Newsletter #100: Some Aspects of Tenant Union Strategy 

By Ben Mabie

Earlier this winter, The Dig published two episodes on tenant organizing. The first centered on Abolish Rent and the reflections of its authors, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, their work cofounding the thousands-member-strong Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU), and what that organizing taught them about how to rethink the politics of municipal governance, organization, and the history of the American working class. It was followed up by a more “nuts-and-bolts” episode on how the tenant movement has organized in Connecticut, with Hannah Srajer. 

This is the first of two newsletters carrying on the conversation started by these episodes. While the second is a more personal reflection wrestling with my own experiences in tenant organizing and the unanswered questions I have around it, this first newsletter shares a document collectively written by a small group I was part of (as was Tracy and the cofounders of Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, or TANC, Justin and Rane) in Brooklyn a few years back. It circulated by way of Google Doc links, though our efforts to find a publishing home for it faltered. The group is now defunct, with many of its members migrating over to organizing on the job, though many of us still have a foot in the tenant movement too. Plus the ideas reflected here helped draw out a positive organizing program and orientation that was germinating across a number of different groups and crews, throwing out practices that others adopted and took up, such as “building captain” models of organization akin to “shop steward”–focused models of workplace organizing. Now on May 4, there will be an afternoon-long gathering of tenants and organizers from across NYC with the explicit aim of bringing people together around citywide collaboration. 

At a time when tenant unionism commands the attention and interest of many across the Left, and where sometimes divergent political ambitions are projected onto the idea of organizing tenants as tenants, this portolan of sorts, drawing on the experience of successful rent strikes and dozens of new tenant associations, provides a window into the thinking of those in the movement’s more “autonomous” wing, as it’s sometimes called: those without much but member-dues funding, led by volunteers, and typically focused on a more “syndicalist” model of tenant organization rooted in building-by-building and landlord-portfolio-wide fights. 

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We are the Radical Autonomous Tenants (RATs) of New York City, a cadre group of tenant organizers living in the so-called “Real Estate Capital of the World.” We are a small part of a growing chorus of New Yorkers calling for the establishment of a citywide tenant union, currently working with new and established projects in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Some of us are veteran organizers in New York, while others are founders of tenant unions across the country. Together, we are all tenants fed up with our living situations and eager to change them. 

Over the last two years, we’ve outlined a coherent strategy for building tenant power based on what we believe is already underway: the creation and preservation of independent working-class organizations across the five boroughs. By “organizations,” we do not mean bureaucratic fundraising entities, but rather an organic group of tenant organizers taking the lead in their community. Broadly speaking, we define “tenant” as anyone who calls our city home, no matter their legal or social status. More specifically, we would like to see all tenants united in a common project, including both unhoused and immigrant renters routinely targeted by the city bureaucracy and a racialized police state, as well as white-collar tenants who may have higher incomes. Landlords strategically harass the former out of rent-stabilized apartments and court the latter in an effort to spur higher rents, facilitated by frequent turnover in a building; however, both groups share a common relationship of exploitation and interest in sustaining long-term residency.    

Our struggle, as with so many fellow tenants, is against both the capitalists of the housing industry and the tight-knit relations between government officials and the nonprofit-industrial complex. Rather than a policy-first effort at gradual change, we have committed to mass organizing, which involves close and careful work building by building, block by block, with tenant leaders embroiled in fights against both the landlord and the city. It is this strategic approach that transforms how we live and relate to our communities, and we are already beginning to plant the seeds of democratic power. 

This document is intended to clarify what we mean by this call to build a citywide tenant union — what we have endeavored to create so far, what we are already beginning to build, and how we can continue to develop a throughline across organizations. In publishing this document we hope to stimulate further debate and discussion about the union we want to build and how we do it. 

1. We are building the future locals of a New York City Tenant Union: A citywide union in name only is no citywide union at all; we are building the foundation of a union that can be a real and meaningful organization of tenants across the boroughs, thus requiring tenant associations to work collaboratively and effectively at the neighborhood scale — one that is large enough to exercise real power, but also incentivizes tenants to take on leadership roles and facilitates trust necessary for collective action. Our neighborhoods are dense enough to allow for tenants to get involved in the politics of the movement beyond their own buildings, and to facilitate the dense interconnection of tenant associations.
   
   Building a mass union is slow but steady work; we are not building on the fly, but rather conducting difficult organizing with everyday people in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. In the Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU) and Tenant Union Flatbush (TUF), we have participated in the development of independent tenant power while envisioning each project as locals of a future citywide union. Within these neighborhood unions, we strive to agitate for the necessity of a citywide project, demonstrate its practical utility, and link projects in a concrete and cooperative manner. 

2. The union is in the building; we fight in “everyday life”: There is too often a seemingly unbridgeable cleavage between the “tenant union” and “tenant association,” where the former is a militant layer of activists and organizers dedicated to advancing the broader structures of the movement and its political interventions, and the latter is the collective organization of tenants within a specific building. This gap between building-level organization and the larger geographic network weakens our movement by limiting the horizon of the building-level fight, thus reproducing social divisions within the movement and disconnecting the larger union from the basis of self-organized strength.
   
   We must emphasize at every turn that the union is in the building, and that the tenant association is the union. The geographic union is not a layer of activists sitting atop or to the side of associations, nor is it just another community group; it is the connective tissue between tenant associations in the service of advancing its struggles, such as creating economic leverage against powerful landlords. As much as possible, we want the locus of leadership to rest with the democratic will of the tenant association and its organic leaders, and to develop structures that position their struggles at the heart of the union.
   
   In turn, it is the politics of everyday life and the problems one encounters living where we do — from eviction and racist harassment to concerns about safety, wanton disrepair, pernicious forms of social segregation, atomization, and the absence of control over one’s immediate surroundings — that is the focus of our day-to-day organizing. We want to instead pose collective solutions to these everyday problems and draw out their broader political stakes.

3. We need democratic, collective, working-class leadership: The different kind of leadership we want to build should be democratic, wherein major decisions are made by membership, the political and practical stakes are discussed, every member feels as if the organization is their own to shape and to help serve, and local procedure serves the broader ambition to transform isolated individuals into a new collectivity. A democratic organization may need rules, but it is not synonymous with those rules so much as the collective identity and practices we engender.
   
   Everything we do should be collective: Rather than a few people occupying uncontested posts, we are developing the structures for a diversity of tenants to take the lead and share their knowledge. The union is able to tap deeper into our communal capacity when it doesn’t only rely on those with ample free time but instead creates opportunities for people at different levels of commitment to contribute; therefore, broad layers of “middle” or “rank-and-file” leadership can transmit lessons and practical support from one struggle to another. The “building captain” programs developing in TUF and CHTU are precisely such a structure.
   
   The union should be working class in every sense: our tenant associations and neighborhood organizations should be composed of tenants from different backgrounds, social positions, and experiences, and one of the core measures of its success will be the degree to which many different kinds of working-class people take it up for themselves. In short, we organize so that everyday tenants become protagonists in politics and in their own lives.

4. Our power comes from self-organized collective action: Some think that political power only resides within the law, policy, and the state, but we know that the basis of our power comes only from mass self-organization. Even in its most expansive sense, the state is not an equal-opportunity arena for struggle but is structured precisely to disarm our side. Although we may well use the courts and the legal conquests of the movement where necessary, our very ability to access such rights and abilities depends greatly on our organization — that aspect should remain at the center of our fights and our strategy.
   
   More than any other tactic and tool, we prize the rent strike, our collective economic refusal, which represents both an exercise of financial leverage and an immediate break between occupancy of a place and the extraction of wealth from people inside. It says that we don’t need to pay in order to live. Such an approach is intentionally distinct from that of many nonprofit organizations.

5. Class independence and autonomy mean tenants “seizing responsibility” for ourselves and each other: Our unions must be “class independent” and “autonomous” from the political parties, other social strata, the legal apparatus, etc. We want to express this as clearly as possible: to be independent and autonomous means that we as tenants must seize responsibility for our own conditions of life. We cannot delegate our struggle to an outside agency or third party. No one can ultimately organize for us. We need people to step up and fight for themselves and for others.
   
   Our unions also champion the moment that members take responsibility for their building, with self-organized repair and deduct campaigns, beautification initiatives, and reclamation of common areas in buildings and neighborhoods. They also support efforts to occupy space and take collective safety into our own hands, as opposed to the violent intercession of cops.

6. Unions develop diverse associational culture within the working class: Our unions are strategic precisely because they link different layers of working-class people, who are so often held apart by the prevailing divisions of contemporary life, into a common political project. In our broader fight against the power of capital, class relations become a key place where we learn to fight and work together, generalize the experience of solidarity, and syncopate different experiences into a common proletarian subculture. Our leverage as tenants is important but so too is our ability for very different kinds of people to join in a common political cause — a rarity even in the experience of many other types of organizations or recent social movements.
   
   The member roles of our union are no doubt important as mobilizational tools and instruments of democracy, but we know that their associational cultures, if successfully developed, reach far beyond that. Our union is not only as powerful as its formal members but also every tenant who follows its example or otherwise derives inspiration. Our unions want to project a fighting political culture that makes tenancy identical with solidarity.

7. We practice politics through the union: Our movements sometimes fall into the trap of thinking they only become political when they set their sights on state power, discuss policy and legislation, or establish a transmission belt between themselves and a party organization. We maintain instead that the union is not simply a place to air grievances and then build legislation; rather, we can practice politics through our union to build power into our everyday lives. We want our unions to draw out the immediate political stakes of the control over land and territory, challenge the logic of private property, promote universal accessibility, and establish themselves as an alternate collective authority of and for tenants. 
   
   We also believe in the slogan, “Strong communities make policing obsolete,” and that the associational power of our unions is among its most concrete instantiations. Because the police are used by real estate capital to produce profits and control the working class, our efforts must be inherently abolitionist. Our unions must maintain and demonstrate, through the ways we organize, that we do not need landlords or their state. 

8. There is joy in our association: The movement is hard, often harrowing work, but it is also characterized by trust, communication, and connection with fellow tenants. This involves new kinds of intimacy and relationships that are altogether different from those yielded by the market or the nuclear family. As much as possible, we want to turn instances of organizing into places of socializing: food is nonnegotiable, and BBQs might be the preferred form of a tenant association meeting. The more joyful we make the work, the more inviting it will be.
   
   An effective strategy is important, but making this a worthwhile, affirming fight will set us up for the long term. Recruitment should therefore be accomplished through various methods, including building associational culture across divisions (e.g., class solidarity over national or “citizen” identity).

9. We do not yet know what a “home” could be: A robust and disciplined union movement transforms not only the immediate conditions within our buildings or the legal landscape upon which we rent, but also develops new notions of “home,” “neighbors,” and “tenancy.” Our tenant associations often build upon and develop the existing social fabric in our places of residency, and they can give a new voice and vehicle for that social life. But there is also an experimental character to our organizing, in which we can get creative about the future we want to see. We look to learn with our fellow union members what collective security might mean and how to relate to all tenants in our neighborhoods — particularly those without stable homes. Tenancy, after all, is a social relation that is inclusive of anyone who does not control and own the places where they live.

10. Our struggle is against capitalism, private property, and its attendant social divisions: The capitalist state ensures that property owners are free to abuse, evict, and gentrify with the full protection of Albany, the courts, and the New York Police Department. But housing is a need and therefore a right, meaning the capitalist system — which rewards the commodification and hoarding of housing by the few — can never make this right a reality.
    
    Of course, tenancy is but one element of this struggle against the dictatorship of private property; our strategy for the tenants movement must be syncopated with the wider rhythms of class struggle. In this front of the fight, we look to transform ourselves as tenants into a people who can make meaningful decisions over the spaces we inhabit.  Through mass organization, our strategy looks toward full democratic control of our city and total abolition of the old order. These serious ambitions for another world have gone by many names; we tend to call them communism.