Five tenants’ unions from around the country convened on Tuesday to announce the launch of a new national organization to take on the power of multistate real-estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation marks the first major national effort at tenant organizing in forty years.
“Every tenant deserves a union — everyone deserves to move with the kind of power I found here,” said Donna Goldsmith, an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union (one of the federation’s founding members) to a virtual audience of renters from around the country.
Goldsmith moved to a senior-living community in Louisville looking for a fresh start after the murder of her daughter and two grandchildren more than a decade ago. When her apartment began flooding regularly, she connected with the Louisville Tenants Union. At first, she was skeptical, but through building an ongoing campaign for better conditions, “I found other people like me,” she said. “Now all I think about is the tenant union.”
Billing itself as a “union of unions,” the federation is seeding a movement that hopes to turn tenants into a political force that can’t be ignored.
At the local level, the group’s five founding unions have already racked up an impressive streak of wins spanning a wide range of organizing tactics.
In the last year, the Louisville Tenants Union passed far-reaching restrictions on public funding contributing to gentrification in Louisville; KC Tenants defeated a billionaire-backed stadium tax in Kansas City; Bozeman Tenants United banned new short-term rentals and elected one of their own as mayor in the Montana tourism hot spot; the Connecticut Tenants Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement with one of New Haven’s largest landlords and Chicago’s Not Me We won ballot referenda backing a landmark antidisplacement ordinance covering the area surrounding the new Obama Presidential Center.
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La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Rebecca Burns
