Younger Americans are struggling to afford homes. Many families are stuck paying exorbitant prices for rent while also juggling high utility bills and groceries they can’t afford. So it’s no surprise that as people look at their housing expenses, which are typically their biggest budget-buster, they are simultaneously looking for ways to fight these rising costs instead of just accepting that high prices and poor housing conditions are inevitable.
Tenant unions, large and small, are one of the ways those seeking relief from these conditions can protect themselves against the power of landlords to evict them, push them out through “renoevictions” (banishing them under the guise of renovating a property), or force them to endure long-term neglect and simply subject tenants to abuse.
Although the Biden administration and Democratic presidential campaigns arguably did too little, too late to acknowledge the plight of renters, tenants now find themselves grappling with how to organize in the face of a more hostile federal government bent on making it harder for lower-income renters to keep their housing.
Tenant groups, which experts and advocates say have been growing and strengthening in recent years, may be the best tool for renters to keep their housing in the current political environment—and do more than merely survive an increasingly bleak economy. The NYS Tenant Bloc, United Tenant Federation, and other tenant-focused groups say they have been thinking about how best to approach tenant organizing at this crucial time, to both build political power and empower tenants to take proactive steps to help themselves.
Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager at Eviction Lab at Princeton University, said he’s seen more tenant organizing spread outside of the largest cities.
“They’ve been much more active in specific cities on the West Coast and liberal cities, like L.A. or San Francisco or New York or Chicago,” he said. “But we’re starting to see more tenant unions that are more consistent and maybe more professionalized in cities that maybe you didn’t expect to see before.”
These new-look tenant unions include such organizations as the Kansas City Tenants Union, or KC Tenants, which worked with the Louisville Tenants Union and Bozeman Tenants United to form the Tenant Union Federation. Together, they have successfully pushed renters’ issues to the forefront of federal policymaking, as well as won material victories for tenants. Tenant groups associated with Housing Justice for All created the New York State Tenant Bloc in January to push for more political solutions to the issues renters face.
Garnham said that despite the high cost of rent in New York City, there are lessons to be learned from robust tenant organizing. There are hopeful trends emerging, as well: The eviction filing rate in New York City has been much lower in every borough except the Bronx compared to the national average, according to a January Eviction Lab analysis, a decline that’s likely been aided by organizer-driven reforms over the years, such as a city law guaranteeing counsel for tenants in housing court.
Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenant Union Federation, said it doesn’t take much to empower tenants to fight for housing access.
“More often than not, we encounter in tenants a kind of intuitive militancy, and what I mean by that is like, a lot of the people we talked to are, ‘The worst thing that the landlord could do to me he’s already doing, and so I have nothing left to lose,’ like I might as well try for this new kind of power,” she said.
Renters have a stronger motivation to stand up to landlords these days. Although rent price growth has slowed down, people are still paying much more for housing than they did before the pandemic, and without new construction of rental units, the trend may reverse. The high cost of housing in America was a persistent plague on both the Biden administration and the Trump administration—nearly half of renters spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2023.
But much of the Trump administration’s agenda will make life even harder for renters. Trump’s big spending law is great for higher-income homebuyers and investors, but it doesn’t benefit lower-income renters and first-time homebuyers in nearly the same way. Trump’s tariffs also threaten the economy, and the rising prices of household goods are going to hit renters’ incomes hard. Tenant groups say that landlords are also using the immigration crackdown to threaten tenants out of their homes.
Until very recently, eviction filings for 2023 and 2024 were lower for most of the first half of this year, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In July, eviction filings ticked up a bit in comparison to June and previous filing years at the same time. Despite the lack of dramatic changes in eviction filings, Garnham said you have to look beyond the surface of those numbers and look at Phoenix, Minneapolis, and other cities with higher rates; in addition, eviction rates are much lower in Canada and parts of Europe.
Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, said that because homeownership is increasingly out of reach, more people are turning to the rental market, and renter mobility is lower than it once was. All of this makes the market tougher for renters.
“We are at a point where markets are tightening again, so there are fewer vacant units if you are out searching,” she said.
Raghuveer said that while the Tenant Union Federation “succeeded in a massive way” by putting tenant rights on the radar in the last years of the Biden White House, there was still so much more to be done. Although the Biden administration made big steps forward on tenant rights, the proverbial rent was still too damn high when Democrats were in charge. The Biden, and later Harris, campaign waited too long to address issues facing renters, and even when it did, it failed to talk about them in a way that showed it understood the urgency of the issue, she said.
“In some ways our project remains the same. On this question of power, the landlords currently have all the power and the tenants have none, and our intervention as ever is to organize tenants into powerful collectives, a.k.a. tenant unions, to exercise both economic and political power,” she said.
But these organizations plan on changing things up, she says. First and foremost, the rent strike will be more central to organizing plans.
“Even with the Democratic administration, it’s not as though we were winning, right?” she said. “Our assessment is we’re losing in part because tenants aren’t yet serious enough about our ultimate power, which is our rent, right? Our rent is what pays the landlords. Our rent is what settles the debts with the federal government. Our rent is really at the core of not only the American economy but the global economy.”
She said that means more national campaigning this year will be focused on organizing supermajority strike-ready unions in as many places as possible.
Tenant groups are also flexing their political muscle in influential political races. Cea Weaver, director of the NYS Tenant Bloc, explained in a July webinar on building tenant power that the housing organizers realized they needed more political heft at a time when political leaders prioritize the perspective of homeowners and the real estate industry above that of renters.
“What we decided … is we needed to reduce the turnout gap between tenants and homeowners in local and state elections; we needed to turn the tenant majority into a tenant voting majority,” she said.
Weaver said the plan was for the 501(c)(3) group Housing Justice for All not to advocate for a particular New York City mayoral candidate but to push for tenants to vote and for candidates to support a rent freeze. The group knocked on doors to send voters the message that they should support a rent-freeze candidate. She said that when it became clear Zohran Mamdani was a “rent-stabilized candidate running for election on an insurgent base, putting renters front and center in his platform,” the group invited everyone who signed the rent-freeze petition to a 501(c)(4)-friendly space to vote on endorsing him.
Weaver said she believes the work of turning tenants into a voting bloc helped shift the messaging about an election that was supposed to be about crime and scapegoating immigrants and unhoused people into an election about the affordability of the city itself.
“I always like to remind people that Trump is a New York City landlord,” Weaver told The New Republic. “No one knows how to fight him better than we do. Tenant organizations have to do something different under the rise of far-right authoritarianism in the U.S. It’s clear that organized tenants cannot sit out the electoral arena. We know that high housing costs drive voters to the far right.”
Johanna Heyer, member of the Sacramento Valley Tenants Union, the current iteration of which was formed in 2024, said tenant groups are facing “another moment of crisis” with the Trump administration’s attacks on housing programs and ICE crackdowns, which have resulted in immigrant tenants being afraid to go to work. The group is focused on building up the base of the union with working-class tenants to make the organization stronger and less prone to organizer burnout. But Heyer said it’s difficult not to be reactive and respond to crises as they come up with tenants being harassed by landlords who are asking about their immigration status or threatening to call ICE on them.
“Both of the cases that pop into my head of recent calls we’ve gotten from people who are being targeted because of their immigration status or their perceived immigration status … those are both small mom-and-pop landlords,” Heyer said. “We had one who physically assaulted the tenant to the point where she’s just terrified for her own physical safety.”
Other California tenant groups have recognized how interconnected the fight against mass deportation and housing access is. The Los Angeles Tenants Union organized anti-ICE protests in L.A. in July.
Heyer said that she’s seeing more tenant unions looking at ways to organize across a landlord’s entire housing portfolio and sees potential in more networking and coordination among unions in different parts of a state to work together against a particular landlord.
“There are common experiences that we’re all going through in our own unique local variations, so I think that would be a really interesting thing to look at in terms of where the movement is headed right now,” she said.
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