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"If we have a chance, it lives in the tenant union" w/ Tara Raghuveer | Fighting Fascism · The Nation Podcasts

0:06
[SPEAKER_02]: One fine morning, I was awakened And Bella Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chob
0:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, welcome everyone to another episode of the Fighting Tashism podcast.
0:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your co-host Aaron Reganvert and here with my wonderful friend Matt de Silva.
0:47
[SPEAKER_00]: How's it going, Matt?
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm good, Aaron, how are you?
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm good.
0:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We are a smuckers, not with us.
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He's had to miss a couple.
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He's doing some post-doc and book writings.
1:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't remember what he's got.
1:03
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a very important person.
1:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So well, well, model through with Adam this time.
1:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
1:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But I thought this was such a fun conversation.
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think like really useful.
1:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I thought this was really cool.
1:17
[SPEAKER_01]: We talked to Tara Ragervier, who is a tenant organizer and director of the Tenant Union Federation AKA Tough.
1:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Excellent.
1:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Excellent.
1:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And a gram.
1:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Very good.
1:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not an anagram.
1:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an acronym.
1:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Excellent.
1:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Excellent acronym.
1:36
[SPEAKER_01]: But what it could be an anagram.
1:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Or it could be an acrostic poem.
1:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe maybe.
1:44
[SPEAKER_01]: What's more about acrostic poems?
1:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a fun assignment in elementary school.
1:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I feel like I bodied some pretty good across the poems for like, you know, mother's day or something.
1:57
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Tara's car is awesome.
1:59
[SPEAKER_01]: She's been organizing in primarily based out of Kansas City since 2019 with the Kansas City tenants.
2:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Personal anecdote here that we didn't get into, but I've no tar for a long time.
2:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Back in the summer of 2019, I was in Kansas City for a wedding.
2:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And I actually attended a Kansas City tenants meeting.
2:19
[SPEAKER_01]: It was in,
2:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Some like, I think they were getting spaced from a union hall or might have been like a church basement.
2:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It was one of those very, you know, authentically lived in spaces.
2:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was 25, 30 people from all walks of life.
2:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a really cool thing to be a fly on the wall floor.
2:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was seven years ago and now,
2:43
[SPEAKER_01]: They've had some really amazing wins in Kansas City and the Kansas City area, which we talk about a bit on the podcast and another going nationwide, taking on some bad memories across the country.
2:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's interesting.
2:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we've had some episodes where we're sort of very big picture.
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had been anticipating this as like, you know, sort of a break from that.
3:06
[SPEAKER_00]: If we're going to get down into the needy grid of of what it looks like to do real organizing on the ground.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was that.
3:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But as we talk about in the episode, Tara is very clear about the strategy needed to take on the sort of nationalized financialized corporate interests that are running the housing industry right now, that you can't just
3:32
[SPEAKER_00]: building a larger, a larger strategy that is as large and scope as the hour and breath of these folks that we're up against.
3:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a conversation that I think is both like a window into what does it look like to be doing this really important work on the ground, but also ties into all of these larger themes that we've been talking about in this podcast.
3:58
[SPEAKER_00]: As always, we want to thank course radish for the music for this podcast, we want to think our wonderful producer, Nick, and we want to thank the nation for posting us.
4:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Without further ado, Tara Ragdee.
4:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Tara, thank you for joining us on the flooding fascism podcast.
4:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So excited to have you.
4:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going to start this by asking you to rank the top 10 most fascist land lords in the country.
4:27
[SPEAKER_01]: But that feels like a little hot off the peak.
4:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So instead, can you kind of give us a rundown of of what Casey tenants, you know, is, you know, how, what when you founded it, how it came to
4:41
[SPEAKER_01]: and how it kind of grew to be a bona fide powerhouse in Kansas City.
4:47
[SPEAKER_04]: Sure.
4:48
[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks for having me.
4:50
[SPEAKER_04]: It's great.
4:50
[SPEAKER_04]: And we can get back to the list of most fascist landlords.
4:53
[SPEAKER_04]: The spoiler is that it's a lot of them.
4:56
[SPEAKER_04]: The list is more than 10.
4:58
[SPEAKER_04]: But we'll get back there.
4:59
[SPEAKER_04]: So I grew up in the Kansas City area on the Kansas side.
5:03
[SPEAKER_04]: moved away a long time ago and really never expected to be back.
5:07
[SPEAKER_04]: But I found myself doing some research on evictions in Kansas City when I was a senior in college and that brought me back here and specifically it brought me back and in conversation with poor and working class tenants who just couldn't make things work.
5:24
[SPEAKER_04]: And I remember during that period of time drawing diagrams in my notebook
5:30
[SPEAKER_04]: The rent is too high for her to pay, but if she can't pay the rent, she ends up in a fiction court.
5:35
[SPEAKER_04]: If she gets evicted, there's no place for her to go.
5:37
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, I was drawing these diagrams being like, this actually just doesn't make sense.
5:42
[SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't make sense because the rent is too high and that was more than a decade ago.
5:46
[SPEAKER_04]: So the rent's been too high.
5:47
[SPEAKER_04]: The rent's
5:48
[SPEAKER_04]: two-day I'm high now, it's been that way for a long time, and this kind of got stuck in my head, and the stories that I heard from tenants at that time really got stuck, not just in my head, but in my gut, because I felt like what I was hearing was story after story about a...
6:03
[SPEAKER_04]: power imbalance that was so stark.
6:07
[SPEAKER_04]: And perhaps more stark than anything I had ever seen in any area of study or area of personal experience.
6:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And I became obsessed with housing and also obsessed with why people weren't talking about it that much, which then becomes relevant again in 2026 as affordability and the rent are kind of on the tip of everyone's tongue.
6:26
[SPEAKER_04]: But that was back in, you know, 2013, 2014.
6:30
[SPEAKER_04]: I ended up as an organizer in the immigrant rights movement and loved that and learned a lot but kind of fixated on housing and that power differential and came back to Kansas City repeatedly over the years to talk to people about my eviction data, what I had found and
6:47
[SPEAKER_04]: Eventually, the organizer brain ran into my little researcher brain and I realized that, of course, talking to people about the data was not going to solve any of the problem that was actually getting worse under my nose.
7:01
[SPEAKER_04]: So I moved back in 2019.
7:05
[SPEAKER_04]: sort of at the invitation of three amazing women I had met at that time Tiana called well Diane Charity and Brandy Granados.
7:14
[SPEAKER_04]: Those three would become the co-founders of Casey Tenons with me and our first meeting was on February 17, 2019.
7:21
[SPEAKER_04]: We had 12 attendees including two infiltrators and then the next meeting we had 35 attendees and the next meeting we had 55 attendees and three days
7:33
[SPEAKER_04]: at the beginning of March in 2019 in sub-zero weather with 120 people.
7:38
[SPEAKER_04]: And then we were kind of off to the races, haven't slowed down since.
7:41
[SPEAKER_04]: And we are now, I think, the largest tenant union in the country.
7:46
[SPEAKER_04]: We have over 10,000 members on paper, hundreds of people who are very active, roles in their property unions and in their neighborhoods week over week.
7:55
[SPEAKER_04]: And of a slew of policy victories, as well as material victories in the buildings and properties that we've organized.
8:03
[SPEAKER_01]: having infiltrators in your first meeting.
8:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like you're onto something.
8:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
8:09
[SPEAKER_04]: The Facebook groups were abuzz.
8:12
[SPEAKER_04]: My landlord and the realtors were paying attention.
8:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That's amazing.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you sort of take a step back and give a little bit of an explanation of,
8:21
[SPEAKER_00]: what a tenant union is and how it works.
8:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And also interesting to hear a bit about what they've been traditionally and if that is shifting as the structures and the housing market and financialization, all these new dynamics are impacting things and if organizing tenants has had to change as well.
8:44
[SPEAKER_04]: Such a good question.
8:45
[SPEAKER_04]: Our first challenge as tenant organizers is actually telling someone, letting someone know they are a tenant.
8:51
[SPEAKER_04]: That's actually not an identity that many people feel connected to.
8:54
[SPEAKER_04]: And if they're thinking about that identity, it's from a place of shame.
8:58
[SPEAKER_04]: We are told to aspire for ownership in this country.
9:01
[SPEAKER_04]: And if we're relegated to this sort of tenant class, it's something that we're told to feel some shame about.
9:07
[SPEAKER_04]: So,
9:07
[SPEAKER_04]: When we knock a door, we sort of first have to explain that dynamic, which of course doesn't take long because people know that the biggest bill that they pay every month is their rent and they know that they know the way that that shapes the rest of their experience as a sort of participant in the economy and their neighborhood and society around them.
9:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And then as we're recruiting people into tenant unions, we have to define what that is because as you all know, very few people,
9:36
[SPEAKER_04]: in this country today have any experience with any kind of union.
9:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And if they do have an experience with something like a labor union, we can't guarantee that it's necessarily been a good one.
9:45
[SPEAKER_04]: So once we get to explaining a union, it's pretty simple and again it's pretty intuitive.
9:51
[SPEAKER_04]: There's strength and numbers, right?
9:52
[SPEAKER_04]: There's more of us than there are them.
9:56
[SPEAKER_04]: them is our landlords.
9:58
[SPEAKER_04]: So, at the doors, we'll usually say, you know, what difference would it make if you complain to the landlord?
10:05
[SPEAKER_04]: Have you done that before?
10:06
[SPEAKER_04]: And how has the landlord responded?
10:07
[SPEAKER_04]: And tenants will be like, no, they don't respond.
10:09
[SPEAKER_04]: I make my complaints sometimes, they don't respond.
10:12
[SPEAKER_04]: So, they don't make them anymore.
10:14
[SPEAKER_04]: So, then we say, okay, what happens if your whole building gets together?
10:17
[SPEAKER_04]: Because you're all having these issues.
10:19
[SPEAKER_04]: What do you think the landlord would do then?
10:21
[SPEAKER_04]: So, people start to understand the potential power of the union.
10:25
[SPEAKER_04]: To your point, though, I think there's, you know, nothing about tenant unions is new.
10:30
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, sharing resources with our neighbors and organizing together in this type of way is kind of as old as time across cultures and through time, people have done this kind of thing to survive.
10:43
[SPEAKER_04]: We're not inventing anything.
10:45
[SPEAKER_04]: What we are innovating,
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[SPEAKER_04]: is a new practice of tenant organizing under new conditions.
10:52
[SPEAKER_04]: We are up against more powerful forces than ever before.
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[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, some of the most powerful forces in the global economy.
11:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's as a result of the financialization of real estate capital.
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[SPEAKER_04]: the consolidation of real estate capital, more of our landlords are nameless, faceless entities who we don't know.
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[SPEAKER_04]: And they have all this power increasing power over our lives.
11:15
[SPEAKER_04]: So the way that we organize needs to change.
11:18
[SPEAKER_04]: And we've spent a lot of the last couple of years innovating a new methodology of tenant organizing that really borrows from organized labor.
11:25
[SPEAKER_04]: and apply structure based organizing tactics to our context.
11:30
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're organizing what we call super-majority strike ready unions at the property and portfolio level.
11:37
[SPEAKER_04]: And we're using those unions.
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[SPEAKER_04]: It's one thing to build them.
11:41
[SPEAKER_04]: It's another thing to exercise power.
11:42
[SPEAKER_04]: That's why we say strike ready.
11:44
[SPEAKER_04]: We want to build fighting unions that are actually using their political power and economic power.
11:49
[SPEAKER_04]: Because our powers are rent.
11:51
[SPEAKER_04]: Our rent money actually makes the global economy go round.
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[SPEAKER_04]: If we get serious about how to use that, we could really change some stuff.
11:59
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's some of how we're thinking about tenant organizing today, but I'll also say just organizing building by building block by block is not sufficient given who we are up against.
12:09
[SPEAKER_04]: They're moving at a at a pace and at a scale that we can't actually beat if that's the only way in which we're organizing.
12:16
[SPEAKER_04]: So right now we're pushing ourselves to think about
12:19
[SPEAKER_04]: Where does structure and methodology meet up with strategy so that we can actually have a plan to win?
12:25
[SPEAKER_04]: Straight fire.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting thinking of just the process of getting folks in the door and I got my start doing student organizing work on my co-founded youth organizing program called the Providence Student Union and it's the idea of like you don't really have the architecture, the legal architecture
12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: create something and get people involved.
12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It's helpful when you're doing working with students that you can just say we have three pizza.
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: People will show up.
12:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I assume it's a little more complicated with getting tenants in the room.
12:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's interesting to hear you're talking about sort of the figuring out this larger strategy because I think we have been we've had a few episodes that were very sort of big picture where we're looking
13:09
[SPEAKER_00]: 30,000 feet at what is fashion's look like right now, what kind of let us hear.
13:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're envisioning this is like an episode where we're like really zooming in on what does it look like on the ground to actually do real organizing work.
13:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And it sounds like from what you're saying,
13:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we actually can't ever do that completely like that.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a that's a key part you're doing that you know door to door building these real relationships with people wanted a time, but as you said that the folks that were up against are operating a much larger scale and so you have to figure out how to how to marry that on the groundwork with yeah scale that can can can fight against them.
13:49
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I think that's such an important point because there's a lot of comfort that we might feel if we decided that our project was as simple as going door to door and organizing majority unions building by building block by block.
14:04
[SPEAKER_04]: That actually, you know, even saying those words out loud makes me feel some sense of like clarity and comfort and I think there there is a real hunger for clarity and comfort in times such as these and there.
14:18
[SPEAKER_04]: There is a, I think there's an endurance for the unknown that we have to develop if we want to be serious about winning and if we want to be serious about contesting.
14:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And that is uncomfortable.
14:31
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, at the end of last summer we ran this huge training called Union School which took people through our step-by-step methodology to organize supermajority, strikewriting unions.
14:41
[SPEAKER_04]: And by the end of the course we kind of get to this piece that's about strategy.
14:45
[SPEAKER_04]: And also by the end of the summer, we had launched like nine unions in this one corporate landlord's portfolio.
14:52
[SPEAKER_04]: And we were in this kind of like sticky, esquatorious strategic moment ourselves.
14:57
[SPEAKER_04]: And I found myself repeatedly week after week on these last sessions of the training, basically like yelling from this very seat.
15:04
[SPEAKER_04]: yelling to everyone who is participating in the training, I am not at ease.
15:09
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not at ease.
15:10
[SPEAKER_04]: Like if you're committed to strategy, if you're committed to winning, you have to be committed to hanging out in this like murky unknown that is really uncomfortable.
15:20
[SPEAKER_04]: But we can't, you know, the, we can't allow ourselves to self-smooth by just doing the thing that's right in front of us that still might be a good thing.
15:29
[SPEAKER_04]: we actually kind of constantly have to be connecting that thing to the bigger picture.
15:34
[SPEAKER_04]: Otherwise, we have to be honest with ourselves that what we're doing is soothing ourselves, we're making ourselves feel better while the world burns around us.
15:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's scary.
15:49
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a really scary concept.
15:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like, but it ties into like,
15:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Something we've been talking about on each of these episodes and in general, there's just a void right now to do like a weakened democratic party, to do weakened labor unions, right?
16:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes through no fault of the labor union themselves, sometimes because of poor leadership and the labor unions, there are all these people out there
16:26
[SPEAKER_01]: hungering for something that is like going to to be like a guiding light to to sort of name like there's all this bad shit happening here so we can like fix it can the tenant union defeat fascism.
16:45
[SPEAKER_04]: Here's what we say, if we have a chance, the chance lives in the tenant union.
16:50
[SPEAKER_04]: And I actually believe that.
16:52
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's part of what leaves me with such unease and discomfort on a day-to-day basis.
16:57
[SPEAKER_04]: As I feel perhaps delusional and committed to this path that we're on.
17:03
[SPEAKER_04]: And I really feel it's,
17:05
[SPEAKER_04]: filled with so much potential.
17:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And I feel called to dedicate my life force to it, you know, and so let me like break that down a little bit.
17:14
[SPEAKER_04]: I think another way that we talk about the tenant union in today's context is that the tenant union could be for poor and working class people in this country in the 21st century, what the labor union was for poor and working class
17:31
[SPEAKER_04]: And that is to say a vehicle for organizing across race, across gender, across generation, in some ways across class as the sort of
17:41
[SPEAKER_04]: ping-point spreads beyond just the poor and working class and into elements of the middle class and more professionalized classes.
17:50
[SPEAKER_04]: There's so much potential in that vehicle if we figure out how to do it, right?
17:55
[SPEAKER_04]: If we figure out how to organize a tenant in this context and organize to win and the thing that's exciting to me and the reason I feel so call it in this direction is that
18:04
[SPEAKER_04]: we are figuring out, we are figuring it out and it is working.
18:09
[SPEAKER_04]: We are actually winning, we're not winning enough and we're not winning at a large enough scale yet, but the promise of the potential of the tenant union is showing itself to us in every corner of the country right now.
18:23
[SPEAKER_04]: And I do strongly believe that it's not the tenant union alone, but the tenant union as a critical vehicle in fighting fascism,
18:32
[SPEAKER_04]: authoritarianism, you know, racialized and financialized capitalism and everything else that else us.
18:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I ask you on the ground like what that looks like?
18:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like a huge part of what your work is what 10 organizing is as I understand it is like, you name the enemy as the landlord and like the landlord sucks.
18:58
[SPEAKER_01]: and it's a very easy sort of logic to draw into to get people on the same side and in rowing in the same direction.
19:07
[SPEAKER_01]: As you're getting people above, like, does that announce this stop?
19:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, your building is being mismanaged because you're laying loads of pieces of shit.
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's kick his ass or does it get into, like, the more systemic things that are
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: enabling a landlord to be a piece of shit.
19:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess just where does that sort of, I don't know if you want to call a political education, like when does that come into play?
19:30
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
19:31
[SPEAKER_04]: such a good question.
19:32
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, we're primarily organizing people around their material interests and their immediate material interests.
19:38
[SPEAKER_04]: It's the mold in the apartment that's making their kids sick.
19:41
[SPEAKER_04]: It's the whole filled with asbestos above them.
19:44
[SPEAKER_04]: That's making them sick.
19:45
[SPEAKER_04]: It's the fact that their toilet won't flush or whatever.
19:48
[SPEAKER_04]: We're organizing people around those material interests, which actually also means that we're not primarily organizing people around ideology.
20:00
[SPEAKER_04]: of ideological frameworks and identity in our unions.
20:04
[SPEAKER_04]: And that is gorgeous.
20:06
[SPEAKER_04]: Like people talk about this kind of mythological, multiracial work in class.
20:11
[SPEAKER_04]: I know them.
20:12
[SPEAKER_04]: I feel so lucky.
20:13
[SPEAKER_04]: I know them.
20:14
[SPEAKER_04]: And I organize with them.
20:15
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm seeing them join real organization across the country from rural Kentucky, to Boise, Idaho, to Trailer Parkson,
20:28
[SPEAKER_04]: who are getting together with their neighbors and initially fighting their landlords around their material conditions, but the conditions that their units and primarily the rent, which is such a dominant economic force in their lives.
20:41
[SPEAKER_04]: Very quickly, so we don't knock doors talking about
20:45
[SPEAKER_04]: the evils of racial capitalism.
20:47
[SPEAKER_04]: But very quickly, people get a political education within the union and sometimes it's show not tell, right?
20:54
[SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes it's as simple as them meeting their neighbors who hold different identities and starting to understand them in a different kind of way.
21:02
[SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes it is a bit more explicit and we've done a ton of this at Casey Tenons over the years, you know, we have a Saturday meeting every Saturday for two hours.
21:09
[SPEAKER_04]: We meet on Zoom, reach Saturdays out of the month and in person, one of the Saturdays.
21:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And frequently as big events are transpiring in the country or in the world, we'll do like a 30 minute module in that tenant meeting about those events.
21:22
[SPEAKER_04]: We've done them about the Americans with Disabilities Act.
21:26
[SPEAKER_04]: We've done them about Palestine.
21:28
[SPEAKER_04]: We've done federal, you know, the government shut down.
21:31
[SPEAKER_04]: We've done these political education sessions about anything and everything you can imagine that's transpired in the last seven years.
21:38
[SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes that results in us making a decision to do something as a union.
21:42
[SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes it doesn't, but what it does is educate our base.
21:46
[SPEAKER_04]: But there have been
21:48
[SPEAKER_04]: For example, nearly three years of organizing, we've done at the tenant union around ceasefire and around educating people in the Kansas City metro area about Israel Palestine and the issues going on there we've provided this like solidarity infrastructure with a ceasefire team within our union.
22:07
[SPEAKER_04]: that's been active for the last several years coming out of one of those political education systems.
22:12
[SPEAKER_04]: Last fall, we did a political education session on the government shut down.
22:17
[SPEAKER_04]: Many of our members were about to be impacted by the cutoff of SNAP benefits at the beginning of November.
22:23
[SPEAKER_04]: We came out of that meeting and immediately spun up an industrial size grocery delivery program and we delivered grocery boxes to 2,500 of our union members every Sunday for five
22:37
[SPEAKER_04]: So sometimes it results in that type of action, and there's always this interesting debate about whether or not this is union business.
22:44
[SPEAKER_04]: People are like, if this isn't related to our housing, is this union business.
22:48
[SPEAKER_04]: But more often than not, especially on issues like this where we do have members impacted, are union, the union answer to that is this is absolutely union business.
22:56
[SPEAKER_04]: The last thing I'll say on that point, that's maybe
22:59
[SPEAKER_04]: The most relevant to the meta-level political situation we're in right now is we've done a lot of consistent education on immigration enforcement in the last year or so and that resulted in Casey tenants deciding it is union business for us to start training people on community defense.
23:17
[SPEAKER_04]: So we partnered with a local immigrant rights organization.
23:20
[SPEAKER_04]: We trained 200 labor with leaders and stood up 19 neighborhood teams.
23:25
[SPEAKER_04]: We then trained 200 educators and parents and stood up 39 teams in schools in the metro area.
23:31
[SPEAKER_04]: And then we just did a training with 200 service industry workers and stood up teams in all of these bars restaurants and hotels in the metro as well.
23:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And again, is that housing work not necessarily is it union business?
23:44
[SPEAKER_04]: The answer has consistently been yes.
23:47
[SPEAKER_00]: That's so fucking cool and it really I think it really underlines your sort of thesis of the tenet union can be what the labor union has been and it's certainly, you know, that that we had a we had a good century where that that political education was happening through the institution of labor for working class people and and then as traditional labor unions declined they created that vacuum and it has felt like.
24:16
[SPEAKER_00]: what filled that vacuum in a lot of cases was MAGA and like TPUSA, right?
24:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And we didn't, the left was not filling it and it's extremely exciting to hear about folks building these institutions to fill those vacuums.
24:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm wondering if we can take one big step back for listeners and just before we dive back into the tenant union work,
24:40
[SPEAKER_00]: If we can talk a little bit about the structural conditions that we're dealing with, so I'd be interested to hear, you're sort of laying out of what is causing the housing crisis in this country right now, obviously there's this big national thought between like abundance bros who say.
24:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We just have to build, you know, the problem is permitting or whatever, and there's, you know, us on the left who are like, there's a political economy here and there's either equity taking over buildings and all this stuff and, and this fight is happening on Twitter and everything, but it's, it's playing out at the local level everywhere I know in places like Providence where I live, we're in the middle right now, but big fight over rent stabilization where the, the landlords are posing it are saying,
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: This is counterproductive because it's going to suppress you housing development and that's the real answer here so anyway, we'd love to hear you living out for our listeners what is actually causing the house crisis.
25:35
[SPEAKER_04]: The first and most important place to start is that our homes are treated as commodities rather than guarantee to us as public goods or rights.
25:46
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is, I think, probably something that listeners of this podcast will have heard about before this kind of commodity versus public good.
25:55
[SPEAKER_04]: framework and that that really is a core issue and it hasn't always been that way and I think it's actually important that people understand relatively recent American history and the role that the federal government has played in the past in providing homes in in a way that treats them as public goods and then what's happened basically since the 1980s is
26:20
[SPEAKER_04]: the abdication, the federal government in particular, but government in general, abdicating its responsibility to tenants and to providing homes to people, homes for people to live, not homes for people to make profit because here's where the government has played a huge role in the last several decades, is in propping up the financialization of our homes, the commodification of our homes.
26:42
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's actually something to talk about and dig in on quite a bit is it's actually not true that the government doesn't play any role in our homes.
26:50
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, the government is in bed with our landlords and that's at the federal level at the state level and at the local level.
26:57
[SPEAKER_04]: At the federal level a lot of what this looks like is there are two government sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that that back loans up to the tune of $150 billion of business
27:12
[SPEAKER_04]: that our government is in with our landlords.
27:15
[SPEAKER_04]: And those loans are written on pretty sweet terms for the landlords.
27:20
[SPEAKER_04]: They're also written.
27:21
[SPEAKER_04]: We've found through extensive research over the years.
27:24
[SPEAKER_04]: They're written in such a way that actually creates incentives for the landlords to regularly and it greatly increase the rent.
27:31
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the only way the loans actually make sense.
27:33
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the only way they can pay back the mortgages.
27:36
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's all sorts of incentives built into the system.
27:42
[SPEAKER_04]: and propped up by the federal government, but also of course private lenders are writing low-end terms in really similar ways.
27:49
[SPEAKER_04]: This creates conditions for the more consolidated financial players to play a bigger role to be more set up to access capital and financialize their projects and they're delivering larger and larger returns for their investor.
28:05
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's become this
28:12
[SPEAKER_04]: is trying to deliver something in the neighborhood of 15% returns to their investors.
28:18
[SPEAKER_04]: Their nameless faceless investors.
28:21
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's just baked into the business model.
28:23
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's some of the background on housing as a commodity.
28:28
[SPEAKER_04]: the role of the federal government in particular in sort of creating that and propping up that system and then how we arrive at a moment where we have these large governments, many of them multinational conglomerates with increasing power that are trying to turn bigger and bigger profits to their investors and shareholders.
28:55
[SPEAKER_04]: have gotten worse and worse throughout that time.
28:58
[SPEAKER_04]: So what we say now is that we're paying higher runs than we've ever paid for worst conditions than we've ever endured.
29:05
[SPEAKER_04]: And solid solid.
29:08
[SPEAKER_04]: Higher runs than we've ever paid for worst conditions than we've ever endured.
29:12
[SPEAKER_04]: And we're arriving at a moment.
29:14
[SPEAKER_04]: We're honestly something's got to give.
29:16
[SPEAKER_04]: People don't have more rent to pay.
29:18
[SPEAKER_04]: I know poor tenants and Raytown, Missouri.
29:21
[SPEAKER_04]: And let me tell you about a place like Raytown,
29:23
[SPEAKER_04]: If you get displaced from Chicago, you might end up in Kansas City.
29:27
[SPEAKER_04]: If you get priced out of Kansas City, you might end up in Raytown, Missouri.
29:31
[SPEAKER_04]: If you get priced out of Raytown, Missouri, I do not know where you go.
29:35
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's the moment we're in right now.
29:36
[SPEAKER_04]: That's what the stakes are for tenants.
29:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And the situation has
29:41
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like beyond a fever pitch, there's sort of no hyperbole that's good enough to describe the situation that we're in right now, but there's major questions about what the solutions are.
29:52
[SPEAKER_04]: So to your point Aaron, there's a big debate playing out right now.
29:55
[SPEAKER_04]: between people who say, all we need to do is build more housing.
30:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And then others who say theoretically, there's a camp of people saying, all we need to do is regulate the landlords.
30:06
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't actually believe that that second group exists, because I know most of the like reg heads, so to speak, I consider myself one of them.
30:13
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think many of us are so absolutist.
30:17
[SPEAKER_04]: I think some of the supply bros are totally
30:20
[SPEAKER_04]: so absolutist as to think that all we need to do is build more housing.
30:24
[SPEAKER_04]: That's crazy.
30:26
[SPEAKER_04]: That's actually not rooted in reality.
30:28
[SPEAKER_04]: If you look at the numbers, there's no world in which, even if we had a massive federal infusion of trillions of dollars.
30:36
[SPEAKER_04]: There's no world in which we could build enough housing over the course of the next five or ten years.
30:41
[SPEAKER_04]: at a pace that's fast enough to keep up with the loss of housing that's affordable to people as landlord type the rent.
30:50
[SPEAKER_04]: So any thinking person, I would argue, any thinking person understands that there is no simple solution for a problem that's this complex.
31:01
[SPEAKER_04]: It is a question of priority and sequence.
31:03
[SPEAKER_04]: The rent is 2 down high today and that's because the market is completely unregulated.
31:11
[SPEAKER_04]: The first thing we need to do and the thing that needs to take the highest priority is regulate the market and
31:17
[SPEAKER_04]: Then we need to think about supply.
31:20
[SPEAKER_04]: We need to think about supply specifically of housing that people can actually afford to live in, not just housing that's affordable for developers to build.
31:28
[SPEAKER_04]: So that then reintroduces the potential role of the public sector and specifically the federal government and the ways that they may need to re-enter the picture with some ambition so that we're not always designing our housing solutions around investor profits.
31:45
[SPEAKER_01]: One time, a couple years ago, you know, when you like see these little snippets and I think it was in a museum or like a documentary and it's something that I had never thought about before and then you see it and you're like, oh my God, that's like paradigm shifting.
32:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember seeing something about like public housing in the 1940s and 50s and I forget where it's like different parts of the country where it was like a really like lovely place to live,
32:14
[SPEAKER_01]: and like sought after housing and there were there was pride and like you know middle class working class people had like their their their nice apartments or their nice public housing of course they were only white and and then like there was I think I saw a plaque in St. Louis somewhere that was like there was a
32:36
[SPEAKER_01]: around the civil rights time of the civil rights era there was some kind of legal decision that basically said you had to desegregate public housing or or basically make public housing available to you know not just white people and then like immediately afterwards all the public hasn't just wanted to shit yeah and so it feels like it feels like this doesn't have to be that difficult right it's just like let's just build nice public housing and not be racist
33:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that, is that like too over too much of an over the same thing?
33:10
[SPEAKER_04]: You just said one of the most controversial sentences in American history mat.
33:14
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I think it's like, no, it's not that much more complicated than that.
33:18
[SPEAKER_04]: But the sort that you just told is really important to bring in here, which is that, you know, housing is the infrastructure of American racial capitalism, housing and land, right?
33:30
[SPEAKER_04]: The racism embedded in this country's housing policy in particular is loud and ever present.
33:38
[SPEAKER_04]: And the legacy is with us today, and it shapes everything about how our housing system works.
33:44
[SPEAKER_04]: So you're right, public housing was great.
33:46
[SPEAKER_04]: When white people lived there, and then white people were offered mortgages that black and brown people couldn't have access to, they moved out to the suburbs and lived in homes that then generated wealth,
33:57
[SPEAKER_04]: for their families that has now passed down intergenerationaly, and public housing became a place where black and brown people lived, and that coincides almost exactly with this country's disinvestment from public housing.
34:11
[SPEAKER_04]: And then perversely, of course, as tends to be the case when when following this kind of neoliberal framework of privatization and disinvestment is perversely, then the impacts of that disinvestment get blamed on the people who live there.
34:25
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
34:26
[SPEAKER_04]: That it became a story about this sort of hubs of crime and concentrated poverty and, you know, any kind of euphemism you can think of to describe why it's actually the tenants fault that this has deteriorated this way.
34:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, unfortunately, these.
34:42
[SPEAKER_04]: This mythology about what happened to public housing in this country is very alive today.
34:47
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'll tell you, Matt, it's alive even among people who live in public housing today, and people who lived in public housing when they were young.
34:56
[SPEAKER_04]: People who might stand to benefit from a renewed commitment to public housing, they believe that this shit doesn't work.
35:04
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's a huge challenge of ours.
35:07
[SPEAKER_04]: it's a huge challenge that we have to take seriously.
35:09
[SPEAKER_04]: We have to somehow convince people that the public sector that the government can play a different role and can actually guarantee something that is good and that's not an easy sell in a work that the government has only shown people the opposite.
35:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're working uphill like 50 years of people dismantling the government and then
35:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, wondering why it doesn't work as well.
35:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
35:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I really like your explanation on how we got here.
35:42
[SPEAKER_00]: We probably won't put this in, but
35:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a pretty nice explanation and as a committed partisan in the anti-abundance wars.
35:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm wondering, if you would like to speak to like, you said any thinking person would understand that you can't go all just new development to solve the problem, why are there so many people and such powerful people in interest right now who are eating that drum so loudly and relentlessly?
36:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I think there's like two answers here.
36:18
[SPEAKER_04]: And...
36:20
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, you don't see me time at this stuff online because I don't think it's worth my time to fight these like bros on the internet.
36:25
[SPEAKER_04]: The one thing that I think is important to say and I hope you do include this is the debates that play out on Twitter do not reflect real life.
36:33
[SPEAKER_04]: And I have to say this to reporters all the time actually because a lot of these reporters live in Brooklyn and I'm like, sweetie, what you're talking about in your coffee shop and what you're seeing play out on the internet is actually not reflective of what like local government decisions look like in a place like Kansas City where
36:49
[SPEAKER_04]: any affordable developer will tell you, you know, regulation zoning stuff might make a top 10 list of like stuff getting in their way, but like numbers one through four are capital like it's getting the stack.
37:04
[SPEAKER_04]: It's getting the stack like anyone will tell you building affordable in a place like Kansas City or a place like Atlanta or whatever any of these kind of more normal markets.
37:14
[SPEAKER_04]: It's about housing finance and you know, if I have any jobs to make at the abundance bros, which of course I have several.
37:22
[SPEAKER_04]: One of them is that most of them seem not to understand housing finance at all, or curious about it, and they're like so fixated on zoning and sort of anti-regulatory tirade, which only,
37:39
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, raises suspicions about like who they're fighting this fight for.
37:43
[SPEAKER_04]: I remember once on the internet, and I never, I have, I think never in my life used the acronym YMB or NMB on Twitter on purpose, nonetheless, over the years, of course, I've landed in some of these like horrible slack channels where they all decide to like pile on or whatever.
37:58
[SPEAKER_04]: I remember once I was doing a thread explaining,
38:02
[SPEAKER_04]: this algorithm that landlords use to set rents called real page.
38:06
[SPEAKER_04]: They had been investigated by the Biden DOJ and I was kind of parsing some of this stuff that we were learning about real page and this this elusive tactic that they were using to sort of set the terms of the market and in so doing I described I think I like took a jab at what I called
38:24
[SPEAKER_04]: supply essentialists, and it was just so interesting.
38:28
[SPEAKER_04]: I was like talking about these really big financial actors, but these supply bros decided I was talking about them, and they piled on in this really intense way, and
38:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And I sort of was like, this isn't about you guys, unless it is like, are you doing yourself to me right now, you know, I was just kind of like, why are you carrying water for these massive financial institutions that I think.
38:55
[SPEAKER_04]: We can all agree, our pretty evil, it's the type that are run by people who are saying and shareholder meetings.
39:05
[SPEAKER_04]: The most horrific shit you could ever imagine.
39:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm like, why are you spending all day in a Brooklyn coffee shop, defending these people with your life?
39:15
[SPEAKER_04]: What checks are you getting to do this?
39:19
[SPEAKER_04]: That's some of it.
39:19
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think another piece of
39:25
[SPEAKER_04]: framework resonates with kind of normies, like people out in the world who aren't necessarily collecting checks to carry water for private equity is that it's comforting.
39:36
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like comforting to think that some cute technocratic solutions are the answer to a problem this big.
39:44
[SPEAKER_04]: It's what we were talking about before where, you know, I could maybe lead a much more peaceful life if I believed that the only thing we had to do was organize tenons building by building block by block.
39:58
[SPEAKER_04]: My life would be a lot more peaceful.
40:00
[SPEAKER_04]: I would have to pay for less yoga and
40:05
[SPEAKER_04]: immunity shots and shit like that, right?
40:07
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think that's, that's the resonance for normies is like, you know, they're, I think they may be buying to some of the supply demand, like 101 BS that people present to them.
40:20
[SPEAKER_04]: And then I think, you know, people want,
40:23
[SPEAKER_04]: to hear that there is a simple solution for problems that seem really complicated.
40:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And unfortunately on this one, I'm sorry to say, there is not a simple solution.
40:32
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a question of priority and sequence.
40:35
[SPEAKER_04]: Supply, of course, plays a role but who owns that supply, who controls it over time, how that supply is regulated, is super important.
40:43
[SPEAKER_04]: Who builds that supply is important to me?
40:45
[SPEAKER_04]: people have accused Casey Tenons and all of our organizing across the country through the Tenant Union Federation as being anti-development.
40:55
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not anti-development.
40:56
[SPEAKER_04]: I want the development to happen in a way that ensures that people have affordable homes to live in.
41:01
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't want displacement, right?
41:04
[SPEAKER_04]: I want the people who build our homes to have really good high paying union jobs.
41:12
[SPEAKER_04]: Is that so bad?
41:13
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, I'm very forward to development, actually.
41:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I just want to see it look right, right by the people.
41:19
[SPEAKER_01]: That's funny.
41:19
[SPEAKER_01]: That, like, exactly mirrors some of the conversations we have.
41:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm currently a counselor on a
41:25
[SPEAKER_01]: for actor's equity association, the Indian for stage managers and actors across the country.
41:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Although I'm up for reelection, so I don't know how might lose.
41:34
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like the bit there of like, we don't want theaters to close.
41:40
[SPEAKER_01]: We love theaters.
41:41
[SPEAKER_01]: We want more theaters, but we do want that theaters to pay their workers or reasonable amount of money so that like we can continue to be actors and stage managers.
41:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, it feels like a, well, willful ignorance on the other side of like, oh, you don't, you don't see things exactly the way I see them.
42:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you're, you're intransigent and you're an idiot and you're anti this thing.
42:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, no, no, I'm very proud of this thing.
42:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm proud whatever it is, housing.
42:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I just, we just want to get a smart way.
42:16
[SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of bad faith on both sides, I will say.
42:19
[SPEAKER_04]: And the one thing that I have to offer that I think is very useful in this kind of bad faith fraught discourse is my version of touching grass is that I'm in a church basement with regular people very, very frequently.
42:36
[SPEAKER_04]: You know who doesn't give a shit about this Twitter debate is Ms. Pauline, who's an 80-year-old tobacco farmer in rural Kentucky, who lives in squalor.
42:43
[SPEAKER_04]: She does not give a fuck.
42:45
[SPEAKER_04]: All she wants is a safe place to live.
42:47
[SPEAKER_04]: And along the way, she's going to get an education through our tenant union.
42:50
[SPEAKER_04]: She's part of winning the first tenant bargain agreement in the American South, which is amazing.
42:56
[SPEAKER_04]: But I feel lucky that I get to kind of escape from all of this kind of bad faith argumentation because I'm in touch with regular people whose lives are actually on the line.
43:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think you use the word normies and I think for anyone who might be listening who's like involved in politics or policy, I think it is worth stressing that the constituency to support the regulatory stuff that we're talking about is.
43:21
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, in order of magnitude more when we're talking about actual people, this is obviously anic data, but in Providence, I mentioned we have this big rent stabilization fight going on.
43:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And we a few months ago had a spent election for a city council seat that was going to be pivotal in that friend of mine who was running, this is the award, this is the highest income award in the city.
43:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the award with the least proportion of renters undoubtedly.
43:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Jill who was running was the one person who was for rent stabilization and it was like a six-way or seven-way and she got over 50% of the boat.
43:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, like the politics of this, I think, should be pretty clear for folks who have a self-interest in building the joyitarian coalition that they're not just thinking about their developer donors.
44:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
44:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's also like you just want to live in a place where people
44:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
44:17
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned tenant unity and federation.
44:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to give you, I wanted to hear a bit about that.
44:22
[SPEAKER_01]: You just stepped down as the director of KC tenants, the founding director.
44:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And so now you're moving on to organize the organizers.
44:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that a way to put it?
44:36
[SPEAKER_04]: All right, go.
44:37
[SPEAKER_04]: I hope that's not it.
44:38
[SPEAKER_04]: But after seven years at KC tenants,
44:43
[SPEAKER_04]: formal transition of leadership, and one of my very faiths, Janae Manley, is now the director of KC Tenons.
44:52
[SPEAKER_04]: She came in as a leader in our base six years ago.
44:55
[SPEAKER_04]: She was my leader, and I'm very proud of that, but she's an extraordinary organizer.
45:03
[SPEAKER_04]: was working the overnight shift at a gas station at the time where when she joined KC tenons and dealing with a level of housing and security herself and she's a single mom of twins and pretty much like stepped into the union has never looked back and has continued to grow and develop as a leader within our union and then of course grow and develop other leaders within the union.
45:26
[SPEAKER_04]: So very proud of that transition.
45:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And along the way, Casey Tenons was also sort of looking around and building relationship with other organizers across the country who seemed to be doing something in a similar way.
45:40
[SPEAKER_04]: I've always had a national and a local role, also for the last seven years, I was organizing on what's known as the Home's Guarantee Campaign.
45:48
[SPEAKER_04]: And then a couple of years ago, we sort of arrived at this moment where we looked around and in the field around us, there were enough.
45:55
[SPEAKER_04]: pretty serious tenant organizing projects and tenant unions where we fault it was the right time to try to start something national and that's the tenant union Federation.
46:06
[SPEAKER_04]: So we launched in August of 2024 and as of now it's my one job as opposed to the last seven years where I've just had to and it's all been chaotic all the time.
46:17
[SPEAKER_04]: The tenant union Federation is a union it's a national union of tenant unions.
46:22
[SPEAKER_04]: and we're starting small on purpose.
46:25
[SPEAKER_04]: So the founding five were Connecticut tenants, Louisville tenants now known as Kentucky tenants, southside together on the south side of Chicago, Casey tenants and Boseman tenants in Montana starting small to get big.
46:40
[SPEAKER_04]: And now, you know, we're almost two years in.
46:42
[SPEAKER_04]: I think we're in our get big era.
46:44
[SPEAKER_04]: So we've been sort of experimenting with this methodology to organize supermajority strike ready unions.
46:51
[SPEAKER_04]: We've spread it across the country.
46:53
[SPEAKER_04]: People are using it everywhere and it's working.
46:57
[SPEAKER_04]: And tenants are organizing these unions.
46:59
[SPEAKER_04]: They're getting strike ready.
47:01
[SPEAKER_04]: Some of them are going on strike.
47:02
[SPEAKER_04]: Others of them are getting to the bargaining table with their landlords here in Kansas City.
47:06
[SPEAKER_04]: We've run three run strikes in the last year and a half.
47:10
[SPEAKER_04]: We have one two of them in pretty major ways.
47:13
[SPEAKER_04]: We want rent freezes to your leases, rent reductions, conditions, fixes, and this is in Missouri, where we have absolutely no right to rent, and there's not really a right to rent strike.
47:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you, can you back, I mean, what's a rent strike?
47:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it just, we don't pay the rent?
47:31
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't be the run, and it's not just anything, of course, it's like a extremely deliberate and tightly organized endeavor that comes at the end of a long arc of escalation.
47:44
[SPEAKER_04]: So we don't start with strike.
47:45
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't start by threatening a strike.
47:47
[SPEAKER_04]: We get there once we've expended every other resource or tactic that we have.
47:54
[SPEAKER_04]: And we also only get there when we have a really deep understanding of our landlords' financials.
47:59
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's kind of getting back to the point that we were talking about Erin, you know, we, we take ourselves seriously on what that requires of us or what that has required in the last couple of years is really deepening our understanding of housing finance, the role of the federal government, the role of the lenders, how to understand the term sheet that a lender will have with the borrower.
48:21
[SPEAKER_04]: We're studying, you know, the landlord balance sheets when we can access them.
48:25
[SPEAKER_04]: There's all sorts of other ways that we're
48:27
[SPEAKER_04]: training ourselves and organizers across the country to become experts on our landlords financials as a way of then understanding our economic leverage, which our rent is our power that only matters if we know how to use it, right?
48:41
[SPEAKER_04]: So a rent strike is about organizing tenants, economic power, and we're always aiming for at least a majority rent strike, needing over 50% of the tenants in the property.
48:51
[SPEAKER_04]: We're really aiming for a super
48:56
[SPEAKER_04]: of the households in the property and the mechanics of the strike kind of mirror that of labor where we get people together to authorize a strike drive.
49:06
[SPEAKER_04]: We then run that drive.
49:09
[SPEAKER_04]: If we have sufficient numbers we call a vote to see whether or not we're authorizing.
49:13
[SPEAKER_04]: If we authorize, that's the landlord's last chance to meet us at the table.
49:18
[SPEAKER_04]: If they don't meet us at the table, then we get out the strike.
49:21
[SPEAKER_04]: We figure out how to actually make it happen, and we withhold rent.
49:25
[SPEAKER_04]: And to get a little wonky for a second, because this has just been on my mind.
49:29
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't take the rent and put it in escrow.
49:32
[SPEAKER_04]: We actually just straight up with hold the rep.
49:34
[SPEAKER_04]: The reason for that is that what we found is like 20% of the tenants in the properties where we're considering strikes already cannot pay the rent.
49:43
[SPEAKER_04]: That's a minimum.
49:45
[SPEAKER_04]: So what we can't do is create tiers among the strikers of those who can't pay and can put in an asker on those who can't pay.
49:52
[SPEAKER_04]: So the strike actually becomes this kind of protective measure for the people who also already can't pay the rent.
49:59
[SPEAKER_04]: And we've seen this amazing like intuitive militancy when we've started floating this idea with people across the country.
50:07
[SPEAKER_04]: We've arrived in an era, as I said before, where something's got to give.
50:11
[SPEAKER_04]: People have nothing left to lose.
50:14
[SPEAKER_04]: And the question isn't whether tenants revolt.
50:16
[SPEAKER_04]: The question is whether that revolt is from a place of desperation or from a place of power.
50:22
[SPEAKER_04]: We're trying to ensure the latter and we're seeing tenants resonate with that and join us in taking extraordinary risks and winning.
50:30
[SPEAKER_00]: That was super helpful.
50:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there a particular rent strike narrative that you could take us through a particular story of how one played out and then how it up eventually ended?
50:42
[SPEAKER_04]: sure.
50:43
[SPEAKER_04]: I'll tell you the most recent one because I already mentioned Raytown, Raytown mentioned on the pod twice.
50:49
[SPEAKER_04]: Shout out Raytown, shout out Raytown, shout out Raytown, shout out you like ring, shout out Cynthia, shout out Uncle Joe.
50:56
[SPEAKER_04]: Anyway, I'll send them the links so that they listen.
50:58
[SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, so it's actually an amazing arc that follows one of the first strikes that we ran was at a property called Independence Towers and Independence Missouri just east of Kansas City.
51:11
[SPEAKER_04]: Independence Missouri and Rayton Missouri outside of Kansas City proper.
51:15
[SPEAKER_04]: That is because the poorest people have already been moved out of the city.
51:20
[SPEAKER_04]: So in Independence Missouri, we ran a strike that lasted eight months and resulted in bargaining with the landlord two year leases rent freezes a schedule for major repairs.
51:31
[SPEAKER_04]: a woman named Cynthia had been Cynthia Barlow had been watching the news from courtesy of apartment building in Rayton, Missouri, called Bowen Tower and she watched this independent strike play out and as she has said to me, she played that
51:47
[SPEAKER_04]: that news clip like it was her favorite song.
51:50
[SPEAKER_04]: She would not like like every day when she was feeling bad when her apartment flooded when she got to sick and then lost her job.
51:58
[SPEAKER_04]: She played this clip over and over again.
51:59
[SPEAKER_04]: And then she basically demanded that Casey tenants come out and help her organize her building.
52:05
[SPEAKER_04]: And she's this extraordinary leader.
52:08
[SPEAKER_04]: She showed up at the Casey Tenant's office.
52:09
[SPEAKER_04]: I'll never forget the first day she came.
52:11
[SPEAKER_04]: And she dragged anyone who she could grab back to Ray Town to knock doors with her.
52:17
[SPEAKER_04]: And then she did all the work.
52:18
[SPEAKER_04]: She laid all the groundwork to organize this union.
52:20
[SPEAKER_04]: We offered some support.
52:22
[SPEAKER_04]: We gave her the framework of like, here are the union cards.
52:24
[SPEAKER_04]: Here's how to run the drive, whatever.
52:26
[SPEAKER_04]: She and her neighbors, Tina, Uncle Joe, Eli, all these folks went and ran the shit out of that union drive.
52:33
[SPEAKER_04]: They established majority tenant union at bone towers.
52:37
[SPEAKER_04]: They started escalating on their landlord issuing their demands.
52:40
[SPEAKER_04]: They got to the table with him in August of last year, but he was slippery slimy.
52:44
[SPEAKER_04]: Didn't commit to hardly anything.
52:47
[SPEAKER_04]: And then on the other side of that, their building was still in squalor.
52:49
[SPEAKER_04]: They were
52:50
[SPEAKER_04]: losing heat, losing AC, losing hot water, there's mold, there's insects everywhere, all sorts of persistent health issues among the old folks and the kids in the building.
53:01
[SPEAKER_04]: And so eventually we started talking about a run strike and the landlord is the Sky Charles Hill, he lives in California.
53:08
[SPEAKER_04]: he likes to donate to liberal causes, you know, we did a bunch of research on him, understood his financials to the extent that we could, although he's a fully private landlord.
53:19
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's limited stuff that we can see online.
53:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And ultimately, we launched a strike on October 1st of last year.
53:26
[SPEAKER_04]: He immediately retaliated, filing dozens of evictions against all the strikers.
53:33
[SPEAKER_04]: And we met him in eviction court.
53:36
[SPEAKER_04]: We have a lawyer on retainer.
53:37
[SPEAKER_04]: The conditions in the building were that bad.
53:40
[SPEAKER_04]: So he started winning in eviction court, not all the time and not tons, but we started winning meanwhile we continued to escalate.
53:47
[SPEAKER_04]: And eventually, we were blowing up this guy's phone.
53:50
[SPEAKER_04]: We had 2,200 people.
53:52
[SPEAKER_04]: Text him one night only at this big benefit concert.
53:55
[SPEAKER_04]: We had his face on posters, he hated the shit, and we had alienated him so much that he was never going to come back to the table.
54:02
[SPEAKER_04]: So what ultimately went down is that we met Cynthia, noticed this guy who was in a fiction court, and he was, and she was basically like, who's that guy?
54:12
[SPEAKER_04]: She found out that guy was this, this fellow named Greg, who's a minority owner in Charles's business.
54:19
[SPEAKER_04]: and so we established a kind of side door with Greg, who peed in light that he was losing money and his feelings weren't the ones that were hurt.
54:26
[SPEAKER_04]: So Greg was able to negotiate with us.
54:30
[SPEAKER_04]: We didn't actually get to the bargaining table and this was an interesting strategic discussion we had to have.
54:35
[SPEAKER_04]: We were like, is the goal getting to the table or is the goal winning?
54:39
[SPEAKER_04]: The goal always winning on my team, right?
54:41
[SPEAKER_04]: So whatever means we need to use, we're going to use those means to win.
54:46
[SPEAKER_04]: So we did a bunch of basically like virtual distant negotiation with the bargaining team, which included Cynthia and Uncle Joe and Tina and Eli.
54:55
[SPEAKER_04]: I was the lead negotiator, my camera Justin, who's the organizer and the property was the deputy, and ultimately in January, we got a deal done and the deal includes rent reductions.
55:06
[SPEAKER_04]: two year leases, a schedule for major repairs, and the strike was able to end after four months, and the tenants resumed normal rent payments on February 1.
55:17
[SPEAKER_04]: And as they would tell you, the fight's not over.
55:19
[SPEAKER_04]: It's still a shitty building.
55:21
[SPEAKER_04]: It's still about situation with the landlord, but they've now had a taste of flexing economic power and winning, and they will not be afraid
55:35
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
55:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the detail of Cynthia noticing a different person in the, in the core rooms that just checks out with like, I don't know, that feels like so familiar to me of like someone just being like, hold on.
55:50
[SPEAKER_01]: What that's, that's a stranger.
55:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't trust them.
55:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's, let's figure out what that situation is.
55:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Did the landlord Charles, who's those name Charles,
55:59
[SPEAKER_01]: did he like give Greg permission to like do all this negotiating like uh or was he just like what was what happened there?
56:08
[SPEAKER_04]: It's hard to know what happened behind the scenes at um all to CJHS Realty but but they I mean ultimately of course they got to some kind of agreement we've stand that we're
56:18
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, we have never and probably will never engage directly with Charles again and you know there's interesting lessons on strategy within this story that I think resonate with other lessons we've learned in different ways which is that sometimes when you escalate you alienate your target and you have to really assess whether or not that.
56:37
[SPEAKER_04]: is a risk you're willing to take.
56:39
[SPEAKER_04]: In this instance, it was almost not an intentional decision.
56:43
[SPEAKER_04]: I think we had alienated him and then had to sort of reckon with that and be like, okay, the student is maybe not coming back to the table.
56:49
[SPEAKER_04]: What are we doing about that?
56:50
[SPEAKER_04]: I think, let's play this movie to the end.
56:53
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't know where to go.
56:54
[SPEAKER_04]: And again, this gets back to this point of like,
56:58
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, in any fight like this, whether it's in one property or whether it's for federal rent caps, which is another fight that we were in a couple years ago, um, and any fight like this, there's an extended period, sometimes months of just unknown, you know, we're in totally new territory, no one's ever been here before.
57:20
[SPEAKER_04]: That's some of both what's so exciting about the tenant movement in this moment is that there's so much newness everything is fresh everything is green and of course it's so scary and overwhelming and and really difficult every single day of that strategic arc it's amazing when we get to tell this incredible story of victory on the other side but it's really hard fought and you know hard fought
57:49
[SPEAKER_04]: really hard fought for someone like Cynthia or someone like like they're in eviction court.
57:54
[SPEAKER_04]: There are lives and their homes are on the line and they're holding the line.
57:58
[SPEAKER_04]: They're taking this extraordinary risk in a place like Raytown with the knowledge, the material knowledge there's nowhere for them to go.
58:07
[SPEAKER_04]: And that, you know, it's like so brave.
58:10
[SPEAKER_04]: It's so brave.
58:11
[SPEAKER_04]: I can't even really describe it.
58:13
[SPEAKER_04]: It's so brave and they shouldn't have to be that brave, obviously, and, you know, because I'm up close to it and I know these people personally, I know that it takes a lot and it's not every day is a day where you can exhibit that kind of bravery, but on net, the bravery is extraordinary and the bravery is scaffolded by the union.
58:36
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, the risk is really only one that could be taken because of the union and the tightness and depth of the organization there.
58:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a really important point.
58:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Individual bravery, even extraordinary individual bravery, isn't actually enough to overcome the forces that we're dealing with, you need the organization, you need the structure, you need the institutional.
59:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You need discipline.
59:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
59:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
59:03
[SPEAKER_00]: We've talked a lot on this podcast so far about the sort of big picture national political dynamics of the democratic party that has been losing support among its working class former base for for years or decades and the you know the growth of this populace right that has been filling that vacuum.
59:22
[SPEAKER_00]: and what, you know, you've been talking a lot about what the Democratic Party needs to do to to come back what we on the left need to do to take over the party to make that happen.
59:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious if you, if, you know, from your many, many, many days and nights in the church basement with people, with the people that the party has taken for granted and lost over the years,
59:47
[SPEAKER_00]: if you have insights for what what we need to be doing in 26 and 28 to change the course.
59:55
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
59:56
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, on one level, Erin, I'm encouraged because everything has changed in, in a political discourse, everything has changed since I started organizing on this issue.
1:00:09
[SPEAKER_04]: used to have to like beg people to say the word housing.
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_04]: It was this unsexy cousin of social justice issues in this country.
1:00:19
[SPEAKER_04]: And everyone, it was like the Spider-Man meme.
1:00:22
[SPEAKER_04]: You would go to the federal government.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_04]: They'd be like, this is this estate and local.
1:00:24
[SPEAKER_04]: You'd go to the local government.
1:00:26
[SPEAKER_04]: They'd be like, we need federal money.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_04]: So no one wanted to touch it.
1:00:29
[SPEAKER_04]: And it was sort of written off.
1:00:32
[SPEAKER_04]: It wasn't us sort of major issue of economic policy or domestic policy or anything else.
1:00:39
[SPEAKER_04]: until it was.
1:00:40
[SPEAKER_04]: We have been screaming about housing in the rent for years and years and years.
1:00:45
[SPEAKER_04]: We took delegations of tenants who had been evicted during the pandemic to meet with every person and federal leadership at the White House at the National Economic Council at the CFPB and the FTC and the Biden administration.
1:01:01
[SPEAKER_04]: Quarterly for years starting in 2021,
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_04]: We spent all of the summer of 2022 in this massive inflation moment begging for someone to talk about the rent.
1:01:11
[SPEAKER_04]: This was during a time when famously the president's chief of staff run clean was driving to six gas stations on the way to the White House, tracking the price of gas obsessively, but they wouldn't say the word rent.
1:01:24
[SPEAKER_04]: And then they finally got around to saying it in July of 2024.
1:01:27
[SPEAKER_04]: It was too late.
1:01:30
[SPEAKER_04]: It was too late.
1:01:32
[SPEAKER_04]: Democrats, Republicans, non-votors alike across the country had received the message that the elites are telling us the economy is great because of the stock market and the job's charts.
1:01:45
[SPEAKER_04]: But I can't afford anything and I have to make decisions about my rent or prescriptions, my rent or groceries, my rent or fixing my car, right?
1:01:55
[SPEAKER_04]: So that had already happened.
1:01:58
[SPEAKER_04]: That sort of like break had already happened.
1:02:01
[SPEAKER_04]: I do think we're living in a moment right now, which is a moment of incredible opportunity if we can get serious about
1:02:10
[SPEAKER_04]: channeling it.
1:02:12
[SPEAKER_04]: The Mamdaadi administration has created a national conversation about affordability that really resonates with people.
1:02:19
[SPEAKER_04]: It resonates with people across party lines.
1:02:21
[SPEAKER_04]: It resonates with people across class, across race.
1:02:25
[SPEAKER_04]: My sincere and deep hope is that leaders of the Democratic Party take that seriously and get really serious about the rent, about groceries, about these issues,
1:02:37
[SPEAKER_04]: that really deeply matter to people and my fear is that it won't happen or it won't happen quickly enough.
1:02:46
[SPEAKER_04]: And when I think about the current administration, I think about the radical opportunism of the people that we are up against.
1:02:56
[SPEAKER_04]: I think about the fact that Donald Trump,
1:02:58
[SPEAKER_04]: was the president who gave us an eviction moratorium in September 2020, not because I think he has some deep care for the poor people who are being evicted during the pandemic before there was a vaccine, but because he is a radical opportunist and there was a federal election mere months away.
1:03:18
[SPEAKER_04]: I also don't believe that a Democrat in office at that time would have taken
1:03:24
[SPEAKER_04]: And that I think like that's it in an nutshell for me.
1:03:27
[SPEAKER_04]: There is like risk associated with running on affordability, talking about the rent, going after the evil people and corporations that are ruining our lives.
1:03:39
[SPEAKER_04]: That is a risk that either party leaders will embrace or they won't.
1:03:44
[SPEAKER_04]: And if they don't, we're fucked.
1:03:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:03:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a great, a great place to end.
1:03:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
1:03:50
[SPEAKER_01]: We're fucked!
1:03:53
[SPEAKER_01]: He's good, eh?
1:03:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The hopeful part was, was, was, was good.
1:03:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I've, that made me feel helpful.
1:03:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, Tara.
1:04:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you guys so much.
1:04:00
[SPEAKER_01]: This was really great.
1:04:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Really appreciate your work and, and appreciate your time.
1:04:06
[SPEAKER_01]: The Fighting Fashism podcast is produced by Nick Damontz in Collaboration with the Nation, using five horse radish.
1:04:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Questions, comments, concerns?
1:04:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Email us at fightingfashismpod at gmail.com.
1:04:34
[SPEAKER_02]: These are the flowers, a part of Janno A bill of child, a child, a child, a child, a child These are the flowers, a part of Janno We'll walk our freedom to there, too These are the flowers, a part of Janno Don't see how you'd have stayed blue