When Tay’Laur and Tay’Leah Paige got the eviction notice taped to their door in August 2023, they thought it was a mistake. The sisters had only missed July’s rent at their North Hollywood apartment during the entertainment industry strikes, which had put Tay’Leah out of work, and their property manager had seemed understanding.
By their first court date in November, they had been approved for Los Angeles Emergency Rental Assistance, a program that would cover about six months of rent. But their landlord — Equity Residential — would not accept the money.
The landlord’s refusal baffled the sisters. They had been good tenants in what was marketed as a luxury building, though they say reality often fell short of that expectation. As court dates stretched on through 2024, their debt snowballed from missing one month’s $3,400 rent payment to nearly $50,000. Late fees started to double mid-lease, and utilities and court costs piled on.
Marty McKenna, a spokesperson for Equity Residential, told Vox they do not discuss individual residential accounts or property-level decisions, but said, “eviction is a last resort and an inefficient way to recover rent.”
After finally vacating their unit in August 2024, the sisters spent months sleeping in their car and hotel-hopping. When they finally got approved for affordable housing — something they’d been on a wait-list for since before moving into their Equity Residential building — they were then quickly denied. The tens of thousands of dollars in rental debt on their credit reports effectively disqualified them from the very program designed to help people in their situation.
Now, Tay’Laur and Tay’Leah are part of a small group of former Equity Residential tenants launching a first-of-its-kind back rent debt strike that will go public in early October. The campaign, organized with help from the Debt Collective, the country’s first national debtors union, has developed a tool that helps tenants document problems with their landlords and generate formal dispute letters — part of a broader strategy to challenge what organizers see as systematic abuse of renters.
“These credit reports, these debts, and the eviction records are things that are real barriers to getting people re-housed,” said Alex Ferrer, a Debt Collective organizer who helped develop the debt complaint tool.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau data from January shows that 14 percent of active renters still carry late fees from the past year, down from a peak of 23 percent in early 2023 but still affecting millions of households.
While existing surveys capture current tenants with back rent, they miss former tenants who’ve been evicted and still owe debt — a data gap that means the Federal Reserve estimate that American renters owed between $9.3 and $10.9 billion in back rent as of late 2021 likely undercounts the true scope. That debt piled up when pandemic relief programs fell short.
The planned strike represents a new front in debt resistance organizing, emerging as federal consumer protections have weakened significantly over the last year, leaving families with fewer resources to challenge debt collection practices on rental debt that have largely escaped national policy attention.
How the strike debt campaign will work
The rent debt strike that Tay’Laur and Tay’Leah are joining draws its inspiration from one of the most successful debt resistance campaigns in recent history. In 2015, 15 students who had attended Corinthian Colleges — a now-defunct chain of for-profit schools — announced they would refuse to repay their federal student loans, arguing the education they received was fraudulent.
Their collective action sparked a broader movement over the next decade that ultimately led to billions in loan forgiveness for former students of predatory college. Perhaps more importantly, the campaign helped student debtors relinquish the shame that keeps financial exploitation thriving in isolation, transforming what had been lonely private battles into public, collective resistance.
The Debt Collective, which was also behind that campaign, is hoping to leverage similar tactics for rental debt with a small cohort of tenants. Their strike aims to have tenants’ rental debts canceled in their entirety.
At the center of the rental debt campaign is the new online tool that helps renters and former renters identify potential legal claims against their landlords. The free-to-use platform guides users through survey questions about their tenant experiences — from false advertising about amenities to billing irregularities to habitability problems — to help them understand what kinds of violations they may have experienced. It then generates formal dispute letters based on their responses that can be filed with debt collectors and regulatory agencies.
The idea behind the tool is to flip the economics of debt collection. Right now, collectors can process thousands of cases quickly because most people lack legal counsel and don’t fight back. The dispute letters force collectors to actually investigate each tenant’s claims: Was there really a working pool? Were the utility bills calculated correctly? Did the landlord properly maintain the building? Those investigations cost time and money.
Meanwhile, copies of the letters can go to state attorneys general and government regulators, creating the possibility that continued collection efforts could trigger enforcement actions against both landlords and debt collectors.
Their campaign is focusing specifically on corporate landlords, particularly national real estate investment trusts, like Essex Property Trust, Avalon Bay, and Equity Residential. These publicly traded companies that own thousands of rental units face different incentives than small landlords. They have shareholders to answer to, quarterly earnings calls to navigate, and reputational concerns that can make them more vulnerable to sustained campaign pressure. Equity Residential, one of the largest in the country, owns over 300 buildings nationwide and reported $2.98 billion in revenue in 2024.
McKenna, of Equity Residential, told Vox their “longstanding approach is to work with residents to resolve issues whenever possible, while balancing our responsibility to maintain safe and livable communities for all.”
While the rental debt tool could work with any landlord, organizers view the national trusts as more promising targets. Their broader strategy involves connecting isolated debtors to build coordinated campaigns — turning scattered individual cases into organized pressure that makes debt forgiveness more attractive than ongoing public scrutiny.
A national crisis with a weakened federal response
Ferrer, the Debt Collective organizer, says he hopes their tool will shed greater light on just how much back rental debt exists across the US.
Activists know that such debt accumulated during Covid-19 eviction moratoriums, which prevented landlords from removing tenants but did nothing to stop their rent tabs from growing. But even more people — like Tay’Laur and Tay’Leah Paige — have seen their debts skyrocket in the period after the pandemic.
The rental debt crisis also reflects complex dynamics that go beyond corporate practices. In states with strong tenant protections like California, some tenants can remain in units for months during eviction proceedings while rent continues to accrue, and distinguishing between legitimate grievances and attempts to avoid paying rent that is genuinely owed can be challenging. Landlords also face continuing expenses for mortgages, maintenance, and taxes that don’t pause when rent disputes arise.
While overall debt collection items on credit reports have declined, rental debt collection has increased nationwide, Chi Chi Wu, the director of Consumer Reporting and Data Advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, told Vox.
A TransUnion report found the most significant change in debt collection during 2022 was this surge in rental debt. Thirty-three percent of the 113 third-party debt collection companies surveyed collected “tenant/landlord or rental debt” that year, compared to just 7 percent in 2021, 5 percent in 2020, and 8 percent in 2019.
Despite its scale and detrimental impact on housing stability, rental debt has received considerably less policy attention than other forms of household obligations. Medical debt, student loan debt, and even school lunch debt have all sparked federal attention and proposed legislative reform. Rental debt, by contrast, has largely remained invisible in national policy discussions, relegated to local housing courts and state-by-state tenant protection laws.
The timing of the rent debt strike comes at a particularly vulnerable moment for consumer protection. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been actively investigating debt collection practices and rental housing issues, saw its enforcement powers significantly curtailed when the Trump administration took office. “You had an active agency trying to look out for renters,” Wu said, “and now you don’t have people making sure lenders are not engaged in abusive practices.”
And emergency rental assistance programs that helped keep millions of families housed during the pandemic have been largely depleted, leaving tenants with fewer options when facing eviction.
This enforcement vacuum has left tenants navigating an often predatory landscape on their own. Rental debt can trap people in cycles of housing insecurity; when landlords report unpaid rent to credit agencies, it can create new barriers to securing housing that can last for years.
While most landlords do not regularly report rent payments, they frequently refer unpaid rent to collection agencies, many of whom regularly report debts to credit bureaus. This creates what consumer advocates call a “parking” strategy, where debt collectors rely on credit damage rather than active collection efforts to induce payment.
The strategy works because roughly 90 percent of landlords now use tenant screening reports before approving applications. One rental debt entry can knock someone out of the running for an apartment, even if the debt is disputed or came from circumstances beyond their control.
Housing advocates argue the system punishes people for being poor while enriching landlords and debt collectors. Fees and interest often dwarf the original debt, creating obligations that become impossible to pay while covering basic living expenses.
The system also amplifies existing inequalities. Black and Latino families face higher eviction rates and typically have less savings to fall back on during financial emergencies, making them more likely to end up in rental debt collections.
Testing a new strategy
The rental debt strike borrows from the successful student debt playbook: small groups generating national media attention, moral framing that shifts blame from individuals to institutions, and strategic targeting of powerful actors’ alleged misconduct. Student debt organizers won substantial victories — $188.8 billion in forgiveness for 5.3 million borrowers under the Biden administration — through federal program fixes, rule changes, and sustained pressure on government agencies.
Rental debt organizers face a more complex landscape of private corporations, state courts, and credit agencies, while representing low-income tenants who historically receive less public sympathy than college graduates. Their bet is that corporate landlords will respond faster than federal bureaucracies to reputation and shareholder pressure, and focusing attention on rental debt could build public sympathy at a time when housing costs have become most American families’ biggest monthly stress.
With federal consumer protections weakened and emergency assistance programs exhausted, the rental debt strike will test whether organized resistance can create enough pressure to make debt forgiveness preferable to continued collection efforts.
“We need higher pay so that the people can afford their homes [and] we have to show more empathy to not only the working class, but to the growing community of homeless,” Tay’Laur Paige said. “I hope that this strike will inspire other people to go on strike if they need to, but I also hope that it’ll also just [create] a domino effect with corporate greed.”
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