Tenant unions organize in the shadow of the law. I say, “in the shadow of the law,” because unlike for labor unions, there is no extensive federal, state, or local legislative scheme that defines the rights, responsibilities, structure, or acceptable strategies tenant unions can employ. Not even the legal definition of a tenant union is fixed. However, that does not mean there is no tenant union law.
Broadly speaking, tenant unions are membership-based organizations of tenants who organize across multiple properties or a geographic region to fight for material changes in their own homes and scale their demands to landlords, lenders, and all levels of government. What that organizing looks like varies across legal jurisdictions, types of housing stock, and local economic climates. Tenant union law is the web of law that governs the relationship between tenants, their unions, landlords, lenders, developers, and government actors. While this legal framework rarely explicitly defines tenant unions’ legal form, tactics, or strategies for scaling their advocacy, it deeply shapes them.
In a recent article in the Yale Law & Policy Review, I offer a primer on this legal framework by analyzing ten tenant union campaigns from across the United States. I draw out from these campaigns three dimensions of how tenant unions organize in the shadow of the law—the internal form and obligations of tenant unions, tactics and strategies employed at the building or neighborhood level to win concrete changes to tenants’ material conditions, and how tenants scale up their organizing.
In this brief post, I hope to illustrate the usefulness of this framework by extrapolating the three dimensions of how tenants organize in the shadow of the law from three different campaigns. In laying out this framework, I offer a shared starting point for those involved in the tenant movement. My aspiration is that it will provide organizers and lawyers already deeply involved in their own campaigns with the resources to explore what ideas they might borrow from other jurisdictions and with a shared understanding of the legal foundations underlying tenant organizing.
Kansas City, Chicago, and New York City
Tenant movements organize in relation to a wide range of laws in vastly different circumstances. Three tenant unions at work in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York City exemplify the diversity of potential starting points.
In these pages, Shai Karp recently told the story of Quality Hill Towers in Kansas City where a tenant union organizing with KC Tenants went on strike against Sentinel Real Estate Corp in October 2024. Missouri’s landlord-tenant laws, the courage of KC Tenants’ members, and the union’s sophisticated understanding of the underlying financing of the properties involved in the strike together form the backdrop of KC Tenants’ ongoing rent strike negotiations.
In the case of the Ellis Lakeview Tenant Association in Chicago, Illinois, organized tenants partnered with the Tenant Education Network to demand repairs and, eventually, a new, more responsible landlord. The building is privately owned and publicly subsidized. Tenants paid thirty-percent of their incomes towards rent while their private landlord, Apex Chicago IL, received $120,000 per month in direct payments from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Unable to withhold the rent the landlord received from HUD, the Ellis Lakeview Tenants found other methods to cut their landlord off from rental revenue.
In 2021, the Supportive Housing Organized and United Tenants (“SHOUT”) came together as a group of currently or formerly unhoused tenants and applicants navigating the New York City supportive housing system across disparate boroughs, buildings, and agencies. The supportive housing model offers affordable housing with supportive social services for people who are unhoused or are at risk of becoming unhoused. Service providers lease either an entire building or multiple apartments scattered across multiple buildings from private landlords, then place program participants in those units. Although New York City is known for strong tenant protections and a powerful tenant movement, supportive housing residents often do not find the support they needed in building-based tenant associations. SHOUT found ways to connect them.
The law shaped the form, tactics, and strategies to scale advocacy for each of these tenant unions.
Form & Democracy
The first dimension of tenant union law deals with form and democracy. In Missouri, any group of tenants who choose to call themselves a tenant union can be one. There is no law that defines a tenant union or states where or how one might organize. However, groups like the Quality Hill Tenant Union do not operate completely free of the law. Missouri tenant unions are governed by the same laws that govern unincorporated associations – like local charitable groups that have not incorporated – which leaves it to them to develop their own internal decision-making structures.
Project-based Section 8 buildings, like the one where the Ellis Lakeview Tenants Association organized, are governed by federal regulations that offer the rare, explicit framework granting tenants the right to form a “legitimate tenant organization.” The law creates democratic requirements for these organizations, protects tenants’ rights to canvass and hold meetings on the premises, and sets conditions for organizers accessing the properties. It says very little about the landlord’s obligations beyond their duty to recognize and give reasonable consideration to any concerns raised by the tenant organization. The regulations create structure, but do not provide a clear pathway for how organized tenants might employ that structure to successfully advocate with their landlord. Enforcement of all of these regulations is left to HUD, a power the agency is loathe to use.
SHOUT’s members explicitly developed their organization in relation to their shared participation in the same supportive housing program. They do not live in the same building or have a common landlord. In a housing market where government involvement increasingly comes in the form of vouchers paid to private owners, it is common for tenants who are neighbors to have entirely different regulations that apply to their tenancies. SHOUT created space for members to meet online and connect with tenants living in different buildings, but whose problems resonated with one another nonetheless.
Building & Neighborhood Level Tactics
The second dimension of tenant union law deals with tactics and strategy at the building level. Tactics and strategy are most fundamentally about leverage.
In Kansas City, Sentinel has brought eviction actions against 16 KC Tenant rent strikers for nonpayment of rent. Even though there is no Missouri law that expressly states that tenants may go on rent strike, tenants’ right to withhold rent where a landlord has failed to make repairs, known as an implied warranty of habitability, has been recognized across Missouri since 1984. Tenants facing nonpayment of rent evictions who assert an implied warranty of habitability claim may be required by the judge to post back due rent as bond. If the tenant successfully posts the funds, the court will then hear the tenant’s claims, which can yield substantial damages. In August 2024, one Quality Hill tenant utilized this tactic, winning $19,000 after asserting an implied warranty of habitability claim. The court calculated the tenant’s damages as the difference between the agreed rent and the fair rental value of the premises, finding the apartment was worth $0. Another background law informing organizing is tenants’ right to a renewal lease. Sentinel issued ten KC Tenants notices of nonrenewal of their leases and notices to vacate. KC Tenants have called the nonrenewals retaliation and demanded their recission. If Sentinel attempts to evict these tenants, the tenant union will have to navigate Missouri case law that bars tenants facing evictions after nonrenewal of a lease from raising equitable defenses, including for retaliation.
The rent strike would not have been as effective of a tactic for the Ellis Lakeview Tenants. While they could have withheld their own portion of monthly rental payments, they lacked control over HUD’s rental payments beyond an appeal to terminate HUD’s contract with the owner. When HUD did not act to terminate the contract, the Tenant Association pursued a receivership through Chicago’s Troubled Building Initiative. Under this program, when receivers are appointed, landlords retain ownership of a building but are barred from entering the property or collecting rents. The receivers take over management, intercept rent, and theoretically rededicate rents to repairs. Where tenants lack the ability to withhold rents, receivership offers another mechanism to cut off rents. As the Ellis Lakeview Tenants lacked a private right of action to pursue a receiver, they had to advocate with the City of Chicago to bring the action.
The SHOUT tenants also could not effectively withhold rent, both because they received a subsidy and because, with varied landlords as their targets, individual rent withholding would be unlikely to cause the amount of financial harm necessary to force an agreement with a landlord. However, rent withholding aside, individually, many SHOUT members enjoy strong underlying legal rights, including living in buildings with rent stabilization or just cause eviction protections. As tenants in New York City, they also have the right to file suit for repairs in New York City’s housing court, which allows tenants to file summary lawsuits where judges send code enforcement officers to their apartments and order repairs where code violations are found. Unfortunately, some supportive housing caseworkers misinform tenants as to their rights, stating that they cannot organize or join a tenant association, request repairs, or make complaints to code enforcement. As a result, bad-acting landlords allow the properties to deteriorate without the residents having a clear understanding of their rights to organize or demand repairs. The net result of these limitations is that SHOUT focuses less on collective, building-level tactics.
Strategies to Scale Organizing
The third dimension of tenant union law is about scale.
KC Tenants are stifled in their ability to win many local laws related to landlord-tenant relations because the Missouri state legislature preempts local governments from legislating in that area. In an innovative strategy, KC Tenants and their partners in the national Tenant Union Federation have organized across properties with federally backed mortgages, including Quality Hill, as part of a larger campaign to get the government sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their regulator, the Federal Housing and Finance Agency, to pass policies that will apply to all buildings with these government-backed loans, regardless of what the Missouri state legislature says.
The Ellis Lakeview Tenants also scaled their advocacy beyond the landlord, effectively advocating with the building’s lender, Freddie Mac, to invoke provisions in the mortgage stating the landlord had failed to maintain the property. Freddie Mac foreclosed and then took over ownership during summer 2024 and now the Tenant Association is demanding a collective bargaining agreement with any new owner to ensure they do not end up in the same position as with Apex Chicago.
SHOUT organized for and won the first supportive housing bill of rights before the New York City Council. The tenants focused on the supportive housing providers placing the tenants with the landlords as an opponent who united them all. Among other things, the bill of rights mandates that city-funded supportive housing providers notify all residents of whether their unit is rent stabilized, of their right to make complaints to code enforcement, and of their right to sue their landlord over conditions in their apartments. SHOUT also won a law requiring supportive housing providers to file reports with City Council that provide data on the bases of denial for affordable housing placements. SHOUT has utilized this data to launch the Safe, Accountable, and Fair for Everyone Campaign (“SAFE”), demanding reforms from the government agencies that monitor supportive housing providers. SHOUT pursued local legislation to provide their members and supportive housing tenants who have not yet joined them the information they need to scale up their organizing.
Tenant Union Law is Expansive, But Not Decisive
In addition to the analysis of KC Tenants, Ellis Lakeview Tenants Association, and SHOUT campaigns offered here, my article examines these three dimensions across a host of other tenant unions, from those in jurisdictions known for stronger tenant protections, like Oakland and Washington, D.C., to campaigns that break the mold of landlord-tenant bargaining altogether, like the Boston homeowners and tenants who organized together against the banks during the foreclosure crisis. I discuss portfolio-wide organizing in San Francisco and New York City, land use fights in manufactured home parks in Phoenix, and efforts to stop the closure of public housing in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. In a country with state-specific landlord-tenant protections, overlapping local, state, and federal regulatory structures, private and public landlords, and economic climates varying from gentrifying to distressed, a comprehensive vision of tenant union law requires a sweeping review of tenant organizing campaigns and the shadow of the law in which they operate.
To be clear, the laws that shape tenant unions’ form, tactics, and scale are not decisive. Even where tenants have access to theoretically strong laws, the laws themselves cannot supplant the work of organizing to build a powerful movement. Good laws are no replacement for leadership development, political education, and deep organizing. It is ultimately up to tenants to enforce their own rights, whether they exist on the books or not.
This primer is designed as a shared starting point for anyone invested in building the tenant movement’s power. It is my hope that tenants, organizers, attorneys, and legal workers who do not see their experiences fully represented here will share how the law has influenced their campaigns, to both further articulate and then move to strengthen tenant union law.
