Charlie Dulik and Tara Raghuveer on Tenant Organizing
| “A record number of Americans,” writes Charlie Dulik today in the NYR Online, “are paying increasingly large portions of their income to compete for a shrinking number of deteriorating apartments spread farther apart.” With rents skyrocketing nationwide—“housing accounted for 70 percent of inflation throughout 2024”—and the Trump administration slashing federal support for affordable housing, the already tight housing market has reached a crisis. Tenant unions around the country have been organizing rent strikes, coordinating mutual aid, and exposing rent-gouging landlords, but, Dulik notes, “the scale of the housing crisis demands a national response.... How can tenants thread the needle between meeting the full scope of the crisis and mounting campaigns they have the power to win?” One answer came from New York City, where, Tara Raghuveer reports today in the NYR Online, Zohran Mamdani’s surprising victory in the mayoral primary race came about in large part due to the coordinated efforts of tenant organizations across the city: In January the Housing Justice for All coalition launched a statewide electoral arm called the Tenant Bloc…. It was an experiment in activating what the Cornell geographer Russell Weaver…has called the “sleeping giant” in New York politics: tenants as a political class. “Tenants are half the state,” the group declared. They could be a dominant political force—if they organized themselves “from the buildings to the ballot box.” The group’s first major undertaking was a campaign to build support for a citywide rent freeze. The mayoral race was a natural occasion: organizers started knocking doors across the city, asking tenants to sign a pledge that they would vote for a candidate who supported the policy. Rather than back Mamdani from the get-go, as several of their members had, they hoped to build a base they could route toward whichever candidate they ultimately endorsed, applying pressure to the whole field in the process.
Below, alongside Dulik’s and Raghuveer’s essays, are five articles from our archive about landlords and tenants. Organized tenants in the US have long debated how to meet the scale of the crises they face. Under Trump, that question is more pressing than ever. To understand how Zohran Mamdani swept New York’s mayoral primary, it helps to know why the city’s tenants went on the offensive against real estate. Two residential developments in Marin County have, for different reasons, met with resistance from their communities. What can they tell us about the way out of California’s housing emergency? —April 26, 2023 “In This Is All I Got, a report about a year in the life of a homeless single mother in New York City, Lauren Sandler finds the intractable source of homelessness in the piratical inequities of the housing market.” —October 22, 2020 “The US is looking at an imminent glut of mass homelessness, the like of which it has not seen since perhaps the Great Depression, of ordinary Americans who simply can’t make rent through no fault of their own.” —September 16, 2020 Carroll Fife comes out of the Black Power tradition and now leads the Oakland chapter of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE (pronounced “ace”), a group formed in 2010 to take up the work of ACORN—the national poor people’s association that was destroyed in a right-wing sting. In the days I spent with Fife and her team at ACCE, I glimpsed the potential of a coordinated, grassroots response to the housing emergency. Compared to neighboring San Francisco, or Los Angeles or New York, Oakland is small and historically progressive—the locus of the Black Panther Party and a richly multicultural working class. So it seemed natural to wonder whether an extended act of civil disobedience by a group of black mothers could inspire change: community control of land, redefinition of private property through cooperatives and land trusts, and a constitutional right to housing.
—March 9, 2020 “Throughout the twentieth century, the area around Union Square was low-rent and commercially diverse. In the early 2000s, hyper-gentrification encircled Union Square Park with chain stores and banks. Tech companies moved in and financial firms followed. The real-estate industry nicknamed the blocks between the park and Astor Place ‘Midtown South,’ though it is nowhere near Midtown…. Rents surpassed those in the real Midtown.” —March 7, 2018 Save $168 on an inspired pairing!
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