On a recent Friday night in San Jose, California, a small group of Spanish-speaking renters sat in the clubhouse of their apartment complex wondering whether the room was bugged. “Let them listen,” said a young man, with a dismissive gesture.
They were meeting to strategize about forming a tenants’ association to bargain collectively with their large corporate landlord. Along one wall of the room hung large white posters with the names and unit numbers of residents and their yes-or-no response to a survey about their willingness to participate in a rent strike.
The majority of residents had answered affirmatively, but actually withholding rent – and facing the threat of eviction – was a more serious commitment. They had a range of complaints: cockroach infestations, broken stoves, windows that would not close. But rapidly rising rent was the biggest issue.
Though the complex is technically lower-income housing, it’s privately owned, and the size of each year’s permitted rent increase is pegged to the median income in the area. In San Jose, where many people earn Silicon Valley salaries, this puts pressure on lower-income families.
Many tenants in the complex spend between 50% and 70% of their monthly income on rent, according to a survey from a Bay Area non-profit that helped arrange the meeting. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as “rent burdened” families who spend more than 30% of household income on shelter.
Nationally, more than 40m households – roughly 35% of the population – rent their homes. Among Americans who are Black or Hispanic, under 35 or in the bottom quarter of either income or wealth distribution, the percentage is far higher. Rental affordability is worse than it has been in decades, and landlords have filed more than 1m evictions in the past 12 months alone.
The idea that tenants’ associations could help with housing affordability is both intuitive and complex. For workers, collective bargaining is an effective tool to improve pay, benefits and working conditions. In principle, extending the same model to the private housing market could help renters win vital concessions.
But the analogy to labor unions is partial: there’s no federal agency like the National Labor Relations Board to enforce laws governing their activities and negotiations. In fact, many states have no laws protecting tenants’ associations, or organizing.
Even without a formal legal framework, concerted action by tenants can be powerful. Rent strikes in New York City just after the first world war mobilized tens of thousands of renters and helped lead to rent-control laws. In the 1970s in California, the Berkeley Tenants Union showed a theatrical flair, leaving a dead cow in a hallway to protest a lack of fire exits and depicting landlords as ghoulish monsters in cartoons. Yet they also won substantive victories, from halting evictions and rent increases to allocating more housing for lower- and moderate-income families.
In the past several years, Kansas City’s KC Tenants has attracted more than 10,000 members, won free legal counsel for tenants facing eviction, helped pass a $50m bond for affordable housing, and won many battles over rent and living conditions at individual buildings.
“We don’t know what a tenants’ union needs to be in today’s market context,” Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants, said. “We actually have to have rigor and some degree of science around how building unions are organizing.”
San Francisco is at the forefront of this experimentation. In 2022, the board of supervisors unanimously passed a so-called “union at home” ordinance, the first of its kind in the US, which requires landlords to confer in good faith with tenants’ associations. The law covers associations in privately owned buildings with five or more units where a majority vote to join. Since it passed, tenants in more than 60 buildings across the city have formed associations, representing more than 1,100 units of rental housing owned by more than a dozen landlords. These groups have pressed for everything from modernizing elevators to posting notices in Spanish and Chinese so more tenants can read them.
Tenants have also negotiated significant rent refunds. In one building with code violations that include faulty fire alarms and a severe rodent infestation, tenants will have 90% of their rent waived for the past 20 months. In another, tenants will receive a 90% rent reduction for almost a year for similar code violations. While not all tenants participated in a rent strike, the association is negotiating for its agreement to cover all tenants, regardless of whether they joined the association or the strike.
Both buildings were previously owned by Veritas Investments. Once one of the largest landlords in San Francisco, Veritas has recently defaulted on some of its loans and is selling portions of its portfolio to other companies. One new buyer is Brookfield Property Partners, a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, a publicly traded multinational with almost $1tn under management. Brookfield negotiated the two major rent reductions with the tenants’ associations.
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Veritas declined to comment for this article. Brookfield did not respond.
One objection to negotiations that cover all tenants in a building is that they could give wealthier tenants rent reductions they don’t need. Charley Goss, government affairs manager for the San Francisco Apartment Association, a lobbying and support group for landlords, said: “You have tech executives who live in the same building as other people who make much less money each year.”
But Brad Hirn, an organizer at the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, which supported the “union at home” ordinance, stressed the shared interests of tenants. “Tech workers making more income and paying higher rents also get really upset when they have to deal with a rodent infestation in the building,” he said. “I have not heard anyone say: ‘Oh, you moved in more recently and work at a startup, therefore we shouldn’t be in the same association.’”
Academics are similarly split on whether tenants’ associations can make housing more affordable. In theory, pressure from tenants’ associations could discourage landlords with thin profit margins from buying or building more housing, constricting the total supply of housing and raising rents.
Lee Ohanian, an economist and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, acknowledged that when landlords make very large profits, tenants acting jointly might control rent more effectively. But he was skeptical that many landlords in California have large profits, and argued the best way to make housing more affordable is to lower construction costs. “The 800lb gorilla in the room is the extreme cost of building in California,” he said.
Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton who studies eviction and poverty in the US, was doubtful that profit margins were thin. “We know less than we think we do,” he said, citing a lack of transparency about profits from companies and landlords. “There’s a lot more policy space for us to work with, I think, that allows landlords to still have a fair rate of return on their investment.”
If tenants’ associations can help push negligent landlords out of markets, this could concentrate more real estate in the hands of landlords unwilling to prioritize profit above the wellbeing of tenants. As Veritas faced increasing financial trouble, it stopped paying vendors to provide basic maintenance services at some buildings. For supporters, driving such landlords out of private markets is a victory.
Tenants’ associations can also champion more radical reforms, such as removing more of the nation’s housing stock from the private market entirely. San Francisco tenants in one building recently persuaded its corporate owner to sell the property to a community land trust. The associations may also help people get to know their neighbors: strategizing, organizing and holding mock negotiations all require tenants to meet, and trust, each other.
The San Francisco supervisor Connie Chan, one of the “union-at-home” ordinance’s sponsors, wants to see the model expand nationally. “When you stabilize not just rent, but also living conditions, it will sustain the tenants in your neighborhood and in your city,” she said. Housing rights advocates around the country – from New York to Denver to Los Angeles – are already exploring how they might implement similar protections.
At the San Jose meeting that may have been bugged, it was safer for each person not to risk potential eviction. But collectively, with sufficient trust among neighbors, they might win significant relief.
At the end of the meeting, each person in the room was assigned a specific number of names hanging on the walls. Their task was to have a quick conversation with each person about a potential rent strike. Some people did not know their neighbors, and even for those who did, just finding the time to talk could be a challenge.
“Some people are always working,” said an older man, “so they can pay the rent.”