The Long Fight for Tenant Power

More than a third of the US population rent their homes. The number of tenants in the country is growing fast—nearly triple the rate of homeowner growth in 2024. So, too, are the challenges they face. Tenants headed into 2025 having experienced the steepest four-year rent hike on record. Nearly half of their households, as of 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, are rent burdened, paying over 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities, with more than a quarter paying over half. Both statistics are all-time highs. Those unable to afford these hikes, no longer protected by the federal programs that emerged briefly during the Covid-19 pandemic, have joined the growing population of homeless people in America—another number at a record high. Housing accounted for 70 percent of inflation throughout 2024. 

Low- and, increasingly, middle-income tenants must choose between paying record rents in major cities or moving to areas with cheaper apartments but worse job markets and fewer social services. These shifts are both regional—toward the Sun Belt or Midwest—and local, to the outer rings of cities and beyond. In the last decade exurban population growth has outpaced urban growth by roughly 7 percent. This development has in turn transformed the suburbs, traditionally considered bastions of homeownership: the growth of renter households in cities like Dallas, Minneapolis, Boston, Tampa, and Baltimore has paled in comparison to the rise of renters in their suburban peripheries. A record number of Americans, in other words, are paying increasingly large portions of their income to compete for a shrinking number of deteriorating apartments spread farther apart. 

Donald Trump’s first six months back in office, true to his landlord roots, have subjected tenants to still more arbitrary whims. A January attempt at a government-wide spending freeze reportedly caused serious delays in Section 8 voucher payments for thousands of low-income New Yorkers. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act boosts tax credits for new development, but many of the administration’s other moves stand to diminish that change’s effect. Aggressive tariffs on steel and aluminum will impede the construction of affordable housing by raising the price of imported materials, as fluctuating proposals threaten to do on the Mexican lime and gypsum used for over 70 percent of drywall and the Canadian lumber that makes up some 30 percent of the country’s supply. Labor stands to become more scarce as well: about a fifth of the country’s construction workforce is estimated to be undocumented and thus subject to the Trump administration’s crackdowns. (These mass deportations, Trump promised on the campaign trail, would ease housing demand and open up supply.) The administration rolled back a civil rights–era fair housing statute as part of a broader pledge to “protect the suburbs.” The National Low Income Housing Coalition has estimated that the country is currently short 7.3 million affordable and available rental homes for low-income tenants. The nation’s most famous developer remains, it seems, largely uninterested in facilitating their development.

Trump’s initial 2026 spending request threatens the nation’s most vulnerable renters with further cuts to the thin federal safety net. That proposal calls for reducing operating costs and capital funding for public housing by up to 50 percent (the system already has a repairs backlog of nearly $80 billion), cutting 43 percent of funding for federal housing vouchers (affecting over one million households), and weakening protections and enforcement. Many of these tenants had put their faith in Trump: counties with the toughest housing markets saw the largest vote shift in his direction this past November, as did people in demographic groups—like Black and Latino Americans and young people—most likely to be renters (though polling suggests that these groups are beginning to sour on the president).

Not all tenants, however, have reacted to hardship by turning toward the right. A growing number have joined or formed tenant organizations in the hopes of building collective political power—in the home, in the community, and on the national stage. There are now several hundred such organizations across the country. On the most basic level, they represent collectives fighting landlords or struggling for policy changes across neighborhoods, cities, and states—or both. They take a number of forms and names: associations, alliances, coalitions, committees, communities, councils, and, most often, unions. (“Leagues” fell out of fashion somewhere between the world wars.) They might have a service-oriented arm, providing legal representation or mutual aid, and some work in collaboration with labor groups: the Connecticut Tenants Union and SEIU 1199 New England are formal partners sharing technical and financial assistance. 

They pick a range of fights, from local battles against squalid living conditions to multibillion-dollar proposals to finance affordable housing. Especially after the pandemic, a number of tenant unions across the country have experimented with ambitious campaigns. In New York a statewide group known as the Tenant Bloc—I work at one of its member organizations—launched an effort to organize 20,000 tenants in favor of a rent freeze across the five boroughs, pushing mayoral candidates to support the policy; seven major candidates eventually did. Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, the policy’s most outspoken champion, won the Democratic nomination on a wave of support from renters. In the aftermath of wildfires in Los Angeles, members of LATU, the citywide tenant union, immediately began exposing illegal rent gouging, prompting otherwise negligent governmental bodies to crack down on offending landlords: the state and city launched seven criminal or civil suits against price-gougers, not including other subpoenas and injunctions. 

But no matter how much strength organizations build in major cities, the scale of the housing crisis demands a national response. In August 2024 organizations in Kansas City, Connecticut, Louisville, Bozeman, and on the south side of Chicago formed the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a self-described “union of unions.” Straightaway the new group started organizing a nationally coordinated rent strike—the first ever, TUF thought—aiming both to win much-needed repairs and to establish national rent caps in federally financed buildings. The campaign failed in its broader aims, but it represents a significant development in the tenant movement: a renewed focus on a nationwide strategy.

The question is how tenants can put that precedent to use. The movement remains relatively small and concentrated in major cities; its size can create a tension between ambition and effectiveness. A bold plan to invest billions in constructing green social housing across the country might alleviate the suffering of many renters, but right now it appears unlikely. On the other hand, organizing a rent strike against a landlord who fails to keep the boiler running in winter may prove both worthy and winnable, but its reach is limited. For that matter, protections that may be desperately necessary in one city might be long-established in another. How can tenants thread the needle between meeting the full scope of the crisis and mounting campaigns they have the power to win?

Tenant organization in America has a spotty history. Some tenants took collective action before the turn of the twentieth century; in upstate New York between 1839 and 1845, for instance, the Anti-Renters donned crude Native American costumes to tar, feather, and torment large agrarian landowners and their agents, eventually winning significant reforms in a new state constitution. Tenant activity exploded as industrialized cities teemed with swollen tenements and the working poor were forced into decrepit, overcrowded apartments with no protections against rent hikes or evictions. 

Beginning in 1904 New York City was rocked by waves of large-scale rent strikes and vast, violent anti-eviction mobilizations, mostly in immigrant Jewish neighborhoods. At one such battle in the Bronx, a crowd of a thousand attacked police with “fists, stones, and sticks” to forcibly halt the eviction of seventeen residents. They won not just a reversal of the evictions but a rent decrease. “The women were the most militant,” noted The New York Times after a similar scuffle.

This type of intense localized activity, amplified by a drastic housing shortage during and after World War I, forced New York state to implement rent control throughout the 1920s. For a shorter period during the war, the need to house industrial workers and service members led a number of states to enact emergency measures protecting tenants; Washington D.C. instituted rent control outright. From 1917 to 1920, 153 cities scattered throughout the country implemented forms of rent control, including places as small as Bath, Maine, and Sharon, Pennsylvania. In some cases they passed legislation that barred rents from rising above a certain level; another method, first pioneered in New London, Connecticut, was to rely on nongovernmental “fair rent commissions” made up of labor, legal, and real estate interests, which adjudicated proposed increases or otherwise pressured landlords to keep hikes low.

Tenant organizing in the early twentieth century was driven as much by the strength of the broader left as by supply shortages and poor conditions. The Socialist Party invested heavily in tenant work, and labor organizers applied tactics they learned on the factory floor to their own buildings, or vice-versa (thus tenant “unions,” rent “strikes”). In 1907 Pauline Newman, a sixteen-year-old seamstress at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (she stopped working there several years before the infamous fire), led a mostly successful rent strike that came to include ten thousand families, for which the Times called her the “east side Joan of Arc.” The next year Newman ran as the Socialist Party’s candidate for New York secretary of state, years before women’s suffrage became law. In 1909 the International Ladies Garment Worker Union hired her as a paid union organizer—the first woman in the nation to hold the position. Newman spent years as a close adviser to Eleanor Roosevelt and worked in labor organizing until her death at ninety-six.  

Throughout Newman’s life, she saw the tenant movement’s fortunes ebb and flow. In the 1930s the Depression facilitated the creation of public housing, which advocates had spent years skillfully weaving into the New Deal agenda; during the wartime housing crunch of the 1940s, President Roosevelt instituted a national rent control system that covered 80 percent of the country’s housing stock (eventually only continued by New York). At midcentury, however, the power both of the left and of labor eroded, and unions moved their social agenda, including housing, to the backburner. Membership and activity dropped, and organizations like New York’s City-Wide Tenants Council ceased to exist. The remaining, much smaller working-class tenant organizations focused their energies on immediate conditions more than on the broader political sphere, agitating around abject building conditions, evictions, and rent hikes. 

As postwar suburbanization drained cities of wealthier residents and flipped the country to majority-homeowner, tenant organizing increased. In the 1960s organizations proliferated across blighted, de facto segregated urban neighborhoods, radical college towns, and even at the national level. Tenants won individual fights, and fair housing became a major component of the Civil Rights Act, but more often the movement lost out to the forces of disinvestment and urban renewal. In 1963 Harlem tenants organized enormous rent strikes; they won some increased enforcement against violations of maintenance requirements and an expansion of legal tools for tenants, though they fell short of achieving sweeping change. Building on the widespread energy of that effort, the civil rights leader Jesse Gray launched the National Tenant Organization, primarily composed of public housing residents. And yet with limited resources the group struggled to organize a common campaign across localities; fractured between the pursuit of militant and legalistic strategies, it fell apart in just a few years. 

Responding to spiraling inflation, President Nixon briefly instituted national rent control—freezing rents in 1971, then capping increases until 1973—as part of a price-control scheme administered by Donald Rumsfeld. When inflation returned in 1976 tenant groups sensed an opportunity to push nationally for the policy again. The New Jersey Tenant Organization led groups from New York, Massachusetts, and Washington D.C. in creating the National Committee for Rent Control. It failed to win the measure nationally, but in the same period a range of localities adopted forms of the policy, from Alaska to Miami Beach. Later, in 1980, the NJTO led a fifty-organization National Tenants Union that was overmatched by opponents before petering out.

As renters organized, so too did real estate—and far more effectively. The National Multifamily Council formed in 1978. The National Association of Realtors formed a PAC in 1969, hired its first lobbyist in 1973, and became the largest trade association in the country by 1975. Both groups have spent decades as extraordinarily powerful political arms for the real estate industry. In 2024 they spent $8.8 million and $86.4 million on lobbying, respectively. 

In the late twentieth century a familiar story began to play out: local tenant groups in progressive cities would win rent control schemes (thirteen localities in California, and at least five in Massachusetts and 120 in New Jersey) while national real estate groups won statewide bans. Upwards of thirty states passed laws banning cities from writing their own rent control laws, often using model legislation written by the influential conservative think tank the American Legislative Exchange Council. Countless tenant organizations transitioned into social service nonprofits or faltered completely, while a national bipartisan consensus formed around deregulating the housing market, destroying or defunding public housing, and transitioning low-income tenants to individual vouchers. 

But conditions for potent tenant activity are growing once again. The national rentership rate, which had reached its lowest-ever point in 2004, spiked after the financial crisis. Nearly six million households foreclosed on their homes, which were often repurposed as rentals. In the crisis’s long aftermath, inequality skyrocketed and capital flowed back into urban cores, where wages rarely kept up with the cost of housing. One result was that downwardly-mobile millennials newer to neighborhoods increasingly mixed with working-class residents who had lived in the areas for longer; both were facing high rents and poor living conditions. 

Energetic groups emerged that built alliances across demographics, such as LATU in California and the Crown Heights Tenant Union in Brooklyn. In previous eras of high organizing activity, tenant groups stood divided between tenement slums and the nearby neighborhoods of middle-class muckrakers, or between segregated inner cities and whiter left-wing college towns. These constituencies did sometimes collaborate—the Berkeley Tenants Union and the Black Panther Party briefly fought together for citywide rent control in the 1970s—but today’s tenant groups stand out for their relatively diverse composition.

Diverse groups became further entwined during the pandemic. Millions faced immediate and devastating precarity amid one of the nation’s largest-ever social uprisings; they were also forced to spend vast quantities of time in their apartments. Not only were tenants from many backgrounds motivated toward radical programs like police abolition, they joined their neighbors in more immediately actionable efforts, like fixing building conditions they may have previously ignored.

Seemingly overnight, new tenant unions materialized across the nation, from Portland to Phoenix, Anchorage to Ithaca. Membership in existing groups surged. Many freshly radicalized organizations pushed an aggressive demand to “cancel” rent, dropping all arrears without repayment. The federal government instead launched an emergency rental assistance program, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instituted an eviction moratorium that was eventually scuttled by the Supreme Court. Some states, like New York, augmented these efforts, extending protections and supplementally funding assistance. But while the tenant movement exploded in size, it failed to secure lasting victories on a similarly large scale before the unprecedented political window closed. 

However quickly its ranks have grown in the past five years, the movement’s overall size remains extremely limited. The labor unionization rate of the American workforce stands at 9.9 percent; if officially tallied, the formal membership rate in tenant organizations would clock in at a fraction of a percent. In cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Kansas City, membership can number in the thousands; in other cities it can be in the hundreds.

And yet movements can have influence far in excess of their size. Take the “Fight for $15,” a labor campaign from the 2010s in which fast food workers struck at strategically selected locations to build pressure for a federal minimum wage hike. The effort, which peaked with some 60,000 workers protesting simultaneously in two hundred cities, helped prompt such a hike in a dozen states, Washington D.C., and many major cities; secured a higher minimum wage for all Amazon workers; and resulted in an estimated $151 billion in raises for 26 million workers on the whole.

Indeed, in recent years renters have scored some notable victories at various scales. In 2024 tenants in New York won a bill to protect millions of market-rate tenants against rent hikes. In the last decade nineteen cities, two counties, and five states have passed laws to provide free attorneys to tenants facing evictions. Organized tenants in places like Tacoma, Eugene, Fayetteville, and Ann Arbor have successfully fought to cap or end junk fees on applications, late rent and security deposits. Wherever tenants in the same building or portfolio organize, they have the potential leverage to force repairs, drive down the rent, and halt evictions. In 2020 thirty-eight families facing eviction in Minneapolis, having successfully battled their landlord for years, finally forced him to sell them the building.

The example of TUF is instructive. The first serious effort to organize tenants around changing federal policy since the 1980s, the group launched its campaign for national rent caps in the late summer of 2024. Organizers fanned out to ten buildings across the country. Instead of targeting a shared landlord, like most tenant campaigns, TUF concentrated instead on buildings with mortgages financed by the federal government, of which there are 12 million nationwide, supported by $150 billion of public funding a year. In a strategy reminiscent of the Fight for $15, TUF sought to leverage the upcoming presidential campaign to push not only for much-needed repairs in each building but also for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to institute rent caps as a condition of all their financing.

Ultimately, out of the ten buildings, only two tenant associations in Kansas City—the only location with a deeply rooted preexisting tenant organization—were able to move to successfully strike. Theirs became the longest rent strike in the city’s history, running over eight months. It won the buildings $1.35 million for emergency repairs, frozen rent for a year, caps on future rent increases, slashed late fees, and a temporary receivership for one building. And yet even where efforts to seed rent strikes failed, the tenant movement grew. When TUF attempted a strike in Ypsilanti, Michigan, even tenant association members who voted for Trump joined the fight. 

For the time being, with Trump in the White House, it’s difficult to envision national campaigns winning any changes to federal housing policy. Perhaps that will lead to effective local campaigns—the history of organized tenants suggests that renters have more power where they are more concentrated. Yet the crises they face are still nationwide in scale, and the growing number of tenants outside of large liberal cities will continue to struggle.

If federal policy is out of reach for the time being, and if hyperlocal organizing on its own falls short of meeting the scale of the moment, then tenants must figure out how to split the difference. Sharing strategies and tactics can be helpful, but without a unifying campaign, efforts spread across disparate locations can too easily fall apart. Even as groups in neighborhoods, cities, and states pursue legislative campaigns relevant to their local conditions, they should also make an effort to organize large landlord portfolios spread across state lines. Locations with more members and experience can help create leverage for those in less developed areas, winning portfolio-wide rent caps like those secured by KC Tenants this year.

Connecting tenants across lines of class, race, and geography could also help make “tenant” a salient political identity, pushing economically precarious renters leftward. As more and more Americans find themselves excluded from the national dream of property ownership, the tenant movement must prompt renters to fight for dignity and security in tenancy rather than seeing themselves as temporarily embarrassed homeowners—a feeling that can easily curdle into resentment and political reaction. With or without intervention, individuals will struggle against escalating rents and deteriorating conditions. But it’s up to unions to give their response shape and direction. 

After the national rent strike campaign ended, KC Tenants polled their membership to decide the organization’s trajectory for the next year. The union had previously won a citywide Tenants Bill of Rights and defeated an effort to spend billions in public funding on a new football stadium for the Chiefs. Now, according to organizers, the union voted overwhelmingly to eschew legislation in the immediate term and instead spend its energy increasing its density building by building, block by block, pledging to increase membership by the thousands. The first buildings they plan to target are owned by the Capital Realty Group—a giant national landlord with buildings in Louisville and Connecticut. They are, in effect, using this moment to build local power and national connection at once. When the next moment of political opportunity arrives, they aim to strike.