tenant leases except for good cause. If they are successful, it could make a seismic impact: greater tenant protection in federally backed housing could apply to over twelve million rental units, nearly one in three renting households in the country.⁴⁴

Biden’s January 2023 creation of a new public process by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to “examine proposed actions promoting renter protections and limits on egregious rent increases” was far less than the immediate rent control and eviction protections that tenants are demanding. But, as they did with the Biden tenants rights’ blueprint, they decided to use the new process as an opportunity to ratchet up the pressure on the Biden-Harris administration, and to organize and grow stronger. “The rent is too damn high, and the government is in business with our landlords,” Tenant Union Federation director Raghuveer says. “We need the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the chief regulator of their industry, to take tenants’ expertise seriously, to weigh it against these profiteering lobbyists, and to enact the tenant protections we need.”

I walk with Poe into Building Five. We start with the basement apartments. At the second door we knock on, Serena (I will not use tenants’ real names here) answers, head cocked to the side and eyes squinted a bit at the site of two strangers. But when Poe explains the purpose of his visit, Serena is eager to talk. A few months ago, a pipe in the apartment above her burst (it is becoming clear that plumbing issues are a recurring theme at Newberry Parc), unleashing a torrent of water that caved in her ceiling and flooded the family living room.

It took the landlord more than a week to clean up the mess. Two of Serena’s daughters have asthma, and they struggled to breathe through the whole ordeal. Serena says she did not expect better: the property has had four or five different managers in the past three years—she has lost count—yet her monthly payments have increased by $200.

Poe walks Serena through the process of submitting an online comment to FHFA via her phone. Like most tenants, in her comments she highlights rent hikes and poor maintenance. She writes down her contact information on Poe’s clipboard. “We’d love to have you join us at the next meeting of the tenants’ union,” he says. “We got child care, we got good food. You can come meet your neighbors and share what is going on.”

One floor up, Jemani responds to Poe’s question about whether her rent has increased, too. “Hell, yes it has!” she replies. While a dog growls behind the apartment door across the hall, Poe explains the reason for the visit. “Did you know your landlord used government money to buy this building? This is your chance to say that tenants should have rights in buildings we taxpayers helped pay for.”

Two weeks later, many of these same LTU members join hundreds of other tenant leaders at the national People’s Action convention in Washington, DC. Among the speakers at the opening rally was LTU member Jasmine Brown, who told the crowd about the time they had spent living out of their car, dealing with raw sewage pouring into their rented apartment, and pest infestation (Brown uses they/them pronouns). “But now we are actively building power with tenants from public housing complexes to trailer parks!” Brown said, then paused for the applause and yells of support. “It is our vision that one day we will have rent control and quality maintenance. Housing security belongs to everyone!”

The convention closes with nine hundred activists flooding the street and sidewalks outside the Washington offices of the National Multifamily Housing Council. The council is the lobbyist for the biggest corporate landlords and a die-hard opponent of rent control and other renter protections. It and other housing industry powerhouses pushed hard against Biden taking more significant action regulating government-backed rental properties.⁴⁵

Wearing “The Rent Is Too Damn High!” T-shirts and chanting, “Do you see us?” to the eleventh-floor NMHC office windows, a series of tenants told their stories and called for action. “The government is in business with our landlords!” Katie Talbot from the Neighbor to Neighbor organization in Massachusetts yells into a megaphone. Talbot lists some of the biggest corporate landlords that are NMHC members—Greystar, Related, Starwood Capital. “They got richer, and we got priced out,” she says. “And that ain’t right!” The crowd repeats, “That ain’t right!”

Talbot, a formerly unhoused woman, continues. “There are $150 billion in loans backed by public money that go to these landlords every year—no strings attached. And that ain’t right!”

“That ain’t right!” the crowd responds.

The next tenant to speak is Jer Zonio from LTU. “I live in a property funded by a loan from Fannie Mae,” he says. “I wait tables and work hard, but it isn’t enough. My landlord raised my rent, and I go to bed and wake up stressed the f— out. If I get sick or injured, I won’t be able to go to work, and I will lose my home.”

“That ain’t right!”

“I’m tired of paying half my wages just to have a place to live. Especially when I hear about this sweet deal my landlord got from my government!

“But I am organizing along with my neighbors like our lives depend on it. Because they do!”

Back in Louisville, while Poe is making his way through Building Five, Zonio knocks on Building Three doors with LTU activist Elizabeth Reid. Adrian Silbernagel and Scott Pittman knock on Kenneth’s door in the basement of Building One. Kenneth immediately pulls his neighbor Manuel out into the hallway for an animated conversation. They explain how the landlord shadow-raised their rent by pulling gas and water into their monthly bill, only to hide what that monthly amount was until the last minute. Then, if the tenants are a day late, the landlord fines them $200 extra, with an additional $100 for every day after.

Kenneth, a Lyft driver, introduces his wife and two small sons, then shows the LTU members a big hole in his kitchen wall where yet another leak had to be repaired. The maintenance office has ignored his calls and texts about fixing the hole. Like Serena and her family, Kenneth plans to move at his first opportunity.

But he knows he risks the same problems at the next home, so he is happy to join the union. So is Daniel, walking outside on his way to his Building Three apartment. His rent has increased nearly 30 percent in four years, while his salary has barely budged. “We are all just living paycheck to paycheck,” he says. He is excited to see the union walking his neighborhood. “I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to come out here to talk about all this.”

The goal for the door-knocking is to have conversations at three of every ten homes visited. LTU canvassers are doing better than that today, maybe because families are staying close to their air conditioning on the hot afternoon. But there is no air flow to the hallways, so Poe wipes sweat off his forehead. It is Father’s Day. Poe he says his daughter understands why he is working today. Perhaps not surprising for the child of an organizer, she led the negotiations with her dad to trade their original Father’s Day plans for a later, bigger event.

Poe is glad it all worked out, because he did not want to skip this canvass when so many union members were eager to go. “There are ten people here today, and I am the only one getting paid,” he marvels.

Why do all these LTU members come out on a hot Sunday afternoon—this is the fifth LTU canvass this week—to knock on strangers’ doors? Why pursue such an analog form of organizing in a digital age? “The most powerful interactions are in person,” LTU’s Erika Sommer says. “When you think about it, people online often don’t really recognize that the person on the other end is a real human being—but that is not a problem when we are standing outside your door.”

Brenda Vazquez points out that unknown callers usually are diverted to voicemail. Reid says older folks often shun social media. Zonio says that showing up at someone’s doorstep proves the movement’s authenticity. The others nod at these responses, then head back to the doors.

Poe puts the rest of the paperwork in his truck, grabs his own clipboard, and follows. “I wish we could just do a text blast or social media post and organize a tenants’ movement,” he says. “But it doesn’t work that way.”