Organizing a Tenant Union in Your Building
Improving Conditions in Your Building: Many of us are not living in the safe and decent conditions we deserve. Are you or are people in your building living in poor conditions (rats, roaches, leaks, insufficient heat, etc.)? Are you tired of the landlord not making repairs? Are you facing rent increases? Are you facing eviction?
Why Organize? We believe individually it can be very hard to bring about specific changes in our buildings and larger changes in our city. But we also believe there is strength in numbers. Tenants have come together in buildings across the city to reclaim our power and have successfully improved our conditions.
What is a Tenant Union? A tenant union is an organization of tenants that builds power to improve conditions and win rights. Like a tenant association they often bring together tenants for social activities and/or address issues in a building. The difference is a tenant union also aims to change the balance of power between tenants and their landlord. A tenant union aims to address all outstanding tenant issues by collectively giving tenants decision making power in their building or neighborhood they live in through a collective tenant agreement with our landlord or cooperative ownership of our buildings.
Steps to Improve Conditions
If a landlord is not responsive to our individual concerns or collective concerns we can use our economic, political, and public power as tenants to bring about collective negotiations, agreements, and changes. Here’s a summary of certain steps we can take form and exercise our power as a tenant union
Assemble/Plan: invite tenants together to identify common issues, educate each other on tenants rights and opportunities for change, and form a common agenda (Goals, strategy, and tactics, and organization)
Outreach/Build Support: to get input and solidify further support for the common agenda, tenants can go door to door to 1) hear tenant concerns, 2) formalize broad support by getting signatures on a petition summarizing the tenants’ demands or on a demand letter, 3) ask tenants to take further action
Demand Letter to Landlord: tenants can bring all their grievances to the landlord by drafting a common set of demands for the tenants of the building addressed to management, indicating what the tenants want, when they want it, and how the desired changes can be recognized in binding agreement between tenants and management
Public Pressure: (if the landlord doesn’t meet the demands within the desired timeline) tenants can apply public pressure through protests that attract media attention and intervention of public officials
Economic Pressure: tenants can exercise their enormous economic power by collectively withholding their rent (aka, rent strike) and when applicable, force public agencies to withhold rent/funding to landlord
Tenant Control: many tenant issues can only be addressed permanently from moving from investor control to tenant control (via cooperative ownership or tenant agreements with landlord)
Combinations of public and economic pressure can force improvements and agreements with a landlord through the landlord directly but also by interventions by the City, public representatives, or the court system.
For support with organizing, contact us at info@roctenantunion.org or 585-210-0705.