Could This Rolling Rent Strike Make the Feds Protect Tenants?

Members of the Quality Hill Tenant Union launched a rent strike on Oct. 1. Photo by Jillian Guthrie

This piece originally posted on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right

Editor’s note: This newsletter post is an excerpt from an article first published in the important housing publication Shelterforce and republished here by permission. It is an important update on the organizing actions of the Tenant Union Federation, which we have discussed in this newsletter several times. You can read the full article at Shelterforce’s site here

On Oct. 1, tenants in two apartment complexes in Kansas City, Missouri, went on rent strike.

Their demand? That the federally backed loans their landlords depend on be conditioned upon protections for tenants living in the properties that receive this publicly supported financing.

These strikes are part of a campaign coordinated by the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a new “union of unions” that was formed on Aug. 6 of this year. Still, the decision to strike came from the residents of these buildings themselves, who voted to authorize them on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 27.

Organized tenants in both Kansas City complexes, Quality Hill Towers and Independence Towers, are now withholding rent and demanding that their landlords and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) take significant steps to protect tenants. FHFA regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which, in their role as the major purchasers of mortgage loans, set standards for what loans they are willing to purchase.

According to organizers with TUF, these strikes kick off a much larger campaign: a coordinated rent strike, actively organized in cities around the U.S. where buildings of tenants can join the strike as they organize themselves and become strike-ready. TUF has indicated on social media that tenant unions in Michigan, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Montana, and Kentucky may soon join the action.

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TUF organizers say that the coordinated strike aims to build leverage that forces the hand of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to do something—specifically, to codify tenant protections for all landlords that receive loans backstopped by the FHFA. The organizers demand that the FHFA introduce rent caps, in addition to demanding maintenance, structural repairs, and other concessions from the landlords. “What we’re trying to do is actually force the regulator to act as a proactive regulator of this market,” says Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenant Union Federation and co-founder of KC Tenants, the 10,000-member union where these first strikes are taking hold.

FHFA regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), or for-profit corporations chartered by Congress to provide liquidity and risk management for the U.S. housing market. Mortgage lenders issue loans to multifamily properties, which the GSEs then purchase, bundle, and securitize. Because mortgage loans are so long-term, lenders need to be able to sell most of them to the GSEs to get the funds to make more loans. Therefore, lenders typically make sure their loans conform to GSE standards.

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According to the FHFA, a whopping 16 million people live in rental units with mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie. “FHFA, we would assert, has untapped potential to regulate a large swath of the rental market,” says Raghuveer. “And that would then have a huge impact on the rest of the market.”    

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The organizers take both the rent strike and its associated risks seriously. “In the last two years, landlords have aggressively hiked rents to the point that tenants don’t have affordable options,” says Tenant Union Federation lead organizer Grace White. “People who live at Quality Hill oftentimes say ‘This is my only option. There’s nowhere else that I can go.’” Therefore, it’s extremely important to TUF that all of the strike organizing is bottom-up and led by building leaders.

“There’s a lot of deliberate steps that we are not skipping, and shortcuts that we are not taking,” adds Raghuveer. “A rent strike is the difference between not paying rent from a place of desperation versus strategically and collectively withholding rent from a place of power. And that requires really deep and serious organizing.”

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Tenant organizers in dozens of buildings, largely in the South and Midwest, have been mobilizing to form tenant unions in coordination with TUF. “We have another set of buildings that may be strike-ready by Nov. 1,” says Raghuveer. Next they have “a bunch” of buildings where they will soon be announcing that a majority of the occupied units have joined a tenant union, and, she says, “we’ll see what the trajectory of those unions will be after they launch.”

TUF won’t say just how many buildings they expect to join the rent strike, in the near or longer term, but when asked what to expect in the next few months, Raghuveer had a one-word answer: “Escalation.”

You can read the full article at Shelterforce’s site here.