"A cutting edge of mass organizing today lies with the tenant movement. Across the U.S., tenant unions have been exploding in growth and visibility. Thousands of tenants - from Los Angeles to Kansas City, from Chicago to Connecticut - have unionized in recent years. This is a bottom-up, multiracial, working-class movement that's directly countering the catastrophe of the U.S. housing system and the power of landlords with the collective power of tenants."
"It's a radical movement: connecting the dots between the housing system and racial capitalism, framing housing struggle as a class struggle, and critiquing the "rent relation" and commodified housing altogether. While far from a new thing, today's tenant movement is an expanding vanguard that's organizing to frontally challenge the nexus of financial and real estate capital at the heart of the corporate power structure."
"In 2024, several tenant unions came together to form the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), founded with the goal of "organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, to secure alternatives to the current housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political class that cannot be ignored.""
Tenant unions across the United States have rapidly expanded, unionizing thousands of tenants in cities from Los Angeles to Kansas City and beyond. The movement is multiracial and working-class, organizing rent strikes, winning policy battles, and building collective power against landlord and corporate interests. Organizers frame housing struggle as class struggle and link housing insecurity to racial capitalism and commodification. The movement emphasizes confrontation, striking, and collective self-organization to assert tenant control over housing and communities. Several unions coordinated in 2024 to form the Tenant Union Federation to wield mass bargaining power and advocate housing as a public good.
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