Tenant Unions Are Coming. Landlords Aren't Ready.
Tenant Unions Are Coming. Landlords Aren't Ready.
An organizer speaks about collective power in the world of real estate capital.
An organizer speaks about collective power in the world of real estate capital.
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What does a strike look like? Everyone moves out? It’s not so easy to just stop renting.
If you stop paying, it's your problem, if everyone stops paying, it's the landlords problem
It depends. I don't know how many rentals are mortgaged vs owned. I suspect they can evict you faster than they run out of cash.
Most states have eviction laws limiting their power, and often part of a tenant union is a lawyer to stall
I suppose you could have a landlord-specific-union. If I own and rent out 3 houses then I’d just evict all 3. If I owned 50 houses, I could just obfuscate true ownership through various LLCs. If you didn’t know all my properties, you couldn’t form any meaningful union against me. Apartment complex would be fucked though.
I work for a company that aggregates public data for...reasons, and I can tell you it takes just 1-2 queries to find every LLC, property, etc. associated to a person.
I think an all out strike as in, not paying rent, is a very serious and aggressive option that you'd only exercise in extreme circumstances.
Unionising provides a lot of power to tenants long before going that far.
For example, as a group you can afford legal representation.
If enough people stop paying rent, then they have to negotiate with them as a group. They can't evict everyone.
Uhmm ... yea, you CAN evict everyone. It's called an eviction. Don't pay rent, get evicted. Don't move out when evicted, get trespassed and thrown out by the Sheriff. A renters union won't do shit. Laws need to be changed to scale property tax so the more properties you own the more taxes you pay.
It can cost landlords a lot of money. You can evict everyone but then you need to actually go through the process with them, one by one. The union can also collectively call attention from the municipality, file official complaints, etc.
If you rent strike and the landlord evicts eveyone, then they need to ready all the units all at once with none of the units generating any income. Assuming they have maintenance staff, they don't have enough to handle that kind of volume. They'll need to contract it out or deal with no income as units get ready one by one. The only downside (upside for them) is that they might be able to raise the rents on new tenants if demand is high enough.
Depends on the state laws honestly. Some states will just have cops haul you out.
Okay, but are the cops going to rehab the units after they haul the evicted tenants out? Are they going to seize all the tenants property and have it all catalogued and picked up? Plus if every unit is now a crime scene, that's longer those units will sit empty, generating no income while all the evidence is gathered and then the crime scene cleanup guys show up.
Seeing where our gov’t going now, I’d expect all property to be seized and the tenants getting deported.
Yes where I live, landlords can simply take the property to municipal bins.
Okay, property is seized and tenants are deported, but that all takes time. I mean, I guess the "free market will fix it" by some enterprising and shitty American starting a company that assists landlords in cleaning up after a rent strike.
I’m being a little hyperbolic to be fair lol
Yes, but no. The Sherriff's office sits everything out on the corner (not just the front of the house) when they evict in my state. They tell people not to touch stuff while they are there, but its a free for all the minute they pull off.
An eviction just costs court fees in my state, and the landlord will automatically get the fee and any legal fee back.
People put deposits down exactly for this reason. The properties are insured. There is no way a renters union would work.
Sorry everyone, forget everything I said. This one person says that the first reason in my list of reasons of why it can be effective to form a tenants union isn't a big deal in their state. I guess that miraculously invalidates all of my other points that aren't related the legal fees of the eviction process. Obviously, it also applies to every other state, even if the fees thing is different there for some reason.
Go evict everyone then, see how that works out for you.
It's kinda the same way that the Trump administration is handling it's business. If you ignore the law and you have enough firepower to enforce your viewpoint, then the laws are up to negotiation. If thousands of people go on rent strike, they can't evict all those people. There aren't enough cops to throw all these people out in the street.
Rent strikes exist and have worked. The realities of evicting everyone is slow and costly legal process that can be disrupted in various ways. The point is to make it so costly that ceding to the tenant union's demands become the better choice. There is a book Abolish Rent that goes into some tenet union victories and lessons can be learned from them.
Pay rent into a communal escrow.
Besides what other people already answered here: Solidarity will also go a long way. Workers in the old days faced the same dilemma: When they go on strike, will they lose their job? A lot of them did. Solidarity saved them and made the movement work.
In the context of housing, solidarity can take the form of organized people in a town agreeing upfront: "If folks from one house get evicted, they can move in with us." Of course this requires a lot of trust—just like the person in the article says. And whenever it should come to this, it will be costly and inconvenient, even burdensome, for everyone involved. Just like filling a strike fund from already low wages was. In the end it worked.
Without solidarity, we are defenseless.
Stop paying, same as any other boycott? I've done this thought experiment before, and while I think tenant unions are possible (and very much needed), they definitely aren't as simple to implement as labor unions.
To start, people would need to live more minimalistically so that "just moving out" can at least be a (last resort) tool in the union's toolbox. This makes tenant unions antithetical to consumerism, a quality not shared by labor unions.
To really thrive, tenant unions would also require people to actively know and interact a lot more with their neighbors, again fighting the trend of increasing social isolation and complacency caused largely by corporate (read: for-profit) social media.
Personally, I want to see a sharp increase in co-living (a.k.a communal living). That would greatly lower the buy-in threshold for tenant unions to really take off, not to mention all the other mental, social, financial, and environmental benefits.
100 people can pool their money together and hire a really good lawyer. 1,000 people could destroy a property management company. $20/month per household would add up fast.
Why is it called a strike? Why do we call it that and band together? If you know, you'll know what all unions should be doing in this Age of Terror